Pulsebound

A new place to go, behind the sixth hall. THERE ARE STEPS IN THE CORNER OF SCORCH HORIZON THAT WERE NOT THERE BEFORE. They turn up after you have taken the Ash Stamp off Orrick and been up the mountain with him, and there is a stonewright standing beside them who has swept that corner for nineteen years and cannot account for them. Everyone in town assumes the collapse opened them. What bothers him is that they are cut square. THE ASHVENT. Down the steps is a passage running under the volcano, and it is dark in the way that only matters if you are listening: there are twelve things down there that make a sound, and each of them tells you something different. Ash sliding against a wall where the passage turns. A hole no wider than your arm breathing warm air out of somewhere a long way down. Water coming through the roof. A rope somebody has strung along the wall on new pegs, which means people have been here and not long ago. Cracks in the stone that tick because there is something hot behind them. An upturned tin bucket where somebody sat and listened to the mountain. Follow them and the passage follows itself: press N at each one and you are pointed at the next. AND FIVE CREATURES YOU HAVE NEVER MET. Three in the passage and three in the valley beyond it, and none of them stands anywhere else in the world. Two of them are worth meeting on sound alone. THE PASSAGE SPLITS, AND ONE HALF IS SHUT. The right-hand branch ends in fire, floor to roof, and you will hear it a long way before you reach it. Professor Whisperous has something to say about that, and what he says is: not today. The left-hand branch has cold air coming up it, which in a passage that is warm everywhere else is the most useful sound in the game -- it means outside. EMBERFALL VALLEY. On the far side of the mountain, and nobody could get to it before except the long way round. Warm ground, a spring you could sit in, a stand of dead trees ticking in the heat, and a notch in the ridge where the whole valley lets its air out. Four people are there and not one of them agrees with the others. A surveyor who has measured the valley twice a year for eleven years says the passage is old and the mountain only stopped keeping it shut. A vent watcher who has slept badly for three weeks says it is a fortnight old and still moving. A goatherd has no theory and would like everyone to know it. And a student is the only one asking why it opened now, three weeks after everything else. Two of them will battle you. Nobody is right yet. THREE PEOPLE IN THE PASSAGE, and they are not strangers to it. The Ashvent showed you two signs of people and never a person: new rope on fresh pegs, and an upturned bucket with a chalk mark beside it. Those two are there now. A rope-setter nine days into eighty yards, a sounder who has been coming down with a chalk and a watch for three weeks and cannot make the mountain mean anything, and a firewatch sitting at the split waiting for the flames to drop. They have not dropped. AND EAST OF EMBERFALL VALLEY THERE IS A TRACK. The ground softens, and at the end of it is TRENCHMOOR: a village built on posts over ground that will not hold a house. The whole street is planks, and the marsh behind it is water, and the old causeway through the marsh is stone -- so you can hear which of the three you are standing on without being told. A market, a hospital, and three houses: a marshwright who thinks the marsh is blamed for what the village does to itself, a boardwalker with three rules for staying alive out there, and a family who boil sweets out of reed sugar. A BOY ON THE STEP WHOSE TWIGSTALK WENT OUT ONTO THE CAUSEWAY. He is not allowed past the second post. Find it among the drowned oaks and it will walk behind you all the way home -- but only if the boy has asked you first, because it does not know you, and out there that is the whole of it. It will not follow you out of the marsh, and it will not follow you back into the valley. Bring it to him and his mother will not make a speech at you on her own doorstep. THE MARSH itself has eight creatures in it that mostly live nowhere else, poison and water both, and a far bank where the causeway climbs out and a track goes on that is not one of ours. BUYING AND SELLING NOW ASK HOW MANY. Choose a thing and a wheel opens: one, two, three, and so on to everything you can afford. Up from the start is Cancel, and up again is the whole lot -- so a single one, all of them, or none is never more than two keys away. It works the same when you sell, the bag counts what you are carrying, and a deal has a sound now. AND SOME THINGS THAT WERE WRONG. A closed way said its piece once instead of over itself. So does a person you speak to twice, and so does anyone whose muttering you interrupt -- no more two voices at once saying different things. A tournament master's prize is read out slowly enough to finish, and the sixth master can be challenged again like the other five. What a trainer says now appears on screen in their own words. And an evolution names the creature you had.

A small patch on top of 1.1.9, with one new thing in it and a handful of fixes that came out of playing. YOUR FIRST BATTLE NOW TEACHES YOU HOW A BATTLE WORKS. The fight your rival picks with you on the route out of Pulse Town has always been a practice one -- nothing is at stake, he puts your Whisp right afterwards, and the day carries on whether you win or lose -- and now it is used for what it is. The same voice that explains a new place when you arrive in it talks you through this one. Before your first choice he tells you what a turn looks like and what Fight, Whisps, Bag and Run each do, and which one you want now. After the first exchange he tells you what to listen for in those lines: It's super effective means the type of move you picked works well against what is in front of you, It's not very effective means the opposite, a critical hit is luck, and if nothing came off his health at all then your move missed and that still cost you the turn. When your own Whisp is running low he tells you what you can do about it -- and only what you can actually do: if you took the Healing Vial out of the storage box in your bedroom he tells you where it sits in the bag, if you have another Whisp behind it he tells you about swapping, and if you have neither he tells you where vials come from and that this particular battle costs you nothing either way. When it is over he says what the next battle will cost that this one did not. He speaks in his own voice, and the music steps back while he does, back up to your own level the moment he finishes or you press Enter. All of it sits under the Travel Guide Advice switch in Settings, the same one that governs his advice on arriving somewhere: if that is off, you will not hear any of this. THE HARMONY NO LONGER TURN UP BEFORE YOU HAVE EARNED THEM. In Polino Village, speaking to one of the guards at the cavern mouth used to put two Harmony trainers on the mayor's doorstep straight away, which is a fight that belongs after the tournament hall and against a team you would not have yet. They now arrive at the point in the story where you are actually sent to that door. And your rival no longer answers a refusal you heard an hour earlier: when he walks you down to the guards and tells you to ask them, he waits for you to ask them. AN EVOLUTION NOW SAYS WHICH WHISP IT WAS. You used to hear the new name twice -- What? Thicketkin is changing, it grew into Thicketkin -- with the creature you actually had never mentioned at all. It now names the one you had first and the one it became second, which is the only way round that tells you anything. Nothing about which Whisp becomes what has changed; every family in the game was checked against its design, and all of them were already right.

The biggest release since the game opened: two new areas, a sixth tournament hall with a floor that can beat your team on its own, and the longest scene Pulsebound has. Everything else in it came from playing what was already there and running into something. SUNLAID BEACH, AND THE FERRY THAT GETS YOU THERE. Once your rival is safe and the Harmony are finished, a ferry appears at the Whisker Bay pier. Captain Flinch will ask whether you are looking to cross the channel, and if you say yes you hear the ropes come off, the anchor come up, and the crossing itself before the two of you walk off onto the sand. The beach underfoot changes as you move -- dry sand, shallow water, wet dirt -- so you can hear where you are standing. There are people there on holiday, complaining about work, wondering where their children have got to, and one who has lost a slaithide. Three trainers: two who break off a game of volleyball to take you on one at a time, and an older man who has been buried up to his neck by his grandson and would like a battle while he waits. And three Whisps that live nowhere else, one of them a dragon. SCORCH HORIZON, AT THE FOOT OF THE VOLCANO. Past the beach is a town built on what set after the last eruption three hundred years ago. The chronicler knows that eruption to the day and will tell you this is not the same thing. The watchkeeper measures the mountain every morning and can only report it. The kilnmaster saw people going up that road last autumn with crates, people nobody knew, and none of them came back down. Nobody in that town says the word Harmony, because nobody there knows it -- you will know it, and that is the point. There is a market, a hospital, and a mountain road that is shut. THE SIXTH HALL IS ON FIRE. The floor of this one has open pits burning in it, and they are not scenery: touch one and your lead Whisp loses a tenth of its health, and every second you stand in it costs another tenth. A Whisp can go down. Your whole team can go down, and then you wake in the last hospital you used -- but you keep your credits, because a hole in the floor is not a trainer. You get through it by the gaps between the pits, and every gap is a place in your list: pick the next one, press N, and walk. Two trainers stop you on the way through and two more are waiting off to the side if you go looking. Beat the master and he gives you the Ash Stamp, puts your whole team right, and then asks you for something. AND THEN HE TAKES YOU UP THE MOUNTAIN. You do not steer any of it. You walk out of the hall together, up through the town, up the road, and in under the mouth of the volcano, and he stops at the things he finds and tells you what they mean. It ends at a ravine with an orange light coming up the walls that is nowhere near the bottom, an old story he has never repeated out loud, and a way out that is closing behind you. THINGS THAT WERE IN THE WAY, NOW FIXED. You could lose your rival for good: touching him for half a second counted as having heard him, so if you walked out of his room mid-sentence the game carried on as though you had his words. The Quality Healing Vial cost less than the weaker one it sits above. The fire in the sixth hall used to rattle straight through a battle. And in Scorch Horizon the mouth of the mountain offered itself as a place to go and then said it was no longer there. FASTER BATTLES, IF YOU WANT THEM. Press Enter during a battle line and it moves straight on to the next one. Nothing to switch on; it costs you nothing if you never use it. There is also a new setting, Attack Sounds, which turns off the noise a move makes -- the line beside it already says what happened. Everything that tells you something the words do not stays: super effective, a miss, a critical hit, a cry, a Whisp going down, the Vessel, a level, an evolution.

A small patch on top of 1.1.8, gathering up a handful of things that were getting in the way. THE WHISP PC STAYS OPEN UNTIL YOU CLOSE IT. Taking something out of storage, putting a Whisp away, or looking at a shelf that turned out to be empty all used to drop you back into the room, so you had to walk up to the computer again for every single thing you wanted to do. It now behaves the way the pause menu does: every action takes you back one step, and you leave when you say Close. What just happened is read out as the heading of the list you land on, so nothing gets cut off halfway. THE BED AND THE WHISP PC ARE NO LONGER IN TWO LISTS AT ONCE. In every hospital and both hotels they appeared under places as well as under objects. Places is for where you are going -- doors, landmarks, wherever the story is pointing you. Objects is for things you put your hands on, and a bed and a computer are the second sort. Your own bedroom is unchanged. YOUR RIVAL IS BACK IN HIS ROOM. After you get him out from under the mountain he goes home to Pulse Town, and that is where you will find him: in the room where the two of you first spoke, with rather different things to say. He is in no state to travel and is not pretending otherwise, and he has had a great deal of time to think about whose journey this is. THERE IS A VESSEL IN THE LODGE THAT ALWAYS HOLDS. One of them, on a bench in the laboratory, of a make nobody sells. Take it while you are down there. When the mountain comes down it goes with it, and there is not another. AND THE FINNUCKLES BUILDING THE BRIDGE IN THE THIRD HALL CANNOT BE CAUGHT ANY MORE. They are Master Cassel's, they are working, and one of them is carrying your planks. You still have to fight them for those planks -- you simply cannot walk off with the workforce.

A release about being able to find things. Everything in it came from playing the game and running into something that was in the way, and most of it is in the Harmony Lodge, which nobody had walked through with a save of their own until this week. THE LODGE NOW TELLS YOU WHERE TO GO NEXT, ROOM BY ROOM. Beat the first of their people and walk back out, and the atrium used to say the same thing it had said before and point at the door you had just come out of. It now names the next room that still has somebody in it, and when a floor is finished it says so and sends you to the stairs. The nine rooms off the atrium and the landing have directions of their own as well: the person while they are standing there, the machine once you can do something about it, and the way back out when neither is true. The atrium and the upper landing carry twenty-two of these between them, so at no point in that building are you told nothing. AND AT THE END OF IT, IT POINTS THE RIGHT WAY. After the lieutenant the atrium used to send you to the exit, which is away from your rival: he is in the cells below, and the run for the door only starts once you have him. It points down now, and it does so from the moment the lieutenant is beaten rather than a breath later. IF YOU STEP OUT OF THE LODGE TO HEAL, YOU CAN FIND YOUR WAY BACK IN. The seam in the cavern wall used to drop out of your list of places the moment you had been through it once. But the Lodge is fourteen rooms with no hospital in it, so going back out is not unusual, it is what the place asks of you -- and coming back you had no way to locate a gap forty-five metres away in a cave a hundred and ten across. It stays in the list, and the game keeps pointing at it, until the whole business down there is finished. BEFORE ANY OF THAT, THERE IS NOTHING THERE AT ALL. Walking into the wall where the seam will be used to answer that the door was locked, in a stretch of rock you are told twice that you walked straight past. Until your rival is taken there is no door there to bump into. And once the two on the gate have been dealt with they are gone from the room rather than still listed among the people you can walk up to. THE CAVERNS NO LONGER HAND YOU A COMBINATION FOR A DOOR YOU HAVE ALREADY OPENED. If you are down there training against the same trainers, beating one used to produce another scrap of paper with the digits of a door you walked through an hour ago, and the directions in that section went on telling you to go and find whoever was carrying it. Each of the three sections now knows when its own door is open. The doors also stay in your list of places once they are open, because they are still the way east. IN A BATTLE AGAINST A TRAINER WITH MORE THAN ONE WHISP, YOU ARE ASKED FIRST. When one of theirs goes down you now hear who is coming out next and are offered the chance to change yours before it arrives. It costs you no turn. It is not asked for their first Whisp, and answering no -- which is where the cursor starts -- carries on exactly as before. Being told the name of what is about to walk in is worth more here than in a game you can look at. AND THE GAME NO LONGER TALKS OVER YOUR FIGHT. The line telling you where to head next waits for the world to be quiet, but it used to give up waiting after half a minute and say it anyway -- so any battle longer than that got it read out in the middle. It waits as long as it takes now, and if what it was going to say has stopped being true by then, it says nothing. Two rooms have been rearranged for the same reason as everything above. In the hotel in Ponthy Bay the bed and the market agent stood two metres apart against the same wall, which by ear is not two things but a corner with clutter in it; nothing in that room is closer than six metres now, and the back wall reads left to right as the market, the hotelier and the Whisp PC, the same as every other town. And in nine rooms of the Lodge a patrol was standing in exactly the same spot as the machine, which meant you could not reach the machine while they were there.