This last stream was an interesting one, as I didn't make a lot of progress, but I felt like I made a lot of discoveries. In the Crystal Cave, there is a section with some hard to see platforms. To help you, the game has a corpse near the cave carry something called a prism stone. It states that it can be used to see how far down a drop is, as it'll make a noise and show a color sparkle on the ground where it hits. Primarily, you would use it to find these hard to see paths, letting you know where to walk. Useful, right?
The thing is, they give you 20 of them, and you don't throw them far, so you need to kinda constantly use them. Additionally, as far as I could tell, there's no way to get more at this time. This reminds me of the first time I ended up in the New Londo Ruins, and got the Transient Curse item. There, they give you 3 of those items, but they become hard to get when you're low on them.
Back to the cave. I ran out of those dumb things after about... oh... 4 deaths or so? So I started to worry, since I didn't have the path memorized, nor did I know if there were more beyond the one I found. Turns out, there was! And I found a way to navigate it without dying a metric fuckton. How? Aural Decoy.
The spell launches forward at an angle, and affixes to surfaces, releasing a little blue ping, normally used to distract enemies. In this case, I angled it lower to the ground and it stuck to where the hidden floor was, and I was able to use it as a path detector to work forward. Once i found the right path, I ran afoul of some horrifying clam enemies, and bailed from the zone, cause I started backsliding.
I then left back to Firelink Shrine, to try to buy a new copy of Great Soul Arrow to test something, but the Horrifying Long Neck was asleep, and the Sorcery shop didn't have what I wanted. So that was a wash. Or it almost was. After talking to someone, I explored the Graveyard some more, and stumbled upon the Catacombs. This area is weird. When the skeletons are killed here, they appear to regenerate a few seconds later. I was starting to get overwhelmed early, because an enemy I killed and walked past had surrounded me on a narrow walkway, but then I had an idea. A dumb, stupid longshot idea, along the lines of other dumb longshot ideas I had, where most of them did not pay off.
I switched to my Divine Falchion. Lo and Behold, the enemies stayed dead. What a dumb fucking stroke of luck that I did that earlier in the game.
And you know what this is going to do? This is going to encourage me to try a dozen more stupid, half-baked ideas thinking "oh, this will make x or y happen" and nothing will happen. This is a curse. This will force me to give the game a ton more credit, or attempt to puzzle through issues that don't actually exist. I have cursed myself to overthinking and stupidly testing dumb combinations. Good job, me. Thanks game. I have given myself 20 more hours of overthinking.
I'm going to keep going through the Catacombs for now. I have a few ideas of places to explore after this though. I can try to go back through New Londo, and find that tower that was by the priest there. I can go back to the woods and use the crest I bought from the Blacksmith, or I can go back to the Crystal Cave and finally clear that out. Don't know how i"ll feel after the Catacombs, but we'll see where I end up.
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