![]() Adding more puzzles like that, even working properly, was expecting people to cheer at the thought of being kicked up the arse with a steel-capped boot every few puzzles they solved. Not long after the game came out, it became literally impossible. The Reversi puzzle's difficulty scaled up with your computer's power. However, even the basic concept was weighed down by one big problem. Sounds like a good idea? Sure, if you didn't suck at them. They also opted to follow up on a much-hated puzzle from the first game-a Reversi game played against the AI-with several more outright games against Stauf to break up the puzzles. Developers Trilobyte tried to compensate by adding new elements to freshen it up, and every single one is a miserable failure. Horror and familiarity don't typically go hand-in-hand, and this is a good demonstration of why. It's set decades later, with the house crumbling and decaying and filled with new puzzles, but still ultimately the same location. ![]() The 11th Hour on the other hand is just dreadful. (I like to imagine the devil dropping by before the game begins, looking around his new base of operations in the mortal world and saying, "Love what you've done with the skeleton in the bathtub, Staufy-boy, but remind me how making your six visitors painstakingly decode the message THE SKY IS RUDDY YOUR FATE IS BLOODY will help usher their souls into my dark kingdom?") No wonder he needed cursed dreams to make his toys. The solution though, SHY GYPSY SLYLY SPRYLY TRYST BY MY CRYPT, smacks of a damned soul trying too damn hard to be clever. The puzzle is to make a sentence with no vowels except for the letter 'y', which is fine in theory. You know how anything can be scary in the right context? Not here. The worst moment in the first game is in the kitchen, where you stumble upon line after line of soup cans. This never deters Stauf, who acts as a constant mocking presence in both games and really, really wants to chill your blood with every fiendish new puzzle, but even the best demon would struggle to make the evil laughter hit home when the only thing that's going to happen is a few chess knights rising up from the ground with an "oh, just indulge him" shrug. ![]() In practice, it turns out that while the devil may have the best tunes, his games are largely restricted to board game puzzles, mazes, and other stuff cribbed straight from 101 Puzzles for the Damned and Abjured. Stauf, unconcerned, keeps selling his toys, until finally he gets his biggest vision of all-a scary mansion on the edge of a town called Harley on Hudson (coincidentally, also the name of a bit of Batman/Gargoyles erotic fan-fiction I'm writing), where he invites six guests to come play games of murder and perversion and. Soon enough, Stauf becomes a rich and powerful toymaker whose success comes with only one minor catch: the kids who own his product start dying of a mysterious illness and losing their souls to their toys in ways the world wouldn't see again until Tamagotchi. For some reason, this results in him getting a vision of a beautiful doll, which he duly carves and sells to a nearby innkeeper-and the next night, he receives a vision of a puzzle. A drifter named named Stauf is robbing his way through life, until one night he murders a girl on the way home from choir and steals her purse.
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