Skip to content


Enslaved Day#3: Back to the Village

Day 3 of Enslaved gets us into a new part of the narrative. There’s nothing too surprising in the main plot; it’s pretty standard and what you are led to expect. This session contains a lot of nice little moments and more good characterization from Trip. The fight design remains pretty interesting. It’s a pretty good session over all, but this game can’t seem to shake the flaws of its core jumping mechanic. Spoilers within.

We return in chapter 5: The Crash Site, which begins with a pan of … the crash site. We have to get across a bridge (maybe the Brooklyn Bridge) first and it’s not in good shape. I get control and reach the water’s edge facing the semi-collapsed bridge. Monkey says his “cloud” works here. He activates the “cloud” and it’s a hover disc. Trip reluctantly admits it looks like a cloud after all. I zip off on the disc. It’s like a jet sky. Monkey gives a very stupid explanation that the cloud  just happens to work in some places, which is a LAME excuse for giving this tool to me whenever the game wants. I try to cross the river and suddenly die from some kind of headache. I guess I got too far away from Trip. I start the chapter over. It turns out that have to use the disc to go up a ramp, jump to a platform and then get off to push an object into the water so that Trip can continue towards the bridge. I do that twice in total to reach the base of the bridge. They climb a little, and then they see another locked door that Trip says is ancient redundant technology. Once through the door, we have to climb a long way up. I throw Trip up to a ledge and then climb my way around. We do that a couple of times. Along the way, there’s one nasty bug where I’m caught in mid-air briefly, but the game mercifully drops me back on the platform after about a minute. I rejoin Trip and she is quite realistically scared about how the bridge seems to be falling apart. I have to carry her and rush up the rest of the way as parts of the bridge are collapsing under us. I cheaply die once because I can’t see what I’m supposed to jump to next as the platform I’m standing on collapses. It takes one more death before I make it.

Now on the top, we look over the remains of the bridge. Trip scans the path ahead. There’s a mech ahead that will self-destruct amidst a bunch of mechs. There doesn’t seem to be a way to stealth them so I run right into the fight. At some point in the battle, I get a takedown action and then it tells me to hit A to do something that takes more text than I can quickly read to describe.  I hit A and everything blows up. Shrug. We climb over a barrier and climb a bit further.  When we reach the new level, they CS hear another dog behind them. Trip sneaks under a ruined truck while I climb around the other side. We end up on opposite sides of the bridge, traveling parallel to each other. We reach a point where her way is blocked by sleeping robots and there’s a turret up ahead and DAMN IT DISC UNREADABLE ERROR. Again, I’m lucky enough to restart the fight at this point when I get back.  I stealth and decoy over to the turret and then get control of it.  I start shooting the mechs then, but I do it in the wrong order, so the mechs manage to overrun her as I try to kill them and I die. The second time, I get the order right (shoot the mechs closest to Trip first) and win. As we leave this scene, Monkey CS sees another glitch (traffic and American flag). W  climb a bit more and then see a new area filled with turrets,. There’s a vehicle up ahead that she can power with the power cell. I distract the turrets so she can get to the vehicle safely. She starts it but I don’t have time to get it as it takes off.  I then have to run along side it to use it as cover from the turrets. I die twice because game CHEAPLY won’t let me jump as part of the bridge collapses under me. I then jump on back of the vehicle. Once Monkey’s on it, there’s a CS of the vehicle  blasting through the remains of the bridge to end in a crash.

After the crash, Monkey CS chews Trip out, but she points out that they’re at the crash site. The dog then appears. There’s nowhere to run, so Trip goes back in the vehicle and Monkey has to fight it. There’s lots of speed ups on the ground out here so it’s cloud time. I win this boss battle by clouding around the dog, hitting it with a stun attack, and then wailing on it; then when its health is empty, I chase it and do a takedown. It takes a bit of time, but the final animation is a quite nice kill.  Trip is CS amazed Monkey did it. He says it was both of them that did it. Trip’s impressed. We cut to a CS of Monkey appearing in his motorcycle, and Trip is very impressed. They drive away, Trip snuggling against Monkey’s back. Another cut to Monkey CS driving out of the city, and there’s a quick  glitch of the guy with his family,  but Monkey just keeps driving. This starts Chapter 6: Village Approach. Monkey and Trip CS talk at a campfire. They are a half a day away from Trip’s village.  She asks where he’s going after the headband is removed. He says he just travels. She cautiously offers him a home in her village, but he doesn’t answer. We cut to them arriving at the village and get a pan of her home. There’s CS of them getting off the bike, and Trip notices the security gates are active. The village is a sky city of metal bridges and such. There’s no one at the bridge control (slavers got them, I bet) so I have to take a lower bridge to get around. Along the way, there’s a little logic puzzle with bridges where I have to raise and lower bridges in a particular order to allow Monkey and Trip to cross to the other side. There’s another slightly more challenging bridge logic puzzle after that. They CS then enter the watchtower, which is also empty, and Monkey notices blood on the ground.  CS Monkey realizes what happened. Trip denies it, but then she climbs up the watchtower and sees the smoldering remains of people.  In shock, she takes a zip line down to the main part of the city. Monkey notices that there are slaver mechs down there, and calls out to Trip to wait. But she’s already gone, so Monkey has to find her.

I get control and start heading to another zip line. There are LOTS of robots to fight. I die once mismanaging my blocks,  but then make it. There’s some climbing and along the way, I hear very broken up signals from Trip. I stumble into more fighting. There are lots of shield and electro guys to kill.This time, I can’t kill the summoners before they get reinforcements, but I still kill them all, reinforcements and all, pretty handily. I finally climb up to the watchtower and zip down to the city. This leads to Chapter 7: Finding Trip, beginning with a CS of Monkey seeing ashen remains of what were clearly villagers. This chapter consists of chasing Trip, who is in total quite believable shock, around the village. I fight more robots, with more shooters now, but it’s actually easier than the fights of the last chapter with their tiny arena and hoards of rushing mechs. I  enter a long street between buildings with walkways a story above me, and there are lots of shooting mechs up there. I duck out of the street to find another glitch of the guy on a motorcycle, and then it’s back to the action. I fight and shoot my way from walkway to walkway, slowly taking out each shooter. I finally get to a door which opens up on a large open town circle, and there’s a long fight in that circle as waves of shooters appear on the surrounding roofs. It’s hard but I win without dying. I finish to exit the circle, where I find Trip huddled in a ball. She’s mourning all of the loss and is distantly resigned to the village’s collapse, just as Monkey predicted. Monkey CS asks where survivors would have retreated to, and she eventually replies that there’s a war room. He asks her to show him where, he helps her up and they walk off-screen.

We cut to Chapter 8: Gaining Access. It begins with a CS of them approaching the war room door. The door is locked from the inside, so Trip is suddenly confident that there are survivors inside. She runs to a resistor, with the plan of overloading the village’s circuits and then hack the door open while it’s rebooting. To get the power to do it, we have to get to the windmill. The fences around it are electrified so we have to take bridge underneath. I jump down, and there’s another raised walkway I have to climb around to then lower so Trip can cross. As we continue, Trip asks what the slavers want, but Monkey says they should just find her father. We get to windmill, and CS see that mechs are trying to break in. They can’t make it because of fence, but once the circuits are overloaded, they will come streaming in.  The puzzle here is to get the windmill active by pulling down the sail of each arm of the mill. I first have to climb up to the top of the highest arm to pull down that sail. Then I have to stand on adjacent buildings and have Trip start and stop the windmill to jump on the remaining arms, move them to a vertical position, and then pull the sail out. It’s a bit of a logic puzzle, but not too hard. Once all three sails are open, the circuits overload and the mechs invade. It’s a long fight and I die the first time. It’s been a big session, so I’ll pick up this fight next time.

Posted in Hardcore.

Tagged with .


0 Responses

Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.



Some HTML is OK

or, reply to this post via trackback.