It's time, viewers, to see what's on the other side of Zi, through the exit on the right here.
You know what's coming, viewers.
(♫ Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa... ♫)
That's right; it is bitcrushed vocals
world, also known as Kur.
The word Kur, apparently, is Sumerian for "mountain," and you can see some mountain like tilesets in here.
You can also see some things that shoot lasers at me. If I hack them, though—as you saw a moment ago—
they shoot blue lasers instead, which are
harmless to me.
And I become harmless to them at the same time.
So let's ascend this laser shaft and see what we can find here.
First of all, we have a save point. Always good.
Can't get to the top of it yet.
ah
You will notice off to the side here: The blue lasers can actually destroy some blocks, like those.
And that's a shaft will take you all the way
to the top, almost.
I'm not going to do that yet, because I want to demonstrate a couple of doors on the way,
but that is an option you have.
Also, the blue lasers do destroy
other enemies, if you time it right.
Damage from hacked enemies like that is the third tier of damage that I was talking about previously.
Anything over here? No, just garble.
Can't do anything with that yet.
The lasers these things shoot when hacked, as well as the diatoms, when hacked, do that type of damage.
Ugh, I am not doing well on this climb.
Let's see what's over here.
Okay, I don't know what I can use to shoot that. Maybe like a guided missile thing, or a flood fill weapon?
I don't know; we'll see.
The language and the vocals here, supposedly, is probably Hindi. the developer has said that he got it off of
a CD of Indian vocal samples. What it's saying, I have no idea. I don't speak Hindi that well.
These wasps—I'm just going to hack one here very carefully—when you hack them, they turn into bubbles,
basically, and float away. But you can't get very close, or else they dive at you and destroy you.
So I'm just going to take them out from a distance with the Axiom Disruptor once I get one of them hacked.
And then, of course we have more lasers. I'm going try to destroy that one and see if I can get a health drop off it.
That'll help.
Over here, we have a Red Flying Krill. I'm not gonna try to hack this one because it's too dangerous.
They jump out of the purple stuff and shoot
at you over and over.
Guess what happens if you go in the purple stuff, by the way, viewers. I'm not going to demonstrate that.
That'll help a little bit too. Thank you, Laser Urchin.
Laser Urchin is the name the wiki
gives those, by the way.
Over here, we have a pathway we can drill through here, but we certainly can't fit in there.
There's another rather conspicuous pathway up and top there, but we can't reach that even to drill it,
let alone get into it.
And, down here,
we have wasps.
Some of these—ugh, if I can aim properly—and here I'm actually going to use the Nova  to get at some of them
on the odd angles.
One of the odd occasions when the
Nova is actually useful.
What happened to my singing? There she is.
So can I get them from over here?
Not quite.
There it is.
Ugh.
Not quite. I can take it out from here though.
Ugh.
Okay, that was unpleasant, but we got through it. And now we have another honeycomb axe pillar room.
You know what that means.
And we can't jump back up. What will we do?
We'll just have to get the high jump
boots.
Field Disruptor, or whatever they call it. It's the high jump boots; you know how this works.
Now we can come back out here, if I can jump properly.
And now that I can jump higher, and the wasps are gone, I can come up here and get:
Another weapon, the Firewall.
It's basically a weapon that arcs with gravity like that. Maybe situationally useful, but not very.
Okay, let's see if I can get out of here without dying.
I'm going to hack this krill here.
You hack them, and they start Arkanoiding
around like the diatoms.
Now that I've done that, I can take
this one out from a distance safely.
Eventually. You're going to shoot at
me from there, aren't you? Yes. Ugh.
You can get the top of here now, but
there's nothing up there.
And, again, very carefully destroy these wasps.
Hooray, we're back to the laser shaft.
Oh, we can jump up here now, but we can't do anything. Same on the left side; don't worry about it.
There is actually an entrance to another area over there to the left, but we can't go there yet.
And, coming from this way, I'm 
just going to drop down here.
This is the other end of that shaft I pointed out earlier.
Don't go in the purple stuff.
And get this last Laser Urchin to open up the wall here.
I should go over here to the save point and get health.
By the way, now that you have the high jump boots,
you can actually jump up and map the top areas of the save point rooms, so get in the habit of doing that.
You don't want to come back and have
to do that all over the map again,
if you're trying to get the 100% map achievement.
And that is all we can really do in Kur right now, so let's wander back over to Zi,
where the music is quieter and calmer.
Now, this shaft here, I can get to that door where the other Trace disappeared through earlier,
but I'm not going to yet. That doesn't really lead anywhere; it's not the most optimal path.
So I'm going to go back down this way first.
If I can, without everything blowing
me up on the way.
Those little worm things they
shoot are really unpredictable.
Happily, there's a save and heal point right here.
I glossed over it earlier, I think, but save points
do restore your health as well.
So take full advantage of it. You will need it.
Let's see. I can't do anything over
to the left there yet either,
so I'm going to pass that up and come back down here.
I can maybe use the Firewall on this thing,
if I'm careful about it.
No?
Is there an angle where I can get this to
work, somewhere?
Oh, okay. From in here.
So there's the Firewall actually being
marginally useful.
Ugh.
That was terrible.
Please drop some health for me.
Got it.
So now you can jump up here
and go through these tiles here,
and there's another Size Node up here.
I suppose that's a good thing
I can't tell how much difference that's
making, but I assume it is.
All right. I think, if I stand here carefully...
Well, that worked, I guess.
I would not be at all surprised if the Orb Walls actually heal themselves like Zebetites do.
Okay, can't go to the left there.
I can go up here, but I won't just yet.
I'll take care of that later
Because, first, there are a couple of
things I can do down here.
I can't Kilver you, can I? No.
Kilver you from here?
Thank you.
These things seemed a lot less
dangerous on the way in.
I'll take that.
And that. Thank you.
And let's see if I can get the rollers
to jump in a way that I evade them.
So, you'll remember this passageway here.
There's a place here you can drill through.
Previously we couldn't jump all the way up. Now we can
To an eyeball forest, where there is another Health Note Fragment.
If I hadn't gotten the one from the secret world in Absu,
that would have been my fifth one
and given me another health bar.
Okay, after this safe room. And, heal.
It's creepy when the music cuts out like that.
So, in here, we still can't jump up there
and get back to Absu yet.
We'll need an even higher jump to do that, or something.
But we can get up here,
past this completely pointless Scorpiant.
I don't know why they even put it there.
Are you running away from me?
Don't you dare run away from me.
So, guess what's in this corridor.
Where is it?
There it is.
Okay, that could have gone worse. There's
another one up here; I think I can hit it from downstairs.
Excellent.
And, I believe...
Yup.
Thankfully, they all give me health.
And I have honeycombs,
so there must be an item in here.
It's a glowing syringe in the middle of the room full of lava. Seems hygienic. Let's do it.
Bioflux accelerator, which causes mutation at max health. Okay. Do I want a mutation?
Trace is equally skeptical. Trace is a scientist; he knows to be suspicious of this kind of thing.
Great. "Blood machines" like in my mind.
How powerful could that modification possibly be?
Oh well, Elsenova stuck us
without our consent anyway. Lovely.
I'm assuming when she talks about mind
machines, it's basically like nanomachines,
kind of thing.
So, you won't see it right now because I'm not at max health, but I'll demonstrate when I get to a save point.
But, basically, you get extra tentacles growing out of your back, and they fire additional projectiles.
And it really never helps.
If anything, it hurts sometimes, because if you're trying to avoid aggroing something,
that's just more projectiles you have to worry about.
But at full health, if I start shooting,
you'll see the tentacles come out. Whee.
And they shoot over the heads of
anything that I'm kneeling to hit, so, why?
They do still shoot at range even if I'm using something like the Kilver, though, so that's something, I suppose.
Yeah, this shaft is a lot easier going up than down.
We can come up here this time now, 
too, with the high jump.
Just allows us to avoid a little more of the Scorpiants.
So now, what happens if we come up here?
First of all, there are now Magenta Rollers. They are, as far as I know, identical to the green ones.
But they do count as a different enemy type for purposes of the "hack all enemies" achievement.
So, with that done, I'll just avoid them.
There's a lot of shaft here that, coming from Metroid, you would think is hiding missile upgrades or something.
But it's not.
Lovely. Ghouls.
Can't go that way.
I do think my power upgrades are getting me
to the point where I can destroy the ghouls
before they have much time to jump at me, at least.
Let me see. I do come over here, I believe.
There's a few more of these things.
I'll show on the map here: This hallway goes back over to where that ledge where the second Trace showed up is.
I'm not going to go all the way that way right now,
because there's something I'll have
to come back for anyway.
But, for right now I can come up here
and reveal another note.
It's hard to jump to, but if I could
jump up there properly...
Come on, Trace. Modify gravity properly. if I could have any properly
There it is. What does this one say
𐎧𐎼𐎮𐏂𐎶𐎢𐏋𐎩𐎢𐎳
Well, this is a different character set.
It's actually vaguely based on actual Sumerian cuneiform, I think. Again with the Sumerian references.
Fair enough. Anyway, this is actually
the first note that I found,
and I actually translated this whole thing by hand, so I kind of know by heart what it says.
Again, it's just a substitution cipher; not too hard to translate.
Basically, someone broke into something, and commandeered it, and released a plague. All right.
Not sure what that means to us.
It's signed "Nin Urunna." "Nin" is  actually a noble title for Sumerian women,
kind of like a queen or a high priestess
or something, I think. I'm not exactly sure.
So, again, whatever culture we are exploring the ruins of is heavily based on Sumerian mythology from Earth.
Including both area names, notes, and the
names of the bosses. Whatever that means.
So what's up here? Another save point. Map it; save.
Anything over here?
Well, it looks like we should almost be able to make that jump, but as far as I know, we can't.
You will need to be able to get higher
than that to get up there.
So we'll go back the other way.
And the music cuts out, and we get a skull and a red door. We know what that means.
How big could this one possibly be?
Oh.
Yup.
It doesn't say anything interesting, so I'm
not going to do a Dalek voice for it.
But this is Uruku. He is not as scary as he looks.
Basically, what you're supposed to do:
There's another platform up here, somewhere.
Where is it? There it is. Once you reveal that,
that laser attack he does can't hit you.
So you're just supposed to use that for cover and gradually shoot all of his parts until you destroy them.
Or, you can do it the cheap way.
There are platforms over here,
if I can get to the right one.
Okay, let's try that again.
As I was saying, if you come through the
purple stuff over here and reveal this platform right here,
then there's nothing he can do to you, and you can just shoot all of the parts here at your leisure.
Those bits there launch projectiles at
you. The gun is responsible for the laser.
Eventually.
And then these five bits up here are
shooting big projectiles at you.
There's another platform up here that makes
this shot a little easier.
An "uruku," by the way, is a type of Sumerian vampire,
basically, according to the Internet.
And the title of this boss music—which
is actually different—is "Apocalypse."
And there is a bit of a vocal sample in there too, but I have no idea what it's saying.
So with everything destroyed, you just start firing at the mouth. He gradually turns red and explodes. Hooray.
And drops a whole bunch of
particles and health everywhere.
So you'll notice there's a little platform down here, but you can't get through there to that door.
You also can't get through here, but there is a platform up here that would allow you to get to the top door.
Where does this take us? That looks like a no-return drop,
so hopefully they're going to give us an item to get back.
What's this purple switch?
That seemed important. Could be the power filter, I suppose, which we're supposed to be finding per plot.
Yup, that's it. Now Elsenova is happy
And she can give us a plot dump, right?
Hooray, plot dump!
With plot dump music.
Worldstream and Breach. "Breach," presumably
is the part that looks all pixelly,
like all the pixel garble we see all over the place here.
You'll also remember that Elsaeova told us that the secret area was basically leakage from the Breach.
We are on a planet called Sudra, which has 
something to do with keeping the Breach out.
But then a man came in.
That's always the problem, right?
Named "Athetos." Who all the bosses keep talking about.
The name Athetos does have meaning in Greek. The game will tell us about that later, so I won't spoil it yet.
And Athetos is a "PatternMind." 
Is that basically a programmer? Probably.
There are piles of bones. I saw some of those, yup
So he infected Sudra with a pathogen—like, a plague?— using a "Breach Attractor."
Would that be a "Storm Talisman," perhaps?
Yup, I think it's fairly evident that what Elsenova is telling us here is basically different perspective on the account
we got from that presumably 
Sudran note we read earlier.
And, Athetos is "win."
I don't know if Elsenova's speech pattern is meant to be a takeoff on the poor translation on older NES games,
or if it's meant to be like a
Russian/Slavic accent or something.
Only you can stop Athetos, Trace. You are the One.
You can move like they do? No, that's something else.
The name, Ophelia, of course,
comes from Shakespeare—Hamlet—
but I don't think that has anything 
to do with the character.
Oh, and there's a pathogen.
Thanks for telling us now, game.
I'm sure that'll never be a problem.
Because we can heal inside egg! Nice of Elsenova to acknowledge the  things actually look like giant eggs.
That's not creepy at all.
So, now what?
Can't get over there.
Do we just sit here and listen to the power filter go?
No, we come over here.
And we get music back.
Well, we can't jump over those pillars, so if we come in here we're trapped.
So hopefully that t-shirt will get us out.
It's a Modified Lab Coat, which allows us to teleport through walls. Yay.
And Trace finds it familiar. Note that his character portrait actually changes colors to match. Nice touch.
Maybe lab coats are just a universal
technology. I don't know.
But with the lab coat, we can now come out here.
And through here.
And come up here, and get—for
defeating the boss—
another Health Node. Hooray.
The symbols you see at the right, there, when you do the teleport—I don't think they mean anything,
other than give you some feedback
that it's actually working.
Similarly, when you do the teleport, you'll see a little bit of extra flickering on the tiles.
Pay no attention to it. It's easy to confuse that with the flickering that actually indicates a hackable platform.
So, you're probably thinking that, now that we have the lab coat,
there are all kinds of interesting places we can get
that we couldn't go before.
And we will be exploring some of those next time.
Thank you for watching, and good night.
