The Stack

Finishing The City Beneath means being repeatedly told “Oh, you thought you were done, did you?” When you reach the end, there’s still the secret rooms. When you’ve beaten all of those, it opens up the Master area, The Undercity, which has its own suite of twelve puzzles. The previous episodes also had their own playable bits in the epilogue, but not in quite the same way — in King Dugan’s Dungeon, it was just some repeats of rooms you had already solved, as Beethro describes them to his nephews, while in Journey to Rooted Hold, it was a display of some rejected rooms that you could try if you wanted to. In TCB, it’s more rejected rooms, mostly variants on things that were in the game but got changed because they were too hard. But they’re presented as a level, something you’re really expected to solve. The UI pointedly keeps track of how many you’ve cleared, in a way that it doesn’t even do in the main part of the game. Doing them all gives you one final Challenge/Achievement.

Or perhaps not final! I still had one more Challenge to go back and find in the regular game — one of those unscrolled ones, designating an optional cutscene. I actually though for a while I had more than one of those, because Steam had Achievements described as “(TCB) TU: Clear all 12 puzzle rooms (then visit 1W)” and “(TCB) TU:3N – Win a game of ‘Mastermind’ on the first visit to the room”. This was confusing because “TU” is ambiguous: in addition to “The Undercity”, it’s short for “The Uncturage”, one of the earlier levels, which doesn’t even have rooms at 1W or 3N.

One of the Master puzzles is an earlier and less-complicated version on the baffling puzzle I described previously. This was rejected for being too hard, presumably because you have to clear the gel personally and single-handedly, but I honestly found it easier than what wound up in the main dungeon. Another is a version of the five-Slayers-at-once room, but without the decoy potion that lets you just blow everyone up. Instead, it has a whole bunch of bombs and internal walls scattered around, to create more situations where you can exploit Slayer AI. This was rejected when the designers realized that they hadn’t ever taught the player how to kill Slayers. The techniques were well-known on the DROD forums, and reasonable fodder for Challenges, but not for a crit-path puzzle. Indeed, this is the only puzzle that’s considered to be too hard even for the Undercity, and isn’t included in the twelve you’re expected to solve. I personally had of course already done the canon version of the room the hard way for the sake of the Challenge, but I found the Undercity version difficult, not just despite the extra bombs, but because of them. I really know only a few tricks for killing Slayers, and the most versatile one — the one I used in JtRH L7:1E — requires an amount of empty space that’s hard to come by with all those bombs around.

At any rate, that’s basically it for my second tour of The City Beneath, and if I didn’t have as much to say about it as I did the first time, maybe that’s just a sign that I shouldn’t blog games twice. I’ll be going on to Gunthro and the Epic Blunder soon, which shouldn’t take long to complete. I recall finishing it in a single weekend the first time.

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.

Looking over my ten-year-old posts on The City Beneath, I’m surprised at some things I didn’t describe. I suppose I was avoiding spoilers at the time. Well, there’s less point in avoiding spoilers when the final revelation of this episode is given away by a subsequent episode’s title and cover art. So let’s talk about Halph.

I’ve mentioned how Journey to Rooted Hold hints at Halph becoming like the Neather. In TCB, this gets even more pointed. In the year between episodes that Beethro spent journeying beneath, Halph fell in with the Dungeon Architects. He’s happily assimilated into the Empire, and regards Beethro as his enemy, with all the fervor of a rebellious adolescent who’s found new friends that his family doesn’t like. And so he appears as the end boss of TCB, in a cycle of rooms organized much like the Neather’s lair, overseeing the puzzles from control chambers that you can’t reach until you’ve solved it all. The one big difference is that instead of just opening and closing doors to control the flow of monsters, Halph commands an army of Builders, who alter the contents of the dungeon at his command, erecting or tearing down walls, bridging chasms, removing the supports from bridges, and so forth. The puzzles here are about trying to control the Builders yourself — for example, by blocking off certain construction areas with monsters, forcing the Builders to work on something else. I feel like there’s a lot of potential that the level only begins to explore. More importantly, though, it puts Halph into the role of game designer even more clearly than the Neather ever was. The Neather had a role in executing puzzles, but Halph is involved in actually constructing them. And, as with the Neather, defeating Halph means breaking into his dev-only area, behind his freshly-built walls.

Not because you want to kill Halph, though. Beethro would be fine without this conflict. He just wants to get to the bottom of things, by literally getting to the bottom of things. But Halph is in his way, refusing to let him see what’s at Lowest Point. Why? Not because Halph knows what Beethro will find, but specifically because he does not. He doesn’t want to learn anything that might challenge his new-found faith. Beethro, for his part, freely calls him out on this, annoying him no end. It’s a lovely dynamic for a boss fight: villain as petulant child, hero as irritating uncle who knows how to push his buttons.

I reached the end of The City Beneath over the weekend — it’s definitely a much easier game than Journey to Rooted Hold. But before talking about that, I’d like to describe a room in the final descent that left me baffled, even after solving it: Abyssian Fortress, 2S.

The basis of this room is that there are these nine 4×4 cells of tarstuff, three of each of the three varieties (tar, mud, and gel). The only monsters in the room are the Mothers in each cell, visible as a pair of eyes, that make the tarstuff expand every 30 turns, although the way they’re penned in here keeps them from expanding. Access out of the room is controlled by force arrows and a black gate, which only opens when all the tarstuff in the room has been cleared. And most of the floor is missing, so you have to get around by means of a 4×4 raft. So far, so straightforward. This much makes it a solid but not-too-difficult tar-clearing puzzle. The only tricky part is the gel. Gel is only vulnerable at its interior corners, but the cells here don’t have any. To get started, you have to create some by letting the gel expand onto your raft, which immobilizes the raft until it’s cleared. But even that’s just low-level tactics.

The difficulties come in with some things you have to step on to get started. First of all, there’s a disarm token, which takes away your sword. Stepping on a disarm token again restores your sword, but the force arrows around the token here prevent you from doing that. Then there’s a mimic potion, which lets you place a mimic on any clear spot on the floor. Mimics imitate your movements, and are armed with swords, so you can use that to clear the tar even when disarmed. But the circumstances suggested another possibility: what happens when a mimic steps on a disarm token? I knew that there exist things that mimics trigger just as if you had stepped on them. So I tried this, and sure enough, I got my sword back. Unfortunately, that left me in a difficult position for the next obstacle: the bridge.

Bridges are another new concept in TCB. They act kind of like level 2 of Donkey Kong: you can remove the supports by walking on them. (In fact, the game reuses the familiar trap door tiles to represent the supports.) Once the supports are all gone, the whole thing collapses, killing anything on it, including Beethro if you’re foolish enough to step back onto the bridge from the last support. In this room, there’s a bridge that’s blocking the raft from moving, and the trap door to collapse it is on the opposite end of the bridge from the raft. Getting a mimic from the disarm token all the way to the other side of the bridge without going there yourself seems impossible — the only way to enlarge the distance between yourself and a mimic is to move in a way the mimic can’t, typically by pulling it against a wall, and there are no suitably-positioned walls in that part of the room. Doing it the opposite way, collapsing the bridge personally and leaving the mimic on the raft, is feasible, but leaves you stranded on a little 2×2 platform, without enough movement room to make the mimic navigate the raft over to you. No, the easier approach, I decided, was to create the mimic on the 2×2 platform where it could free the raft, and remain swordless while it fought the tar for me.

At first, I tried just standing on the raft with the mimic while it fought the tar, but it proved difficult to protect my defenseless body this way. Eventually I got a bright idea: There’s another raft over on the right side. If I got that free, the mimic could take one raft into the fighting zones while I stand on the other, a comfortable distance away. This worked, and I cleared the level through, in effect, remote telepresence. But there were still things about the puzzle that I didn’t understand. For starters, there’s a red gate over on the right side, enclosing the platform corresponding to the one I didn’t want to get stuck on in the previous paragraph. Why is that there? It controls access to an empty space. I cleared the room without opening it. It could be a mere red herring, but DROD doesn’t usually go in for that. Or when it does, it does it with things that give you the wrong idea about a puzzle and cause you to attempt it the wrong way, not with confusing elements that don’t suggest a solution at all.

And then, after you solve the room, there’s a Challenge scroll. The challenge: Clear the room without moving the mimic over the disarm token. In other words, the thing that I had decided was impossible is apparently the normal solution. I feel like I still haven’t solved this room, despite having solved it the hard way. And I have no idea which way I solved it the first time through.

While I’m semi-stuck in the later, more difficult levels of The City Beneath, let’s take a moment to talk a little about the one recurring character I haven’t said much about: the Pit Thing. This is a booming voice that occasionally speaks to Beethro from the depths of the vast chasms you occasionally find while exploring. Sometimes there are a few eyes on pillars in the middle of the pit, using the same sprite as Evil Eyes but not flagged as monsters. I suppose the implication is that they’re part of the Pit Thing, part of how it learns what’s going on in the world. It definitely has some source of information, because it knows a great deal about Beethro.

The Pit Thing first made itself known back in Journey to Rooted Hold, where it didn’t show much of a sign of personality or motivation. Its dialogue was a mixture of taunts, gibberish, and fruitless attempts to talk Beethro into jumping into the pit. That last theme continues somewhat in TCB, with the Pit Thing pointing out that if Beethro really wants to reach Lowest Point, straight down is the fastest route. Given DROD’s sense of irony, I half-suspect that we’ll eventually learn that the pit has an anti-gravity field or an enormous trampoline or something at the bottom, and that Beethro could have saved himself a lot of trouble by just following the Pit Thing’s advice.

For the most part, though, the Pit Thing seems less insane this time around, and at least a little concerned with guiding Beethro towards discovering the secrets of the underground. At one point, progress is contingent on the Pit Thing’s help, when Beethro gets access to the imperial library but doesn’t know what topic to look up. The Pit Thing guides him to the one part of the Library that’s in the process of being destroyed by briars. It does this, it claims, to teach us a lesson about Mothingness.

“Mothingness” was mentioned in JtRH, but I had frankly forgotten about it by the time TCB came out, and only noticed it this time around because I was watching for it. It just didn’t seem important there, just another nonsense word, or, more likely, a typo. But in TCB, it’s the central concept of the Pit Thing’s message. Mothingness is essential to the actions of the Empire. The citizens don’t know about the mothingness, but it’s “soaked into their flesh”, invisible and unavoidable. What is it? The Pit Thing prefers to teach by example, much to Beethro’s annoyance, so we don’t have a definition. The clearest statement we get comes when the Pit Thing is talking about the Archivist faction: “The Archivists have two jobs. One that was given to them, and one they gave themselves. They were told to collect information, but when they listened more deeply to the mothingness, the mothingness told them to collect all information.” We see the result shortly afterward: a war of extermination on the surface-dwellers, because only when they’re all dead can the Archivists’ records be permanently complete.

What is mothingness? Based on these two examples, I’d describe it as something like “things not going as planned”. Mothingness is entropy, code decay, perverse incentives. It’s the system’s inherent problems building up until things reach a crisis point, and then the system continuing anyway, a parody of its former self, its original purpose lost. Mothingness now rules the Empire, which has become a Recorded Information Maximizer, in the same sense as Paperclip Maximizer.

The Pit Thing sees the sparks that fly when Beethro comes into contact with mothingness, and is amused, and encourages further contact. And so the husk of an empire begins to fall.

I’ve talked about this before, but it’s impressing me anew: in comparison to other DRODs, it’s striking how much of The City Beneath is spent without using your sword. It’s not just the time you take exploring the city proper, where you’re forced to keep your sword in its sheath lest it be devoured by oremites. It’s also the way that the new game elements provide other things for the puzzles to be about. Take the rafts and floating platforms, which are really the same thing in two different contexts. A raft or floating platform is a contiguous group of floor tiles that move under your control when you’re on them, provided that there’s nothing in the way. ¹That’s a bit of a simplification, but I’ll spare you the details. Once that’s in the level designer’s toolkit, they can use it to make polyomino assembly puzzles that you solve from the inside. You don’t need a sword for that.

In a weird way, it reminds me of Portal 2. There was reportedly a point in the development of Portal 2 when the developers were seriously contemplating leaving the portal gun out, because they had a number of other novel mechanisms to replace it with, such as magic paint. But they wound up including the portal gun as the means by which you interact with the other novel mechanisms. TCB sort of does it the other way around: using your sword is the goal, the thing that the other puzzle-solving is done in service of. But then, the game also introduces new ways to kill things without using your sword, such as leading them onto hot tiles, or knocking out the supports of a bridge, or letting them step on your raft and then pulling it out from under them.

I mentioned oremites. When you first learn about the city’s oremite infestation, it seems like they’re nothing more than a tongue-in-cheek in-game excuse for the narrative decision to keep Beethro from killing important NPCs. But fairly late in the game, there’s a level called “Oremite Breeding Grounds”. Here, most of the floor is covered with oremite nests, except for a few tiles — and consequently, those are the only tiles where you can draw your sword. The puzzles are thus all about getting monsters over to the places where you can kill them, with enough time to turn to face the right way once you get there. I just love how it turns what seemed like a throwaway joke into a mechanic that produces puzzles, and I especially love how long it waits between introducing the concept of oremites and paying it off in this way.

I mentioned the sequence where you play as the Negotiator, who doesn’t even have a weapon, and has to kill monsters by controlling Fegundos. There’s a second such interlude where you control a goblin, who doesn’t have a sword, but who’s capable of killing things anyway (as we know from the puzzles where Beethro fights goblins). This is the sequence that introduces Aumtliches, the Empire’s latest vat-grown weapon of war. An Aumtlich’s eyes emit glowing, sparking beams that paralyze you if they touch you, leaving you able to turn in place but not able to flee. There’s a sense of powerlessness there that’s worse than simply being killed outright, and the player learns to fear the sound effect that accompanies getting stuck in the beams. And it all leads up to the moment when you get Beethro back, and have a sword again. To emphasize the importance of this, Beethro has to surrender his sword to be allowed into a military encampment just before the goblin sequence, and it’s only returned after that’s over. It’s important because, as we soon discover, your sword can block Aumtlich beams, or even reflect them back. You can still get stuck without recourse, but only if you stand in a place where two beams cross, so that you can’t block them both at once. Even so, being able to block them at all feels like a superpower after experiencing helplessness as a goblin. At first, I took care to orient my sword correctly before stepping into a beam, just to avoid the scary noise it would trigger otherwise. But the game gradually makes this impossible, and after a while, you learn to not let it bother you.

I’m managing to replay The City Beneath at a pretty good clip — I haven’t gotten to the harder levels yet, but I’m pretty sure that the game is overall much easier than Journey to Rooted Hold, even with the Challenges. The central organizing structure of the game is that your progress through the city is blocked by sundry obstacles requiring subquests. You explore more or less freely for a while, triggering plot events as you go, and then, when you can’t do that any more, you go off and solve a series of puzzle-rooms, then come back and resume exploring. The most significant of these obstacles is a series of three great gates. I’ve just passed the second one. This doesn’t mean I’m two-thirds of the way through the game; the first gate comes at the very beginning, and only requires that you sheathe your sword to pass. Also, I recall there’s a significant number of levels after the third gate. Still, it’s good progress.

The second gate is called the Gate of Namedness. The only people allowed through are citizens with names, which is to say, jobs, those two concepts being synonymous in the Empire. As an above-grounder, Beethro is automatically ineligible for this status, until the Negotiator moves heaven and earth to get the law changed. Really, Beethro severely underappreciates that woman. He remains as hostile towards her as he was when they first met, just as he remains belligerent towards everything in the Empire, even the people who are trying to help him. Nonetheless, getting deeper into the city requires him to integrate himself into the Empire’s systems, at least nominally.

I described the process of obtaining a name during my first pass through the game. Beethro applies for the post of Slayer. There are five other applicants for the position, and they all compete for the job with a fight to the death, in which everyone else naturally agrees to target the above-grounder first. Now, the room contains an obvious mechanism for beating them, involving a bomb and a decoy potion. But this time around, there’s a Challenge scroll, which predictably asks you to do without these aids.

I am of course an expert Slayer-killer by now, thanks to the Challenges in JtRH. What once seemed impossible is now child’s play. But there’s a particular difficulty with taking on five at once, and oddly enough, it’s exactly what made the same fight so surprisingly easy back in 2007: the tendency of the Slayers to bunch up. When you’re trying to get them to cluster together around a bomb, that’s helpful. When you’re trying to manually pick them off one by one, not so much. You want them isolated. The act of getting past a Slayer’s guard with nothing but a sword and a wall is a delicate dance, with precise timing, and easily ruined by another Slayer barging in from the wings. The first kill I managed was almost entirely accidental. Somehow, an interloper wound up in a position I could take advantage of. I have no idea how that happened, but it was a big help. Each enemy you take down makes the rest that much easier.

So! Replaying DROD: The City Beneath. This puts me in the new position of blogging a game that I’ve already blogged. Well, it’s been, good grief, ten years since those posts. My perspective will be different.

Coming on the heels of Journey to Rooted Hold, the most noticeable difference is that it isn’t simply a series of levels any more. JtRH played with nonlinearity a little, giving us up staircases and quests that looped back to previous levels, but the notion of “previous level” doesn’t even apply very well to TCB. Grouping rooms into levels is still important for the game’s organization, if only because of the “level clear” gates, but levels here are named, not numbered, and only partially ordered. I seem to recall that the later parts of the game turn into a linear descent like the previous titles, but for now, it’s hub-and-wheel, with some forking. And, while I recall once pooh-poohing the significance of the hub to the whole, it seems impressively large to me right now.

I had forgotten that the Negotiator from the beginning of JtRH shows up again here, in an expanded role. She turns out to be a bit of a rebel, in her own bureaucratically-bound way, and actually does a lot to help Beethro along, even though he doesn’t appreciate it. More importantly, you get to play as her for a little while, in an interlude between Beethro’s scenes, tutorializing the use of the Fegundo. Switching characters mid-game like this is a new feature for DROD.

And of course there are challenge scrolls now! As before, I’m trying to tackle all challenges as I find them. So far, I’ve found one worth describing briefly here. Recall that TCB contains occasional appearances by Slayer trainees, eager for promotion. In behavior, they’re just like the Slayer from JtRH, but they’re stupid enough to approach Beethro in rooms where they can be killed easily. The first such encounter is in a room full of “hot tiles”, which kill anything that steps on them and doesn’t step off on its next move. This makes killing the Slayer there not just easy, but nearly automatic. Once he gets close enough to be a threat, he’ll pause to reorient his weapon, and consequently die. So the Challenge there is: Keep the Slayer alive. So neat, so elegant.

Those hot tiles are just one of a bevy of new environmental features. I feel like the introduction of new stuff has accelerated. Yes, JtRH had new elements, but not this many, not this fast. And a fair number of them were new monsters, some of which were variations on stuff from King Dugan’s Dungeon, like Rattlesnakes and Awakened Mud. Whereas TCB is focusing less on new monsters and more on new room features that let you interact in new ways. Consider mirrors. These are things capable of reflecting the gaze of an Evil Eye (or, later, an Aumtlich), and which Beethro can push around the floor to block passageways or weigh down pressure plates (themselves a new element). They’re a bit Sokoban-like, except that Beethro can use his sword to push them around corners. The point is, the previous two games didn’t have anything remotely like them. I feel like JtRH was basically about fulfilling the potential that the familiar DROD ruleset obviously had but didn’t quite live up to in KDD, while TCB is more about striking off into fresh territory, and discovering new potential in the unfamiliar.

It’s been nearly a month since the Steam sale, so I think it’s about time to wrap up. But first, I want to revisit a couple of games I mentioned previously.

I had some harsh words for Loot Hunter. Well, it turns out that a recent Humble Bundle contained a strikingly similar game called Windward. That is, Windward doesn’t abstract ship-to-ship combat into a match-3 the way Loot Hunter does, but the rest of the game is fundamentally similar. In both games, you explore an age-of-sail world viewed at a large enough scale that your avatar is a ship rather than a person, and you attempt to make enough profit to upgrade your ship by trading goods between ports, doing quests, and fighting off pirates. But Windward does it all so much better. It’s designed more like a MMORPG. The quests are often elaborate multi-stage affairs, even if they are obviously procedurally-generated. The world is divided into zones geared towards different levels. If you’re too low-level for a zone, you’re allowed to go there, but none of the towns will trade with you, and that gives you a strong motivation to go back where you belong. This division lets the designers better control the pacing and keep multiple upgrade tracks running in parallel.

Now, I haven’t given all my sale purchases an honest try yet, but of those that I have, the one I’m most satisfied with is Creeper World. I played through the whole thing pretty quickly, including the bonus levels (which seem to be the part that differentiates the “Anniversary Edition” from the free online Flash version), and then was pleased to discover that it has a couple of sequels. I purchased the first sequel while the sale was still going, and now I’ve played through that as well.

Creeper World 2 pulls the same strange trick as the second Zelda game: it takes a game in a top-down view and turns it on its side. The battlefields this time are systems of caves and underground tunnels, exactly as wide as the screen but many times taller. It’s still basically a game about fighting a fluid called “creeper”, but instead of just spreading generally outward, it flows downward if it can, filling cavities. When completely enclosed, it can become pressurized, spurting out and expanding at an alarming rate when it finally dissolves a hole in the wall. The most effective way to combat this is to build up some pressure of your own to resist it. In other words, you can generate your own creeper this time around. Once you have this ability, it almost seems like an oversight that it wasn’t in the original game. Here it is, the game’s most distinctive feature, but wasn’t something that the player could do. Being able to create your own creeper gives the game a greater sense of completeness, in the mathematical sense.

For all these big changes, the tactics are fundamentally similar to the first game. It’s still primarily about finding the opportune places to cut off the enemy’s creeper flow so you can move in on the things generating it. One change that’s kind of mechanically trivial but makes a big difference to the feel of the game: In the first game, you couldn’t actually destroy the creeper generators. You could effectively disable them by clearing the vicinity of creeper and then parking a blaster near the generator, so that it would destroy any creeper the generator emitted the instant it appeared, but that’s as far as you could take it. (And even then, there was the risk of forgetting that you needed that blaster there, and moving it with disastrous results, as happened to me more times than I’d like to say.) In Creeper World 2, you have a new device that actually destroys the generators.

And it is this ability that made me think: This is a lot like fighting a Tar Mother in DROD. I mean, it’s not identical, sure — Tar Mothers make all the tar in the room expand, while these creeper generators are just point-sources of the stuff. But in both cases, I’m cutting my way through a mass of viscous blue stuff to kill a thing in the middle that makes it keep expanding. And with that said, I think it’s time to get back to DROD.

There’s a room pattern introduced back in level 16 of Journey to Rooted Hold, of rooms entirely filled with bombs except for a narrow and squiggly path. Accidentally nudging a bomb with your sword makes the entire roomful blow, emptying it in an instant. It’s the game’s strongest expression of overwhelming power, so of course the designers bring the pattern back when it’s time to kill the Slayer. The climactic one in level 25 is easier to navigate than the ones on level 16, though, which strikes me as a smart move. The main purpose of this room is story, not puzzle, and it wouldn’t serve the story to frustrate the player right on the verge of victory over the main antagonist.

In fact, that could apply to most of the level. Apart from the ending, level 25 is mostly about a new enemy, the red-uniformed “Guards of the Poppy Brigade”, brought in by the Slayer for a last-ditch holding effort. These guys are kind of like Slayers, but not as smart. Like the Slayer, they wield weapons, and they know how to navigate around walls (which makes them smarter than most monsters), but they’re vulnerable to some really basic swordfighting tricks. They like to keep their swords pointed toward Beethro even when that’s not the right thing to do, letting you kill them with maneuvers that they could have blocked if they knew the right dances. So they’re only dangerous when they mob you from multiple directions. The rooms do build up to that, but only after a whole bunch of easy tutorializing, and even when the puzzles get hard, the guards still kind of feel easy just because I’m mentally comparing them to the Slayer. Being mobbed just enhances that, because it’s an opportunity to kill them in droves.

Now, in that final Slayer room with all the bombs, there’s a moment of hypocrisy so pointed that it has to be deliberate. When Beethro lights the fuse, the exasperated Slayer complains that Beethro doesn’t know what he’s doing and that he’s putting “many thousands of innocent lives” in danger. And he has a point – Beethro really doesn’t know what the consequences of his delving will be, and we know from subsequent games that a whole lot of people, both surface-dwellers and citizens of the Empire, wind up getting killed. But anyway, Beethro retorts that the Slayer isn’t in a position to lecture Beethro about killing people. The Slayer starts to reply that Abovegrounders don’t count, but catches himself, apparently aware for once of what he’s saying. The thing is, at this point they both act as if Beethro has won the moral high ground, even though he’s just cut his way through a battalion of Poppy guards, treating them like they don’t count because they’re Belowgrounders. Really, it’s all just furthering the same who’s-really-the-monster stuff that got started when Halph befriended the roaches, or even earlier, with the Neather.

After that, it’s on to the sequel. Beethro swears to get to the bottom of this whole Empire business, which he eventually does, literally. But the player isn’t done with the game yet. There’s still Mastery. This means solving every single room, including the hidden ones — and some of them are hidden much more cleverly than I remembered. (Completing all the Challenges is not necessary for Mastery, in part because Mastery existed before Challenges.) As I’ve said, the game gives you a lot of help here. You can reload any room you’ve visited, and once you’ve completed the main game, the “Restore” menu tells you the number of secrets on each level, making it a lot easier to find them. Hunting down your missing secrets on every floor is a nice way to look back at the whole game. I like to do it from the bottom up, as if returning from the journey Beethro hasn’t really finished yet.

Mastery gives you access to the “Dreamplane”, a sort of a museum of concept art and rejected room designs, which you explore in the same engine as the rest of the game. It’s impressively large, easily the largest level in the game, and I find it oddly engaging. Usually I’m not much interested in concept art galleries in games (unless the concepts are very different from the finished work), but piloting Beethro around the floors, looking for interactive bits but not really worrying about puzzles, is a relaxing end to a sometimes frustrating game. Moreover, there’s an element of the uncanny to it. See, the Dreamplane is physically accessible from the dungeon. There’s a stairway to it on level 13. You can’t explore beyond the entrance room until you achieve Mastery, but you can at least enter the level, which gives it something of an aura of in-fiction reality, despite being completely fourth-wall-breaking. Furthermore, getting past the Master Gate and into the rest of the Dreamplane effectively requires time travel. Now, when you jump around from level to level looking for secrets, you’re effectively rewinding time back to earlier points in your explorations, but this is non-diegetic time travel, more like turning back the pages of a book. The resulting Mastery doesn’t violate the narrative because even if you didn’t get all the secrets on your first pass, you theoretically could have done so. Getting past the entrance to the Dreamplane, on the other hand, isn’t theoretically possible within the narrative, because there are multiple points of no return between level 13 and level 25. Time travel isn’t necessary for Mastery, but it is necessary for getting back to that Gate once you have it. And once you have a physically real place that’s only accessible through metanarrative trickery, you have something very strange indeed.