nate38 said:

I'll probably end up lazing through the rest with GameFAQs at the ready.

Welcome to my world. I beat the game but after a few hours it was literally just my wife reading what to do next and me doing it. This way I at least got to experience all that the game asks of the player but without having to actually endure the frustration. And like I said, everything else about the game is stellar, so, it was worth it to me to "experience" the game even if it's not as the creators intended.... or maybe it is? ....... frickin' impossible.

Hot streak for puzzle solving today! Really proud that I figured out how to flood the Tower of the Goddess on my own, using my notes and maps and screenshots. I just got the last sub-weapon (and already know of some places I can use it, thanks to some screenshots I took earlier that I wasn't sure would mean anything) and I've got all the weapons, too.

I wish Steam wouldn't crash every time I try to view screenshots in Big Picture Mode, though. It's annoying to have to quit the game and find the folder full of screenshots to check things.

I might have a game-ending bug.

A necessary step to summoning a boss isn't working. FAQs and Wikis say I'm doing everything right. Not getting any relevant google results when I search for the problem. And a helpful dude on the Steam forums seems to have no solution for me.


A game-ending bug after 50 hours of play. Say it ain't so, Nigoro...

@nate38
This is the Steam version, correct? There is one known game-breaking issue with the WiiWare version, but that isn't related to summoning anything. So, I guess it could be a bug they missed since they mis-planned one thing in the WiiWare version, but it would suck if you were the first person to encounter it, and after playing so long too.

I sent my save file to a guy on the Steam forums. He hacked me through the part that was stuck and sent it back. So now I'm back in business!

Really bizarre bug, though, and he was unable to replicate it, so it looks like we'll never know how it happened.

@nate38
Weird, but I'm glad you got it solved! La-Mulana is too good to have to give up on!

I started playing this late at night one day when I was pretty tired, and I couldn't figure out where I was going and fell asleep. Not a good first impression. I should dig back in to it, though.

@Anand
This game is very unforgiving if you're not able to pay attention to pretty much everything, and the start, before you get certain convenient items and functions, is probably the worst in that sense. I recommended the game to a friend that bought it and ended up hating it, despite liking other Metroidvania style games, because he wasn't able to focus properly and couldn't figure out how to use the map or something. Give it another shot when you're in a good mood! Or not. I'm not the boss of you.

Nate's tips for starting La-Mulana, first draft

1. Clear your schedule. This is a deceptively long game. Not only does it have way more content than you’d expect from an indie Metroidvania, it has a lot more backtracking than most games in the genre and will absolutely stump you silly with its puzzles and unclear progression more than a few times. I'm at 50 hours of play time, and I'm only just getting to the home stretch...I think.

2. Be prepared with pen and paper. Like, a lot of paper. Seriously, you should have a fresh 8"x11" notebook ready for this game.

3. Draw your own map. You do get maps in-game, but they're very basic and only usable as a general outline of what each area looks like at a glance. They won't help you remember all the twisty, winding paths and crazy teleports and false passages and such. Fortunately, the map is usually in a treasure chest not far from where you typically enter the area. Once you get it, write the layout down on paper and start filling in more details. You should also make little notes on the map to keep track of inaccessible routes, unsolved puzzles, unopened treasures, unreadable text, and other loose ends.

4. Scan everything. The obvious scannables are signs and tablets and such. But you can also scan murals and statues and totems and such hanging in the background, and they will give you information about what they are. This information is almost always important to some puzzle at some point, maybe dozens of hours later in a completely different area. Write it down. And sometimes the answer to a puzzle is just something you need to scan. So just scan everything, absolutely everything you can.

5. WAIT NO DON'T SCAN EVERYTHING YOU FOOL. Okay so there is a tablet early in the game that, when you read it, tells you very explicitly not to read it a second time. Make a note of where this tablet is, and STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM IT. If you're curious about what it does, go save your game and then come back and read it, and then definitely don't save your game afterwards like I did. It will make the rest of the game way more annoying and a good bit tougher, irreversibly, permanently, forever and ever.

6. Take detailed notes. If you want to have any chance of completing La-Mulana on your own, you'll need to write down a butt load of information. You should write down pretty much all in-game text verbatim (and note where you found it) and even write down non-scannable symbols and stuff too. And on top of all that, you'll want to have plenty of scratch sheets to hash out text from all over the game world and connect the dots. Seriously, write down EVERYTHING you come across in the ruins. I highly recommend using Steam's screenshot function for snapping quick pics of text and dialogue, but you'll absolutely need plenty of paper even with that.

7. Chat with the elder and show him your key items. The elder mostly offers self-aware snark, but he gives good hints from time to time. Also, when you get equippable key items (i.e. non-weapons like keys and statues), you should equip them and talk to him. He will talk about them and sometimes give you clues. And there's one puzzle that inexplicably only activates once you show him a seemingly unrelated item, so just show them all to him at some point.

8. If you're stumped, take a walk. This game is ridiculously non-linear, especially at the outset, but some things can't be done without the proper equipment. And even if it can, you probably won't need the reward right away to explore another branch of the ruins. You can come back later with new knowledge of the how the game works and try again. Maybe keep a to-do list of all the things you haven't explored or solved yet, and try another one for a while.

9. If you're really, REALLY stumped...peek at a guide. Maybe. Honestly, this game is still pretty fantastic even if you're following a walkthrough word for word. But if you do that, you're going to be missing out on some of the most rewarding puzzles in gaming. They ask a lot of you, more even than most old-school games of its type, but all of them are solvable entirely with in-game hints (at least theoretically...others claim to have done it, but I had to check GameFAQs for a handful and am not entirely convinced that one or two of them make sense without outside help, also I'm not done yet so yeah). And when you solve one, man...the feeling is like AHHHHHHH GOD YES I'M A GENIUS. Even the most clever Zelda and Metroid puzzles feel rote compared to this stuff.

Also, the non-linearity means that if you look something up in a GameFAQs guide, it can still be pretty confusing. The thing stumping you may only be accessible later in the game than you expected, or requires an item or ability you've never even heard of, and then you'll want to look THAT up, and the rabbit hole never ends and you wind up spoiling half the game for yourself.

@r_hjort
Nah, it sounds like good advice. I mean, I did pay for it, after all. Maybe I'll even...

nate38 said:

4. Scan everything.

Ah, fuck.

@Anand Yep, it's the perfect game for you!

Finished the game. 58 hours of play, 30 hours on my file.

Okay yeah, I had to look up basically the entire Grail Tablet and Mantra fetch quest at the end, and it still doesn't quite make sense to me. I get the idea behind it based on what I found on GameFAQs, but I'm not sure how you were supposed to figure it out with in-game clues alone. And then then the last two don't even make sense when considering the logic of the previous six. Maybe I missed something, but I don't know, those two in particular seemed impossible to figure out on your own, even if you knew the trick to it. I guess you could have gone through the entire area using the appropriate mantra in every room, but that's dumb.

I also went through Hell Temple, which either wasn't in the Wii game at all or was part of a DLC pack, I dunno. It was absurd in every way, even just getting to the temple. Infuriating platforming, a pretty tough boss, and riddles and traps that were just nuts. I used a guide through the whole thing and am not ashamed.


All in all, the game is wonderful except when it occasionally isn't.

Question for those with the Steam version: Is this like every other Japanese indie game ever where the max resolution is like 800x600? I BARELY tolerated that shit for Recettear and the like, but this seems like a game where playing on a stretched-out-and-oversized resolution would drive me fucking batty. Dunno what it is about indie devs in Japan not having computers newer than fucking 1996, but it makes enjoying their indie scene a real pain. I'm hoping since there was a Wii version, that there's some sort of decent resolution options for at least widescreen, but I can't find any info on it.

Considering picking it up, but even without what I just said in mind, I don't like games with illogical puzzles or puzzles whose logic only works if you look at it from a very specific way. I hate having to look something up, because that means you didn't design the game with normal fucking humans in mind.

It's one reason I really like The Secret World, ALL of the puzzles make sense and have a logic to them and are really, REALLY well designed, and while having a pen and paper handy can be extremely helpful, you're not writing down every goddamn thing you ever read, which is completely absurd to ask a player to do. At that point give them a log of everything they've read in-game. You either keep that stuff sparse or you give them a log, one or the other.

It just sounds like this game got way overambitious and embraced the sort of classic adventure game aspect of "try everything with everything" and "READ ALL THE THINGS AND WRITE 'EM ALL DOWN" which bespeaks very poor design to me. That said, this is all just conjecture from what I've read in this thread. However, a great game getting bogged down by stupid things ceases to be a great game once the stupidity level reaches a certain threshold.

EDIT: Found the answer myself, looks like it gets borders:



Better than nothing, I guess?

@Xbob42 The visual options seem sufficient to me. I was playing at 1920x1200 with black bars on the sides, forgoing the borders. There's a few stretch options, but there's no true widescreen as the game is 4:3.

As for the puzzles, they mostly make sense within themselves, but you're often taking clues from one area of the world, using them to solve a puzzle in a second area, and that then triggers a reaction in a third area. Sometimes the connection is hard to pin down between the puzzle and its result, especially when you solve the puzzle and the Puzzle Solved Jingle plays and nothing seems to happen. So you move on and go back to what was once a roadblock and see something new. This is one of the more unintuitive parts of the game, and why keeping track of your loose ends and clues is important.

You can cut down on the handwriting if you use Steam's screenshot function to record text and take snapshots of loose ends. You can view them while in the game with Big Picture Mode, but doing so would crash Steam for me. So I kept Steam in desktop mode and started alt-tabbing and viewing the screenshots in windows. Even so, there's no organization to the shots other than chronological, and the very non-linear nature of the game compounds the disorganization there a bit. There's an in-game text log that you can use to manually record text, but you only get ten slots. Enough for any one puzzle, but not practical as a long-term tool. A sophisticated text log with enough space for everything would have been very welcome.

And then there are the things that seem inconsequential, but come into play later. Statues in the background. Symbols on the walls. Things you disregard and forget about and then they come up later as a necessary part of a puzzle. If you miss these things, it can be a bitch to go back and figure them out again.

There's also a few puzzles that I'm just not sure about, mostly near the end of the game. One involves translating symbols, and as far as I can tell you aren't given all the information necessary, but I'd have to think about that one more. And another one makes sense once you know the trick, but I don't see how you can guess the trick based on what you're given...and then later the trick changes with no indication. I've looked on forums and haven't seen anyone else put together a convincing logic for this, either.


It's a shame that the game has these problems, because it's ridiculously satisfying when it works. But unless I'm missing a few key things, it doesn't always work, and when it doesn't things fall apart. It's not a problem for the first half or so of the game, but it occasionally gets a bit nutty after that, and it's worst near the end. If you're interested, I say wait for the next sale and give it a shot.

And besides, all its flaws are made up for with some amazing Engrish in the manual.

@nate38 Ick... That's where it kind of makes it a really hard sell for me. I can accept having to look up a messed up puzzle or something in a game that just happens to have a puzzle or two that makes no sense, but it sounds like this game is Fez-like in that the puzzles are most of the experience. If they're solved by just having a big ass list of everything you've ever seen, that doesn't seem too fun, and if some of them just don't make sense even when the entire community gathers together, that's kinda scary. It'd drive me absolutely bonkers, I HATE not being able to figure out a puzzle in a game about puzzles.

Fez had one or two puzzles that the community still doesn't fully understand, but there's also a lot of known unknowns, so the answer could be out there, and it's assumed that the solutions the community came to and how they came to them might have actually BEEN the answer. I didn't like that too much, but it also wasn't necessary to complete the game, and afforded you no real additional cutscenes or anything, just seemed to be mysterious bonus puzzles.

I'll probably pick it up next time it goes on sale, but I dread the experience of having my mind shut itself down in a mad rage.

@Xbob42

This post got me curious as to whether or not anyone ever figured out the explanation for the Monolith puzzle in Fez, and it looks like someone did. Crazy.

@Secret_Tunnel That is literally the most insane puzzle solution I have ever seen. And someone fucking figured it out. Insane.

@Xbob42 It's still a very fun Metroidvania action-platformer even if you're going step-by-step from a walkthrough. That said, the puzzles are the most rewarding part of the game when they work. But when they don't, yeah...they drive you crazy.

@Secret_Tunnel Buh.

@nate38 I'll give it a shot when it's on sale. At worst it'll be a nice long adventure.

And all that Fez stuff looks like some insane conspiracy theory, but I've seen all those things myself and they're all 100% true, and that sort of logic is EXACTLY the kind of high-level logic Phil Fish used for Fez's more insane puzzles. People STILL haven't figured out what all the images in the soundtrack mean. Fish might rub people the wrong way, but he makes shit on a level no one else does.

Started this back up again. Wandering around the first lot of ruins. Not very far it seems, but I got me a sweet Shuriken. Leap of Faith FTW! And apparently I need to fill the Holy Grail or something.

The Penitent Man Will Pass?

Forgot how awesome the music was on this too.