Clive55 Tue Sep 9 12:18:07 2014	I've encountered the same problem as Zograf and Condutas. The story cannot be finished.
	OK I think I've fixed it now. I've played all the way through it today, so it is definitely possible to complete. If there's still a problem, let me know (perhaps email me the URL) and I'll have another look.

Clive55
Thu Sep 11 21:06:05 2014
Star - optimum ending reached

It is fixed! A lot of fun to play this one. Thanks again Phil.

Yaztromo
Sun Dec 7 15:58:18 2014
Skull - non-optimum ending reached

Today the dices are really against me...:-(

Paul Mc
Thu Nov 19 18:36:17 2015
Skull - non-optimum ending reached

I need your help. The fairies keep turning me to stone, where is the fairydust so I know to avoid it.

Mage
Sat Jan 9 04:00:14 2016

I'm encountering a bug when I battle the "Fiend from the Pit" (the monster where you have to test your Luck every time you hit it, and you either do double or no damage depending on the result). I reduced its STAMINA to 0 after passing the Luck test, but there's no option to move forward. The game just gets stuck there with the screen displaying the combat with the monster's STAMINA at zero, with no options or text below.

I'm "continuing" the game straight from Hellfire for my playthrough, not sure it that affects anything.

Fixed.

Mage
Sun Jan 10 03:30:03 2016
Star - optimum ending reached

Thanks!

Mage
Tue Apr 4 13:09:25 2017
Star - optimum ending reached

Are there additional bonus for completing this with Hellfire?

Phil Sadler
Thu Apr 20 05:20:50 2017

Just found a 13-year old bug in this game: the boss of the adventure says to his body guard "Deal with him Aramas." But in my books the character is always gender-less!

Oh, by the way, 'Aramas' is Samara backwards: guess where I got that name from.

meschlum
Fri Oct 26 17:30:45 2018
Star - optimum ending reached

When facing a Fiend From the Pit, the first hit required a Luck roll to do 4 damage - then two more normal hits were required to bring it down. Shouldn't it be another Luck roll?

Phil Sadler
Sun Nov 4 12:27:41 2018

You are right. I suspect this is a bug.

paul
Sun Mar 10 12:32:36 2019
Skull - non-optimum ending reached

killed by a spider, the indignity. this one is hard and dangerous.

Mage
Tue Oct 19 03:23:17 2021
Star - optimum ending reached

And done with the sequel!

YARD
Sun Sep 10 14:59:14 2023
Star - optimum ending reached

Well, I didn't enjoy Hellfire much, but it did have SOME things going for it, like violence feeling more consequential than usual. And as much as I hated the shopping list for the boss itself, the feeling of things finally coming together at the end as you got to negate all the other enemies right before him if you approached things right actually was really satisfying.

This, on the other hand, was just incredibly bad.

OK, I'll acknowledge that there is one thing it does a lot better than the first, and very well altogether, and that is the location descriptions. That island really is beautiful and a great step-up from yet another cave of the original. Its vistas are inspiring, with the bodies of water like lakes and even fish ponds a particular highlight. I am not sure how I would rank them next to, say, Andrew Wright's descriptions, but frankly, both are good.

It is therefore most unfortunate that even as the locale descriptions soar to new heights, the dialogue plumbs new depths. I remember being surprised, to put it mildly, that Gavin Mitchell decided to directly follow up his initial, rather dark (and frankly edgy too) work, Outsider!, with New Day Rising, which had a far lighter tone and was filled with not just rather childish humour, but hugely distracting meta humour as well. For whatever reason, Phil Sadler decided that this story really needed those same elements too, but should also be more of an "epic". And so we get brilliant exchanges like "But why - Because it has been prophesised.", alongside pre-kindergarten-level jokes about tossing an obviously-suspicious anthropomorphized dice into nettles and cowpats.

Even worse is the way the protagonist is written now. Hellfire tended to be very economical with internal monologue and the like - and this turned out to be a blessing. It kept banging on and on about BrAvErY, and there was no way to complete it if you (and by extension, the character) did not, in fact, heed it. Yet, here, we keep on reading and reading how the slayer of Trinitour and plenty other beasts keeps getting cold sweats at the sight of monsters (including some that he* had already killed before anyway), how fear literally causes physical damage, or requires tests of stamina (some extremely intensive) to overcome. I could chalk it to PTSD from being banished to the void...except that the conversational dialogue shows no sight of that!

Instead, the dialogue has somehow ended up dumbing him down a lot. In refs like 353, it's so, somoronic that he is "blushing and looking up at the sky" after being told that the gods are justifiedly interested after everything he's done to beat Trinitour (not interested enough to help more than in one very specific and confusingly unavoidably encounter, but still) and after the Wizards have already called him "The Chosen One" and brought him back from the literal oblivion. The utterly enormous refs 347 and 268 are probably even worse. I will never understand why multiple authors here apparently thought that arbitrary, completely unbelievable skepticism makes characters more relatable rather than less (be it a werewolf disbelieving in vampires in Rise of the Night Creatures or the "Warrior" suddenly deciding that a fairly generic demon birth story was less plausible than, say, a ghost of a woman warrior dead for 50 years emerging from a painting to him* give a piece of tiger fur to morph into.)

(* as according to that bit of dialogue near the end, at any rate.)

As usual, I am running out of comment space again, so this is about to end here. Before I continue about more the story and process, I would like to note that having no way to know what each of the three potions offered at the start even does, whether before or even after selecting them, is NOT a good start. I am not sure why one should be expected to read the "self-interview" (not easily available if you click "CONTINUED" at the end of anyway) to know that your healing is now 1D6 and so are the other restorative potions.

YARD
Sun Sep 10 15:42:00 2023

Narratively, there is also the simple fact that canonically (since you cannot win in any other way), "the Warrior"''s first reaction upon seeing unarmed, chained-up, wounded woman begging for help was to slit her throat, alongside doing the same to Rhino Man begging for mercy, and pulling a sword on a frightened old man. Ergo, he cannot possibly be a very nice person - so it's mystifying to see him approach a living die with "can I be of some service?" and talking to that ridiculously suspicious die as a friend moments later. Same goes for his general demeanor in conversations with other suspicious entities, or suddenly talking to Trinitour as a friend, (mostly once you figure out in which puzzles he is meant to be invoked) which clashes badly with the seething hatred anyone who had actually staggered through Hellfire is likely to feel for him. Besides, the protagonist had also lived through some six weeks of "the dead came back, the seas boiled, reality turned upside-down and people disappeared all over the place", as the background cheerfully informs us.) The one "I'm truly sorry for the things I've done in the past ... there's no real ... excuse" is...belated, to put it mildly. Yet, the last two times Trinitour is in the narrative are even more WTF.

SPOILER

END SPOILER

Even the final, mostly triumphal stretches, where you finally get to (mostly) relax and reap your narrative rewards are surprisingly compromised by not just typos (more on them later) but similarly dissonant and illogical writing.

SPOILER

END SPOILER

Before I move on from the primary narrative, I should mention that this story's relationship with canon appears to be really questionable. To be fair, it's not the only one: Outsider! was very obviously written as urban fantasy with little regard to fitting with the rest of the setting, and the complete absence of, say, any Hashak's progeny, seems remarkable even for an Old World location. Here, though, everything to do with demons and religion owes far more to real-world Christianity than the rules of the setting. After Hellfire, I had to double-check that there ARE crucifixes in the setting, but at least they are meant to be a collective representation of all good deities. Here, there are numerous mentions of an obviously monotheistic God, Hell is described more monotheistically than like the Planes of the setting, and there is a mention of a single Devil, as opposed to the demonic pantheon. And one of the refs mentioning literal Christmas is about as inexcusable as the sudden outburst of atheism near the end of Outsider! that completely contradicts characters' own actions.

YARD
Sun Sep 10 15:43:21 2023

And as far as "gameplay" goes, I suppose I had to cheat here less than I did in Hellfire, which probably counts for something. I did not start looking at this comment section for hints until getting to Hell Demon, and I only started "right-clicking" around that point as well. There are only so many choices of direction in a row one can take when they typically come with zero indication of which would do what (a surprising devolution from Hellfire, which at least tended to leave more hints about its tunnel entrances), or which is the core and which is the branch (Hellfire at least kept pretty strongly to "north = leave area, try it last rule" and the sequel enjoys messing with it at all turns), which would let you backtrack and which won't and which would have unavoidable consequences as soon as you turn to that ref - even if in the narrative, IT WOULD SOMETIMES TAKE SEVERAL MILES OF WALKING before you get to the point that kills you or massively punishes you.

Another thing which makes the narrative here so annoying, and the protagonist so hard to relate to, is just how much the Warrior is now a total plaything of whatever enchantments happened to be around the place this time. Being randomly thrown around the first few exits is not too bad once you realize that there is nothing crucial to skip over that way, but even much later on, there are still those infuriating auto-choices where the character is suddenly "oVeRcOmE wItH eMoTiOn" and either has to deal with those fits of fear or grabs obvious traps in the form of food or gems. One might suspect that the thing which would separate "a Chosen One" from a merely skilled Warrior is being able to resist such influences, whether initially or learning to do so over the course of the trial. Yet, apparently being able to guess the path through unmarked trails (since "canonically", the Warrior would have had to have known which path to take the first time, every time) is a far more important skill to determine.

And of course, there's the similar design as in Hellfire, where you get a bunch of items that often sound cool, but are at best useful in one highly specific circumstance, and at worst are not useful at all. Here, it's arguably worse, since you do NOT need a particularly massive list by the end like in Hellfire, but the story is good at pretending that you do. Compared to the approach of Shrine of the Salamander or even A Princess of Zamarra, it just feels so impotent, especially when it results in the totally logical plotting like this:

SPOILER

END SPOILER

YARD
Sun Sep 10 15:52:17 2023

Now, here's a link to a ref where a really strange bug had occurred once:

SPOILER

END SPOILER

And typos - at least as many as are going to fit in this one comment.

SPOILER

END SPOILER

YARD
Sun Sep 10 15:59:02 2023

The first set of typos is apparently caught in the filter, so here's the next one (200-300), anyway.

SPOILER

END SPOILER

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