The Stack

I admit that my posts about this game have gotten a lot of small details wrong. For the most part, they’re not worth going back to correct, but there’s one rather large point I feel I need to set straight, incase it leads any future players astray. I said that, to perform the ritual that puts the lurking evil sometimes known as Dark Fall back into its cage, all I really needed to remember was the words, not the runes associated with them. This is sort of true: the ritual does only ask you for words. But noting which runes go with which words turns out to be crucial all the same. It turns out that the words have to be recited in the right order, and the ordering is given only in terms of runes.

This is a slight inconvenience for me, because I had been taking most of my notes in a text file rather than a physical sheet of paper, and obviously I can’t draw the game’s made-up glyphs in a text file. I made this choice mostly because it accommodated playing in the dark, which seemed appropriate for both the game’s palette and its subject matter. When I found a rune, I turned a light on long enough to copy it down. But I stopped doing this when I thought it was unnecessary. And so I’ve had to go through the game and re-solve puzzles I had already solved to fill in the runes my notes were missing.

And that occupied my latest short session. At this point, I have all of the runes, but I’m still one magic word shy of victory, and who knows how much random poking around I’ll need to do to find it? I suppose the next step is to try to remember where I found the one rune that I don’t have a word for, on the basis that the word, or at least hints for where to find it, it will be nearby. Once again, I wish I had taken better notes!