The Doom that Came to Mordavia: Let's Play Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness

Seepgood goes around the rest of Mordavia village completing his errands of working out at the Guild Hall and picking up his health and poison pills from Dr. Cranium. Speaking of the good doctor he has some new dialog:



Report:



Scientists:



As we go to leave:



"Not to mention green and necrotic Doc..."

There isn't a lot to do until nightfall except to grind for stats or visit the Gypsies and get some more background. I settle on the latter:



"Awh, she likes us!"



We ask Magda about vampires:



After that we give her a few kopeks and the tarot reading begins:







(You know this is Ad Avis, right? Like I told you? The Ad Avis from Quest for Glory II and III. Everyone is getting that, right? Okay, good.)

The reading of the Ill-Omened Man (Ad Avis) continues:

















"Let me guess... The Void card?"



"Nailed it!"

With that the reading is over and Garcon will have to wait until the next day to ask for another one. He tells the two about casting the Destiny spell and saving Tanya's life:



She then tells Perseii to be careful when traveling at night after pissing off whoever this powerful person is (it's Ad Avis and Katrina. You knew that right? Ya'll had figured that out hadn't you?)

Next time we run into one of those powerful people Magda mentioned... It's fine. It's fine. Everything's fine. This is good.

There are some broken/incorrect image links in the last post on page 5:

When you talk to Yuri about the Child, and Bella's retort to Yuri's sexist remark about women learning to read and write.

Thanks Bunk! I think I got them all fixed.

You're welcome! I'm liking how this QFG game's turning out.

It's my favorite in the series and still sits comfortably in my top 10 games of all time

Likewise!

you know, I'd forgotten how the writing of the Tarot sequences is surprisingly good.

If only actual Tarot readings were as entertaining and ominous!

Finished with the gypsies Garcon spends the rest of the day grinding before returning to the village for supper. Back in the inn he talks to the innkeeper once more.

Child:



Next we speak to the friendly townsfolk:



Rumors:





"Trina you say? I know who Trina is! I wonder who it could be?"



"Me?! I don't believe it!"

Townspeople:



"You're welcome, you're welcome! Yes, it was all me who has made this tiny hell hole livab..."





"Oh, yeah... I guess there is still all of that to do..."





"Oh! I see how it is! Solve all our problems! But don't try to involve us in anyway!"

I tried to see the Inn Domovoi later in the night but the little guy never showed up. Perseii finally went to bed only to find something in his room the next morning:

Jackson grabs the note and reads it:



"Oh yeah...Trina really does like me!"

With his night planned Danar just has to find a way to wile away the daylight hours. First he gets his workout in:



And you can tell by the fact that all the weights are now in the stair stepper that the game is nearing the endgame.

Next he picks up his pills and then heads back to have his fortune read again by Magda:



GILFs, right?

The reading continues:









Guess what card that is?



If you said "The Void" give yourself a cookie! If you guessed this reading was about Katrina give yourself another cookie!

With the reading done Seepgood spends the rest of the day grinding once again until nightfalls.

Once the sun sets he heads to the castle gates:

[IMG]

"You are most certainly not the mysterious beautiful woman I was expecting to meet here!"





Turns out the "Hounds of Hell" are the reanimated corpses of cows... The more you know!

(You can run away from the hounds. You can even make it back to town! But unless you let them capture you the game cannot progress.)

If Ad Avis' past performance as a villain is any indication Garcon is going to be out of here quicker than you can say Prince Garcon Perseii Jackson Danar Seepgood the Third!





Ad Avis is SO bad at his job that he didn't bother to take Jackson's inventory from him...



"Thanks for providing me with the means of your destruction, again, Ad Avis! Awfully considerate of you!"



Danar lost a day sleeping in the dungeon:



Guess he'll have to work extra hard this evening to make up for it! Speaking of work it's been forever since we checked Seepgood's stats:



Not bad looking! I think this is lowest stats I've ever had a character be at this point in the game. Most of the time when my characters get here they're in the 300s or 400s. It doesn't seem to be hurting us any though!

Tune in next week for daring escapes and terrible curses!

James Bond Moment When Villain Reveals Evil Plan Which Will Ultimately Be Thwarted (TM)

"What she desires and what she will gain through her actions are very different things"

And the ultimate goal is eternal darkness, why don't vampires ever realize this will kill all plant life and then all humans? Then again no one in town is complaining about blood loss, so maybe these vampires don't require blood?

Falselogic are you going to show off the dreams you see when sleeping at the staff or garden? I don't think there was a specific deadline to get to this point, or if there is a deadline now, but I would have expected that to come before you started this section.

can't... stop laughing...

Going be straight with you birdiedude. I completely forgot that this is a thing.

I will try to rectify that by sleeping in the garden from here on out.

We last left Garcon sitting in the dungeon of Castle Borgav after having been tricked by Ad Avis into meeting him at night. We'll start by having out hero looking around:



Perseii gingerly puts his ear to the door and listens in:







*ears perk up*



Okay! Well now Jackson nows that there is a secret entrance somewhere in this room? And seeing as there are very few well drawn or unique objects in this room that Danar knows right where to go!



"All too easy."



How interesting!



Has this game beat you over the head enough yet? Seepgood takes a closer look at the coffin:



(an aside here. I wish the artists had created some sort of unified look for Katrina because this pic of her, the conversation pic of her as a peasant girl, and the pic of her as the master looked more alike. Likewise the voice acting for the two)

If you try to do anything but kill Katrina she'll wake up and do this:



(We'll get to what happens when you try to kill her later.)



Observant readers will notice that somehow in the midst of a conversation Katrina has changed outfits.

Katrina seems really, really upset about us interrupting her beauty sleep!



And has also slipped into her BDSM gear... Garcon tries to explain himself:



and like every cis het man on the planet he thinks his affections can solve all his problems with the opposite sex:



Katrina has heard that love line before it seems...



Perseii makes some mewling noises but Katrina is unconvinced:



"This seems perfectly innocuous..."



"well, that seems like a very, very, very bad idea. On the other hand I would like to live."





"Barnacles!"



You know it's serious because Katrina has whipped out the King James language...



That's great Katrina, but what is a Geas?

Gaes (geSH)

(In Irish folklore) an obligation or prohibition magically imposed on a person.



With that Jackson finds himself outside of the castle once more:



On the positive side Danar is no longer imprisoned in a dungeon. On the negative side he has to help Katrina bring about eternal night...

But let's say we hadn't tried to talk to Katrina or wake her up or kiss her?









So, there you go, that is what happens if you kill Katrina. You die. There is only one way to win this game!

What if you try and tell Katrina that it was Ad Avis who brought you to the castle?





The point is that no matter what we do if we want to beat this game we have to go along with Katrina.

With the geas upon us Seepgood heads to the gypsy matron to see if she can shed any light on the situation:

Magda's reading continues. Sadly, it has nothing to do with the obligation put upon Garcon.







Can you guess who this is? I'll give you one chance...







It's Erana. If you didn't guess that you haven't been reading, or are incredibly dense!

Now that we've learned all about Erana despite not asking to learn anything about her we try and ask Magda for help with the rituals:





"No Magda it wasn't about that. It was clearly about Elana the lost sorceress. You are no help at all!"



"That's reassuring."

Erana:



Dark One:







Rituals:



"That isn't helpful at all! Where are these rituals?!"

Join us soon when Perseii goes in search of the remaining rituals lest the geas ruins him!

DUN DUN DUN! I forgot about the time limit on the rituals.

After Garcon received the geas from Katrina the gypsy is supposed to give us a free reading that provides clues to where the remaining rituals may be found. You remember we already got one of them, right? When we snuck into the Monastary and drank that overly ripe wine? Yeah, that one, it was the blood ritual. We still need the bone, sense, breath, and heart rituals. There is a mouth ritual, yes. But seeing as Katrina got us out of the Dark One's cave its clear she already has that one!

Except no matter what I tried I couldn't get the old bat to tell me anything about the rituals, except this weird glitch where I can ask her a question about cards and she tells me where just the Bone Ritual is!

It's a good thing I know where are the rituals are! Anyway, someone asked about Erana and I'd been skipping that. If you sleep in her garden you'll have some strange dreams:











Well, that was not fun at all! Perseii doesn't have any time to think about it though! He only has three days to find all these rituals! We're going to start with the Senses Ritual. It's in the swamp. Remember the swamp? It was right outside of the Dark One's cave past the slime? You thought it was just a fancy way to keep you from leaving the valley, didn't you? Wrong!





The swamp goes on for awhile, using the acrobat skill has Jackson leaping from tuft to tuft of land. The only worry is that you don't jump between two dry spots while a hand is raised out of the water right where you're about to jump. Eventually Danar finds this:



Seepgood moves as quickly as he can to close the gap between him and the evil sorcery, the damn thing shooting magic at us the entire time.

With the Dark Sign affixed to the monolithic tombstone he must now solve a puzzle:



The symbols you see along the edge represent the various rituals needed to summon the Dark One. If you start with 'mouth' (in the upper right) and just move clockwise the puzzle will be solved (I believe the order is mouth, bone, blood, breath, heart, and I have no idea what that last one is.)



Two rituals down. Three more to go!

Day 12 is still young but Garcon is also exhuasted. He takes a short rest in the swamp before leaping back to the mainland and napping until nightfall:





Why do we need Will o' Wisps? Perseii will need them to unlock the puzzle for the next ritual, which just so happens to be located just east of this screen:



Those symbols were all revealed after using the Will o' Wishps on the obelisk:



I wonder what goes in that small hole?



I missed a screenshot of this but this puzzle has you moving the dial around a wheel of different letters. The solution is to spell the name of the Dark One, azoovl, to unlock the rock and retrieve the ritual.



Two more to go! The next ritual is located in a Wraith's barrow. This particular wraith is located south and west of Erana's garden. Once you defeat him:



One more! The last ritual is located in the Hangman's Tree outside of Baba Yaga's hut. But we already looked there way back, remember? I wonder what happened to it?

"You're harshing my buzz Baba baby!"

Despite her misgivings about Jackson's wizarding prowess she hands the ritual over:



With that she kicks us out of her hut. And with that Danar finds himself in possession of all the dark rituals Katrina tasked him with finding. But, before we run off to show her let's get some sleep:




"This again?!"





"What is your deal this time around Erana?!"



Join us next time we Seepgood does some grinding, talks to everyone once more and then starts the end game!

Turns out no one had anything worthwhile to say before beginning the endgame. And the Gypsies were still bugged and giving us bad clues to find rituals we now already had! So without further ado Garcon heads back into Castle Borgav













And with that Perseii once again enters the cave of the Dark One



It appears the tentacled beast has come out of his cave and in the process shrunk down to a much more manageable size? What happened to the giant tentacle that almost killed Jackson when he escaped from this place two weeks ago?!



I guess this is the High Priest that Katrina mentioned? The book near him must have the last ritual in it. Danar casts fetch on the book:

With the final ritual in his possession Seepgood moves deeper into the cave:



Here we are again in the Heart Cave. You can't tell from the screenshots but the sphincters blocking off the others rooms will pulse in the order we need to enter them. It's... distrubing to say the least. The first one is the Bone Cave on the far right, the room we started the game in:



The alter is right there, but before beginning the ritual Garcon lights the one torch and returns the other:











Thinking quickly Perseii leaps up and out of the way of the enclosing bones



With the ritual complete he grabs the torch again and returns to the Heart Cave:



The next room he enters is on the far left, the Blood Cave:





Jackson slowly makes his way down and then back up to the alter in the Blood Cave.

Once at the alter he begins to read out the blood ritual:









I don't know I think the oozing bright red acid really adds to the room... But with it pouring over everything it's going to be a little harded for Danar to make his way back to the exit:





Climbing and leaping over a couple of ledges and precipices gets him back to the Heart Cave and into the next chamber, the Breath Cave:



Seepgood makes his way over to what he assumes is the alter in this room:

Garcon is right in the middle of the Breath Ritual:



If you were paying clost attention to the words of the ritual you'll have some idea as to what Perseii has to do next. The alter has a number of pipes coming off of it three lowes ones and three higher ones. The order to blow them in is: lower right, lower left, lower middle, higher middle. Jackson does that now:



When he is done the door in the back that was closed before opens up and a great wind begins blowing in and out of the room. As he tries to leave Danar is caught up by the breath:







After being sucked into the chamber in the back and then blown back out and up against the "screen" Seepgood finally makes his way out of the Breath Cave:



And into the final cave, the Sense Cave. With no indication of what to do he begins walking around:








With all his senses returned Garcon can take a look around the room and notice that parts of it correspond to the senses he lost: a nose, an ear, an eye, etc. At the alter he begins the ritual: