Dealing with Dementia

Overview

This is a short and specific guide of how to make the most of a character with the ‘Dementia’ trait. When a character you want would be perfect if not for having this particular trait, then this guide should provide you some tips on overcoming this obstacle

Introduction

As the title states, this guide is aimed at helping people who want to choose a character that has the trait ‘Dementia’ due to it being a great character otherwise. I wouldn’t expect anyone to WANT to use a character with ‘Dementia’ after reading this, since it is definitely a detrimental trait, but I do hope to make people feel more confident about taking on this trait in order to make the most of their current character options.

The Basics

So, to begin I will list the more obvious ways to tell when an enemy or trap is a fake. The majority of people who see this will probably not need these things pointed out, but they are still important to be aware of for the sake of making better choices when responding to a fake enemy.

First off, the easiest way to tell if an enemy is fake is to get hit by it. If you are hit by an enemy or a ranged projectile from it and it passes through you, it is fake. Like I said, this may seem obvious, but in the midst of a fight with 4 or 5 enemies you may not realize one is fake right away. Keeping this in mind will help with uncovering fakes.

Not a perfect screenshot, but here is an example of me with a floating spike ball passing right through me. That is a pretty dead give-away for a fake enemy

The other obvious way to tell if they are fake is to hit them with your sword. If you go to strike an enemy and nothing happens you know that it is fake. For the primary image associated with this guide I have an example of this about to happen.

You can see that the projectile from the Plinky (4-way fireball shooter) has already passed through me. I took the screenshot a moment too soon, but my attack goes right through it.

In addition, when you strike a fake enemy, a question mark will appear near the enemy for a short period of time, signaling to you that it is indeed fake.

Advanced Techniques

With the more obvious means of identification in mind, I will now describe a few tricks I have learned that require the use of observation more than immidiate reactions. There are a few different ‘tells’ of a fake enemy that can easily go undetected if you are too focused on moving quickly through a room.

The first, and probably best tell, is when an enemy is outside of their normal habitat.

You can see here that there is a flower enemy here from the forest, yet it is in the castle habitat. This was in fact a fake enemy, and this is the best way to identify them. However, it still requires a bit of observation, as one’s intial reaction might be to take the enemy seriously simply because they recongize it and have a response already prepared for it. Enemies like the knight with the swinging spike ball fit right in to the Castle environment, but they do not actually appear there.

Another trick to identify a fake enemy is if they or their projectiles can pass through a wall that they normall could not.

Here, you see that this Plinky’s attacks are passing through the walls near it. This is not something that can normally occur, and so if you are on the other side of a wall from this enemy and you see the projectile come through, you can readily identify it as false. This works best with ranged attacks, but I believe I have seen enemies such as mages float through walls when they are fake. Just keep in mind which enemies can break the boundaries of the game and which cannot.

A third means to identify false enemies is recognize when an enemy is out of place even if it is in the right habitat.

I know that I already used this image previously, but I will use what it looked like when I entered the room to give the example. In the ‘box’ to my right, there were several fire mages contained within. There was also a projectile-shooting eyeball. This eyeball was a fake! So when you enter a room where a specific set of enemies is placed in certain spots, you can pick out fake ones by observing which of the enemies is not like the other.

This connects to my last point, which I do not have a screenshot to associate with. When you enter a room with a false enemy, that enemy will always be in that room. However, this is not quite accurate to say, as the enemy may change form! What i mean by this is a room with a fake enemy (or multiple) will always have that number of fakes. But it may not always take the same appearance. The screenshot I used twice is an example of this: at first, the fake enemy was an eyeball. But upon my return to the room, it had become a floating spike ball. This change occurs whenever you leave a room and return to it. I have not taken the time to document the possibilities for what it could change to, or how many times it can change, etc. but it is still something to be aware of as it may catch you off guard while you are backtracking.

Conclusion

So, that is that. Hopefully this tips will help someone somewhere deal with their Dementia (yes I had to throw in a joke). If I am feeling altruistic I may take the time to expand this guide, but hopefully it will be useful to many of you as it stands now. Thank you for taking the time to read my guide and if you have any questions or comments or tips to add yourself I strongly encourage all of them!