Review – Aaron Reed’s Blue Lacuna, Part Two!

This is part two of the Blue Lacuna review, which seems likely to become at least a twenty-part opus and something I’ll be able to milk all the way until Spring Thing.  Seriously.  Still on Chapter Two here.  I am still finding the game big and deep and neat and good, but no longer completely unflawed.  This might not turn out to matter, though, as I have yet to find anything that constitutes a Badness of Significant Proportions.

No gorilla for you today.  I am actually too tired for gorilla.  The following showed up on my Twitter today, though, and it’s cute:

asym CDM: Huh, my son just came up from the basement where they have a kitchen set and exclaimed with glee, “Hey Dad, We’ve GOT THE EGGPLANT!!!!”

asym CDM: Mind you, he did have a plastic eggplant with him. But, it doesn’t seem a cause to celebrate so exuberantly.

[spoilers begin here]

Gotta admit that it’s a tad overwhelming picking this game back up.  So many locations on this island.  So many green words and blue words and, worst of all, those black words, the ones composing sentences and attempting to convey information and making me tired. Right.  Okay.  We were following a creature.  Let’s keep doing that.

> touch rain
You feel nothing unexpected.
My first disappointment of the default-message variety.  It’s probably a bit much to expect every single thing to respond to TOUCH, but after touching things like a crazy person in the first chapter and receiving a lovingly hand-crafted message each time, that didn’t seem like such an implausibility.

Ah-ha, found out what color snails are!  Snails are white.  And trees are yellow.  Maybe that’s what I’ll do, investigate that color puzzle, since I seem to have lost the creature for now.  Also I didn’t, as such, need the You notice that the snail shell is exactly the shade of the white band… but this is my own damn fault for choosing story mode even after the game suggested I might like puzzle mode.  “Let’s have a little talk about your future,” the game said.  “I saw you examining those objects.  Picking up those matches.  Trying to put things up your bum.  Clearly, you’re a bright girl, and you could go far in puzzle mode, but naturally, the choice is yours.  Give it some thought.”  And, of course, I did what I do in real life, which is twiddle my hair, snap my gum, and say “Ooooh, better have story mode, ’cause thinking is harrrrd,” then secretly resent everyone for not taking me seriously.  Then go put things up my bum.

Oh, right, playing a game.  Playing a game, thinking is hard, snails are white.  Let me see if I can find any berries.

I wonder if it’s safe to assume the writing I can’t read will be automatically filled in after I’ve learned some of whatever language this is.  Right now it’s very Hangman-looking, or Morse code written by someone who didn’t know about dots.

Hope I’m not supposed to use this crack as a handhold to scale the cliff.  I mean, it’s not like I’d actually have to do it physically, it’s just that I would be completely unable to identify with my character afterwards.

You feel the edge of the crack experimentally for handholds.  It wouldn’t be easy, but you might be able to climb the crack up, at least a little ways.
Crap.

I have always seen knickknacks spelled with Ks, never “nicknacks.”  Until now.  (Knitpicking.  OH HO HO I MADE A FUNNY)

Crystal is blue.  That makes three.

When you near the cool of the waterfall, you can feel the temperature difference between it and the pool distinctly, invisible eddies of heat transferance swirling about your legs.
Eddy’s been swirling about my legs again.  Yeah, Eddy from heat transferance.  I’m thinking of filing a suit.

> x seaweed
None of it appears particularly valuable.
I… wasn’t planning on selling it?

Mussels are green!  I could probably brute-force it from here, unless it turns out manta rays are red and berries are black.  Stranger things have happened.

Hmm.  One problem with having compass directions off is that I’m not always entirely sure where I came from.  I was in the water, and I went towards some boulders, and now I’m being offered the choice of a rocky point, the edge of the forest, and a bank of slippery stones.  This island needs some Brits on it to form a standardization bureau.

Why does the strange man seem to think we’ve already discussed the paintings in the cabin?  As far as I know, we haven’t had a single coherent conversation.

Yup, this island is pretty Mystlike, what with all the pulleys and levers and cogs and gears.  Rather glad I took story mode now, even if it kept me from taking credit for my important snail-color discovery.  (Also, this is not apparently useful for anything, but lichens are cyan.  I am letting you know because science needs to be free.)

There is a lot of island here.  The excitement of exploration is beginning to lose out to the frustration of not knowing what I’m supposed to be doing.  A Call went out, which is supposed to mean a fellow Wayfarer is in trouble, but the Wayfaring sisters from this world seem to have gone elsewhere, leaving behind a weird crazy dude that I am reluctant to speak with because, even if the conversation with him ever went anywhere, it is not often he gives me the opportunity to have one.

Maybe I’ll start figuring things out tomorrow.  (To be continued.)