Let's Play Firmament - part 13 - Ice maze

[@Divector8]

I noticed something funny at the end of the video. What looks like a a glowing concrete wall behind the Conveyance Pod is actually a missing texture. That concrete texture is what's shown in UE4 when a decal has no texture assigned or the specified texture cannot be found. I do game dev on UE4 and laughed as soon as I saw that.

[@NikaNakaidze]

Haha

[@sashakindel3600]

The ice maze took me a long time, but for exactly one reason, which is that I had already run into enough situations where I thought the cavitation hammer might work but it didn't that I took for granted for a while that it wouldn't work through a metal grate. I never noticed the flashing triangles in the sky. Neat.

[@micahbush5397]

I enjoyed the underwater maze; I even keep a saved game so I can go through it again whenever I want. My main nitpick: You can see the watery distortion on the areas that are supposed to be inside the suit.

[@MasterTMO]

I opened that door to the bulwark kit and immediately ran away yelling "Nope! Nope! Nope!" :) Didn't help, I still had to do the stupid puzzle. :P

[@fieryphoenix2501]

that pause before ..... "in the next video"

[@Mirality]

I enjoyed most of the ice maze in VR -- even got the elevator working again -- but got stuck at that last section with the three blocking poles you had to concatenate. For some reason i had a hard time finding the right angle that didn't retract.

[@MasterTMO]

I also had a hard time solving this one because I didn't notice the socket behind the grate was frozen. I wandered around through the maze for*ever* trying to find the right angle to hit it, when the stupid thing was iced over and unreachable from any angle.

[@Sparks68]

The ice maze requires great patience. Had to start it over several times. Glad I made a save just before donning the suit. Understanding the general strategy and ultimate goal helped immensely. Getting around a few things was frustrating. I can see why there are those who hate it. It is possible to get trapped between two or three sets of steam valve tubes sticking out across a walkway. I believe it can be done without concatenating anything if the elevator is used. Definitely the hardest of the three Embrace journeys.

[@FernandoRubioMateu]

"In the next video..." Love that sentence I don't know why

[@scottmacfeat2568]

I didn't like this puzzle initially. But knowing the "why" behind it makes it more interesting. Imagine keepers regularly maintaining the steam pressure and heat pumps because one day it will be needed (cant say why yet as thats a spoiler). But now that it hasnt been maintained in presumably a long time, youre basically starting over from scratch and troubleshooting along the way. I find it pretty awesome that the components in this realm needed this kind of maintenance under the ice for the embrace to work. Again, for me, knowing more of the story at this point might have helped the tedious nature of this puzzle.

[@cubicinfinity2]

4:53 is indeed awkward. I can't remember how it was supposed to be done either.

[@WarthogDemon]

I love mazes. Also I'm guessing the portal will take us to where Turner and the Arrivals came from.

[@TheInkPitOx]

Or it could take us to the next chamber where we have to deal with the super high energy pellet while standing atop the unstationary scaffold

[@MasterTMO]

Oh, neat. I had *not* noticed the weirdness with the sky when I went through...

[@TheInkPitOx]

"than the other animals" All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.

[@dlessor1]

This puzzle made me so motion sick. Constantly getting stuck on things moving around, trying to shoot the adjunct on things. Almost puked! Got through it and moved on! Can’t imagine how brutal VR would be!

[@georgH]

This maze was a bit frustrating sometimes, but I really enjoyed solving it!

[@eefaaf]

13:30 Never got that elevator working, but somehow still got out.

[@eefaaf]

Ah, so did you :)

[@Dilandau3000]

@@eefaaf I think the elevator is just there to show that the Keepers didn't have to deal with the whole maze every time they went here. But I guess the steam has been off for so long it's not usable anymore.

[@eefaaf]

@@Dilandau3000 I have seen others getting it to work. Not sure if that was the easier method, though. Maybe needed less linking, but more searching for valves and heaters.

[@micahbush5397]

At 25:17, there's a path to the left (behind the pipes) that angles downward; it's very easy to miss. It leads to a heater that will de-ice the elevator, which isn't critical to use, but does make it a bit easier to get around.

[@eefaaf]

@@micahbush5397 Thanks. Not sure if I still have a saved game from the start of that maze. Like Sven said: two slots is far too little.

[@NikaNakaidze]

Underwater stage pain in the ass

[@Phanto5692]

(After listening to the woman's story...) Me: Well that escalated quickly.

[@krisCrashTV]

Yes that thing in the middle of the Swan was completely closed at the start. I don't think she knows the truth, she just knows how to find it, but she didn't make it there. You'll be the first one to know for ages.

[@adamsteele6148]

Great work sir

[@Jellepepe]

My issue with the underwater maze is similar to all the puzzles in firmament, its extremely linear, a very clear goal and its immediately clear what you need to do. At that point its just tedium. A good puzzle requires you to figure something out, ideally from the environment or from putting other things together, here most of it is super linear and/or way to easy to just stumble on the solutions

[@BigGator5]

(listens to the woman's story) Sweet Christ. 😰 What is going on? Are we going to get the full story?

[@aqualung2000]

Where are books? The journals? The little scraps of paper that at least give you some _hint_ to what happened at a place before you got there? The environments are nice but I feel like the game is only half done and they released it anyway without a _shred_ of backstory.

[@Jellepepe]

​@@aqualung2000yep. It really feels unfinished in terms of the environmental storytelling. (Example; the bunkers in each realm are there, but contain basically nothing...). I think they came up with the broader story/setting (which knowing the conclusion i think is pretty good) but just did not get the time/funding/whatever to finish it to the level it should have been. A narrator is not a good substitute for environmental storytelling...

[@DavidRay_40]

@@Jellepepe they got the funding they needed, and then some. I was one of the backers. While I was a little disappointed in the ending, I still enjoyed the game a lot.

[@GalaxyGuy12]

I gotta admit, I'm with the haters on the ice maze. The whole area seemed more like a chore than a puzzle, and also rather contrived because the valves seemed to have been placed with more attention given to restricting movement than with whether they serve any sort of flow-control function. Anyway, I've been thinking about the mentor's recordings a lot, and I gotta wonder how they work. If she is dead, as she claims, then they would have to be some sort of pre-recorded messages, and they're probably triggered by you doing specific things (and, I mean, in the video game mechanics sense, that is exactly what they are, of course), but that begs the question of some of these latest recordings. The Mentor says she hasn't Awakened the Embrace before, that you will be the first to do so, but then how could she have set the recording to trigger when you completed Awakened the Embrace. Like how would she even "know" that you have awakened it, since she would presumably have no previous experience of it to go on? Of course, the possibility exists that she is still alive, and these messages are live, or that the Embrace has previously been awakened, and that she has prior experience to go on, or the Awakening is a well-documented process that she could have made triggers for the recordings for without having to experience it herself. Come to think of it, what kind of recording is it anyway? I mean, it's not like an audio-log playing off of the Adjunct or something, it's a small glowing puff of smoke in the corner of your eye that speaks to you. For all I know it's psychically embedded in your brain or something.

[@NikaNakaidze]

I wonder why dive suit distorting inside?

[@NikaNakaidze]

Ur step noise distracts her talking sven

[@tuschman168]

Turner disrupting a culture after arriving gives me Sirrus and Achenar vibes. Is this an actual Myst game in disguise?

[@PregnantOrc]

My main dislike with the underwater maze would be that it was just not interesting enough of a puzzle. Far to many "puzzles" up to this point can be boiled down to just finding the sockets and turning them from off to on and now the twist wasn't something interesting like having a limited amount of steam to (re)direct as we ascend or having to un- and re-freeze parts to make our way up. It was still mostly the same find them and turn them all to on but this time we have hidden them more than usual and added both a bunch of lights pointing every direction and a water effect to obscure your vision. This endgame puzzle just felt so much less interesting than even most starter puzzles in other Cyan games.

[@aarontrupiano9328]

is it more or less hated than the obduction gauntlet though. it's kinda bizzare how this diving suit thing makes little to no walking sounds underwater. it's kinda immersion breaking

[@Dilandau3000]

I don't know, but at least the maze here isn't interrupted by constant long loading times.

[@generrosity]

I could see some of the keepers walking around in smokers jacket and slippers, so having slippers and low tappy noises for the suit (rather than bioshock clonking about and getting really sick of it fast)

[@generrosity]

📯📯We ... Are Watchers

[@NikaNakaidze]

Sven why u did not used elevator it would be cool ride

[@NikaNakaidze]

When she talks sven u dont move after she stops talking u can move again

[@allixandra]

Your English is amazing.

[@generrosity]

What is that intended to mean?

[@TheInkPitOx]

Sven is originally from the Netherlands@@generrosity

[@tuschman168]

@@TheInkPitOx Nice to know. For some reason I thought he was from Scandinavia.

[@eefaaf]

@@tuschman168 Misled by his name 'Sven'? That's indeed more of a Scandinavian name. Maybe his parents liked Sven-Åke Nilsson?

[@tuschman168]

@@eefaaf Yeah, that's probably it.

[@janinejisokay]

I'm having a lot of trouble following her story due to the accent and with the small subtitles often fade in the white background I just gave up. I end up with no clue what is going on.

[@Val_Emrys]

The game allows you to make the subtitles larger. I wish Sven had done that.

[@NikaNakaidze]

If someone has Thalassophobia they could not play this part of the game

[@TheInkPitOx]

Guess what: it's a maze

[@NikaNakaidze]

And ads again in ur vid sven

[@Val_Emrys]

Hunt and peck puzzles are the least interesting for me. I am pretty good at them because I am persistent and patient with trial and error when I know there is no time limit but I don't think I am alone in preferring puzzles that make you use clues and logic. That is my complaint with this game. Otherwise I enjoyed many other aspect a lot.

[@ulrichschonhardt6796]

The ice maze makes me dizzy just by watching 😮 And can these loudspeaker announcements be switched off or set to every 15 minutes? I find these annoying.

[@DukeOfEarle88]

I think this game would have been a solid 6/10; but because of the girl's voice- in that fake (sh-ttier version of a), Parisienne accent makes it a 3/10. 😅

[@tomvanwuytswinkel]

Not gonna lie, hated this part of the game... Took me Ages going through, too unclear for me

[@generrosity]

Ages - like a Riven Age long, or just a Channelwood Age long? 😜