Overview
If you want to: Beat the game Beat New Game Plus Never lose a sub-objective Get the happy ending and Understand what is going on in this gameThis is the guide for you.
Things the game doesn’t tell you
I just finished New Game Plus with happy ending, never triggering the lockdown, and not being seen by civilians and… well, I have to say this game was as frustrating as everyone has made it out to be. This game does the worst job of explaining itself and, even when you understand it, you still aren’t certain how things are “supposed” to work at any point in time. But once you understand the logic of the game you can actually have fun instead of ripping your hair out.
Let’s get these out of the way:
- For those on higher resolutions: the click area for icons is below the icon. Why. WHY.
- Hold the pause before killing someone. It repauses the game quicker than hitting it during or after the attack, which matters a lot when someone else’s red laser starts looking for you.
- Actually, hold the pause always and treat it as an unpause button by releasing it in spurts. The crazy maneuvers you can do with this make the game extremely enjoyable. It also lets you keep your meter high between combat, which is super nice.
- I have no idea how to break the zipline/hookshot except reeling yourself in, landing somewhere, or shooting another one. It’s dumb.
- Once you get sword throw, you have to be in the air to use it. When in combat, make sure you have one more in the meter before you jump or you’ll not have it where you planned.
- Never, jump on samurai. Even if they’re stunned. You die. You can hit them if you’re both in the air next to each other, though. They still go flying.
- If you jump through a person, your jump arc will pretty much end. This gets unfortunate when you land where a fallen person is and they get up. You will hit them on your next jump and then get shot.
Before combat
There’s pretty much two parts to this game: before and during combat. You can clear out most people before combat. There’s one key fact here:
If someone isn’t looking at you in the light or in their laser, combat doesn’t start.
This means:
- Breaking glass doesn’t start combat.
- Throwing your sword at someone who’s visible doesn’t start combat.
- Killing someone who’s visible doesn’t start combat.
- Strangling someone who’s visible doesn’t start combat.
- Combat doesn’t start until you’re visible and someone sees you. It might initiate the countdown, but that’s manageable.
- You can pretty much tickle someone as long as you’re not in the light or in their laser.
Using this super important fact and liberal use of pausing, you can do some nice stuff.
- You can break a window that is RIGHT next to someone and murder them. Combat doesn’t start. You could pause the game the moment the glass breaks, zipline above them, then strangle them, while staying hidden.
- If you have the ability to throw your sword and have it fly back to you, you have a very good exploit on your hands. Stun and kill someone, then jump. Throw your sword at someone at the farthest end of a line of people. Spam having the sword return to you, and it’ll just stab everyone along the way.
- While your sword is flying back to you, you can jump and then click it again, changing it’s direction. Or you could have it fly towards you and jump, killing the person behind you. Very creative use of the flying sword is great.
- If you can’t use the sword flying back to you to kill multiple people, that’s OK. You can just keep jumping and throwing the sword and just kill lots of people.
- Usually, only one person’s laser will be on at a time. Same with the countdown. You can kill lots of people before dealing with the countdown.
- You can jump on someone and leave them and you won’t initiate combat. Sometimes you need to do this when a laser is about to catch you. Usually, you want to murder them immediately.
- Strangle everyone you can. You usually won’t even trigger the countdown.
- When you have to enter combat, make sure you’ve killed absolutely everyone you can before you get into it. Being good at this is more important than being good at combat.
Combat
Staying hidden for as long as possible you can clear out a LOT of people. I only had to fight the Officer with three of his men. But sometimes you need to enter combat. Hopefully, you’ve cleared out a bunch of people beforehand. Either way, here’s some tips for combat:
- Often, if you bust through a window or land on someone into combat, it’ll give you a free turn to act. Basically, initiate combat intentionally and you might be rewarded.
- If you fill up the bar (I don’t know what it’s called) it clears itself and gives you another turn where people can’t act. Usually, this is a bad thing. Your abilities are often better than getting another turn.
- Every enemy will eventually have a period where they won’t attack. They’ll reload or, in the case of the samurai, just stand there.
- If someone shoots high enough on you, you’ll duck.
- If you knock people off of high enough buildings, into the electric cables, or into the mines, they’ll die. Use this. Hitting a samurai (the first time) sends them really far.
- If you end a turn directly above or below someone, you can stab them and it’ll move you right next to them. This lets you get a kill and dodge gunfire.
- Throw your sword at someone you’re about to land on. You get to kill someone while dodging gunfire, and it fills your meter back up one.
- If someone’s counting down, you can often get close to them and they’ll switch to trying to shoot you. Avoiding lockdown is key.
- Don’t throw your sword at samurai. They block it.
- No matter where you use the decoy, you get pushed away from it. This includes off of the wall, off of the ceiling, or just jumping. Could be bad, could be good.
- Sometimes, the decoy “jump” lets you go through the machine gone shots. I don’t know how this works and it isn’t consistent. It’s been my hail mary a few times.
- If you have an option to kill the machine gun guy, kill him.
- Next, if you have an option to kill the samurai, kill him.
- Next, if you have an option to kill one of two people, kill the guy who’s going to reload sooner.
One of my favorite exploits involves the stun teleport. If you get enough on your meter to trigger it and everyone is aiming at you, stun teleport to the person farthest away from you. Usually, the fact that everyone is looking away will give you a turn to kill them. Then, when everyone points their guns at you again, do it again: stun teleport the farthest person away from you, back where you started. If you can get it going, you’ll clear the whole room this way, teleporting back and forth across while murdering. This works extremely well in those frustring rooms that are a hallway with a bunch of guys in a row.
Ultimately, the name of the game is “two birds, one stone.” It’s a challenge to stun people, kill people, dodge bullets, AND fill your meter while staying alive. If you can jump into two people, do it. If you can throw your sword at someone and land there so that you dodge bullets and get your meter back, do it. If you can, while in the air, have your sword come back to you to kill someone so you can keep dodging, do it. If you can get above someone one turn so you can kill them while dodging bullets next turn, do it. Often you’re in a position where you could kill someone but you’d get shot. At that point, the name of the game is “survival first, killing second.” Eventually, people will stop shooting or you’ll stun everyone, or something. Getting greedy gets you killed.
Abilities
In terms of the abilities, I don’t remember the order I did things. Here’s my thoughts.
- Do not move on if you don’t finish all the sub objectives. Those skill points are necessary. I finished the New Game Plus quicker than the first time through because of the abilities (and I still made sure to finish all the sub objectives, thgough it was just for fun at that point).
- Strangling people was great in the beginning, I’d get it first. It doesn’t fill your meter, but in the beginning there’s lots of opportunities to use this. It’ll help you get the other skills.
- Throwing your sword and having it fly back is amazing. The game becomes significantly easier with this.
- I’m not sure if the sword throwing or the teleport stun should be first. The sword throwing is amazing at getting kills where you wouldn’t, but the teleport stun does more than stun; it saves you in tight situations. It’s a safer bet.
- The decoy is OK, but it doesn’t fool them for long. I’d get the other skills first. Once you can teleport back to your decoy, it might save you from some more tight situations.
- The “fist” ability is such an edge case that I’d leave it for last. Killing someone when you don’t have your sword and you’ve stunned them is kind of a last resort. Without this ability, you’d still be fine.
Last thoughts
Once I figured out this stuff, the game stopped being a pain in the ♥♥♥ but rather a challenge that was worth playing. It doesn’t really excuse the game for a horrid job at helping you figure out how anything works, but I had a great time with it. I very much didn’t enjoy figuring out how any of this crap worked but very much did enjoy it afterwords.
Random thoughts:
- I haven’t managed killing everyone in the last level, happy ending or not. The middle section where there’s three rooms of people who can see you at once just stumps me. I can clear the rest, but I’d suggest just rushing through there until you’re back to dealing with one room at a time.
- You can kill the scientist. Once I started holding the pause, it was actually easy to get him before he jumped. Still, it doesn’t effect the achievements or skill points if he gets away, it just alerts the next room.
- Let the rooms with poison kill the people for you. Just make sure that none of the lockdown countdowns end before the poison countdowns.
- In New Game Plus, when the machine guns are firing, they don’t just keep shooting in one place. Their gunfire follows you. It’s terrifying.