Apparently the force we have to rely on, in a galaxy that contains Jedi, is
fucking magnetism.
When the game makes you stop and think something makes absolutely zero sense, the game has done something very wrong.
so, you’re meant to burn some vines, and for some reason I don’t think is ever actually explained, the lightsaber doesn’t do it. You’re meant to get what are basically candles in metal open spheres and throw them at the vines, which go up like flash paper when these spheres touch them.
In this particular room, you are on the outer edge of a circular room. It is split into two semi-circles, one of which is raised higher than the other, and there is a gap between the two semi-circles that requires you to jump between them. The floor of each is also a small pool of water. You are on the upper semi-circle, with the aforementioned metal spheres with candles.
There is a vine on a chain holding up something you want to drop, and the vine prevents this. You cannot throw the metal spheres directly at the chain because there is a terrible leak in the room, and there is a wall of water dripping (not a waterfall) between you and the vines which will extinguish the candles within, despite the upper part of the sphere surely being enough to protect the flame inside. Alas…
So I get stumped, and you can press a button for the PC to get a hint off his little droid companion. “We can take advantage of the metal casing” says Cal, “that’s what has me stumped mate, it should protect the candle from the water” says I, until I realize there’s a giant magnet you can turn on on the bottom semi-circle. As an aside, the first time the magnets are mentioned it’s as “devices able to simulate gravity”, as though in a galaxy with interstellar travel and droids they apparently don’t know what fucking magnets are.
Anyway, the solution of this puzzle is to force pull a metal candle sphere to you, and instead of just… jumping the gap holding this thing, or using the force to slow the water or otherwise move it out of the way, aside from the simplest solution of using your fucking lightsaber, you then have to force push it across the room into the magnet’s effect, jump the gap, pick up the sphere with force pull, and then throw it on the vine with force push (which comes with its own goddamn problems since there is no other part of the game that has ranged combat so your guess is as good as mine where this fucking sphere is headed) but oh noes! There is an invisible part of the drippy water that the sphere went through and is thus extinguished so do it a few more times because we like to pad our game about being a Jedi with nonsense Prince of Persia like traversal puzzles.
Part of me wants to finish the game, but there’s another part of me that knows even if I just kick the difficulty down to story mode I’ll still get frustrated at the horrific writing.
Like, you start this part of the game with the antagonist manipulating the protagonist as summarized in my previous post, and they hack your comms and goad you between puzzles and traversal, until toward the end she says something along the lines of “this part looks precarious, I hope you enjoy your death” and the protagonist responds with “was this your plan all along?” and I had to pause the game because it made me so angry. I don’t know if it was the writers writing such an actually stupid character or if they were treating me, the player, as though this was some sort of spectacular twist that wasn’t so obvious that I’d seen it coming for the last hour or so of the game that made me so angry, but it was just such
visceral rage I had to take the time to calm myself down.
This is followed by a bizarre, out of nowhere side plot thing that I don’t think has a bearing on anything, after which the protagonist wants to have a conversation with one of the other characters who has been found to have been less than forthcoming with the truth, who then asks if they can talk later. The protagonist for some reason is cool with that… then a hyperspace journey, during which they talk about weird noises coming from inside the ship, instead of the elephant in the room. I assume this is foreshadowing, but the game bugged out on me after that so I stopped for the night.
I will torture myself further tomorrow, and rant again I imagine.