[Click here to start from the first progress log]

Okay, so the difficulty of the nighttime monster attacks only ramps up early on. Once you’ve got six or so people working as guards while decked out in steel armor and the best swords, they pretty much take care of the nighttime stuff by themselves. I also tested out the controller support and hardcore mode, and while hardcore mode is vaguely interesting (I don’t know if thieving workers are only a thing in hardcore mode or if I got lucky in my normal mode playthrough), TB;FL really doesn’t play very well with a controller for several reasons I’ll elaborate on toward the end.

First, though, session three

Once you have enough nighttime guards who are equipped enough to handle most enemies without losing anyone and you’ve built everything you can, the goal shifts slightly. To continue forward, you need to send out a scout (who’s equipped with armor to avoid dying) so that they come back and tell you about a mysterious cave. Then you need an alchemist and some warriors to explore it, because the first dungeon you complete has a stone tablet at the end that the alchemist translates, unlocking more content. There are no monster attacks if you explore dungeons, so safely exploring can be as simple as making as many shields (required to switch workers to the warrior job) as you have guards and switching them immediately when the dungeon becomes available. Then you switch them back to guards once you’re done to be safe. There’s no need to explore more than one dungeon unless you’re trying to run up your score for the sake of TB;FL’s supposed leaderboards.

I won during session four

Deciphering the text in the dungeon allows you to open the temple gate, further expanding the horizontal real estate and allowing you to construct several new things (such as the best kind of swords). This culminates in you freeing the “titan,” though you’re also able to upgrade its weapon and armor first. Of course, you have no way of knowing what these things actually do, and this is why it’s recommended to not start on hardcore mode; releasing the titan sends it off to face against some evil creature that seems to be minding its own business, and this manifests in an awkward fight scene that plays out kind of like a QTE sequence (22:57). You have two attacks and a block, but nothing up to this point has prepared you for this and it’s difficult to know when to do what. Dying to this thing and losing a hardcore playthrough would have been infuriating. Needless to say, you want to be able to kill this thing in one or two hits, and that means upgrading the titan’s weapon and armor.

I reloaded and killed it on my second attempt, and here’s where some ugliness arose—the music changes to a short loop once you beat the game, and this seems to override all other music until you quit out. That means that when I reloaded my game to play a bit longer and see whether doing so caused my score to go up, I dealt with 20 minutes of this short loop repeated over and over and over again.

Making a self-sustaining city

That bit of extra playing led me to a strange realization: you can gain more points per day than you lose, rendering scores meaningless if it’s ever possible for your city to run itself without your input. Obviously this could be a problem for a game that’s apparently going to have leaderboards, so I challenged myself to make it work. I loaded up Cheat Engine to use its speedhack feature and started balancing out jobs so that everyone was producing things faster than they were using them up. In the process, I confirmed something I had suspected: mixing traits for your guards may be necessary early on, but it’s ultimately counterproductive. Some of the traits cause guards to run forward faster than anyone else, allowing enemies to pick them off before the rest of the group can get there. By ensuring that all of your guards instead move at the same speed, they attack as a group and are basically immortal.

I left the game to play itself for awhile (running at 4X speed thanks to speedhack) and started recording when I came back and everyone was still alive. The whole time, alchemists continued to produce the resource necessary to upgrade the titan, so I eventually leveled everything up to 125-200 and finished the game. Weirdly enough, the enemy still managed to one-hit kill the titan with two of its attacks, so I have no idea what armor is good for, but leaving the game to play itself indeed improved my score. I’m not sure how much value the leaderboards will have considering being on top requires little more than keeping the game running longer than others, but there’s something inherently satisfying about setting things up so that your input is no longer needed, and hopefully this doesn’t get changed at all. Off the top of my head, including a steeper per day penalty (losing a little more than what you’d normally get for defeating enemies would probably work) would solve the problem while still allowing players to create their own self-sufficient city.

A note about controller support

I wanted to try out hardcore mode and the controller support, so I tried out both at the same time. This first attempt was ugly enough that my further attempts to finish hardcore mode (which I almost succeeded at before a stupid mistake at the end netted me a game over) made use of the mouse instead. Basically, menus can be incredibly awkward with a controller, but that’s not the biggest issue here. The biggest issue is that you can interrupt your job to start another one while using the mouse, while using a controller tends to lock up further inputs until you’ve finished whatever you were doing. Because I went to make food on the first day (twice, thanks to the way the cursor occasionally resets to the rightmost option instead of staying put), my character stood around and lost tons of life while refusing to attack until the very end. This wouldn’t have happened if I was using the mouse.

[Click here to go to The Bonfire: Forsaken Lands log #1]

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