The Stack

Once again, I’m going for Mastery: finding and beating all the secret rooms and unlocking the Master Gate and its hidden concept art gallery. Usually I manage this in a single manic session, sometimes the same session where I complete the game. But somehow, it’s been taking me longer this time around, despite having done it once already, years ago. Maybe I was better about locating secrets on the way down, back then, so that I had fewer to handle afterward. As I write this, I have four secret rooms remaining. Two of them, I’ve found but not solved. The other two I haven’t even found.

In addition, there are still several Challenges in the in-game Challenge list (and a Steam Achievement with each one). I’ve been taking care to do the Challenge scrolls as I find them, but this game has, for the first time in the series, Challenges that don’t have scrolls. Yes, even the “Kill the Slayer earlier than you’re supposed to” challenge in Journey to Rooted Hold had a scroll, locked away behind a Master gate on the level where the Slayer first appeared. But here in The City Beneath, there are Challenges of a different sort: ones linked to story content rather than puzzles. Whenever there’s an optional cutscene that plays only when you do something special, like going back and talking to someone in the city after a plot event relevant to that person happens, there’s a Challenge for doing it. I intend to do all of these Challenges, but some of them are time-consuming. One requires you to kill the Guide that the Negotiator assigns to you in the beginning, then play until you get a cutscene where two people discuss the Guide’s murder. To get this, I had to play through two entire levels a second time, just to get from the murder opportunity to the cutscene. I guess the game hints at this when Beethro says he’s tempted to kill the Guide, but as a player, I wasn’t tempted at all. I liked the Guide. She gave Beethro sass.