Tips and mechanics to ease the burden of the new player
Welcome
If you stumbled your way to this rather obscure souls-like, be welcomed, and I hope you don’t mind the cold.
There’s only ice and the husk of those who dream no more here. Fret not, I’m here to help. For a bit.
Character Creation
When you start the normal mode, you are given a choice one of each 3 weapons and 3 relics.
Weapons
The weapons, astutely you may already figure out, are different. Most weapons have a slight variation of damage, range, and stamina cost – more importantly, each weapon has an “awake mode”, or a special strike unleashed by holding the Attack button.
While the exact stats are a mystery to me, I can at least tell you about their special attacks.
- The Swordspear:
Performs a long range strike and changes to Glaive mode. Extended weapons such as these usually consume more stamina but have slightly better damage.
- The Assault Blade:
Enter an extended mode without strike, like the one above.
- The Shieldaxe:
Swap between Shield mode to Axe mode. Shield mode deals reduced damage from your base damage (about 25% less), but the Axe mode deals significantly mode damage (about 25% more).
All starter weapons are equally viable, and you will find more, so be it from the two merchants in the game, laying about, in chests, or taken from the cold hands of a few wanderers.
Relics
Relics give you a powerful passive effect that largely change how you will play the game.
Of these relics, you won’t see the other 2 you don’t choose for the rest of the run, so choose carefully – or choose wildly and deal with it. All 3 relics, like the weapons, are equally viable.
- Lightfoot:
When executing a Perfect Dodge, you regain stamina.
- Ironspine:
Provides passive armor to reduce damage taken, and enables Perfect Blocks – a PB costs no stamina.
- Bloodshot Eyes:
Gives you the ability to leech off life from enemies by dealing damage after you’ve been recently wounded.
All these 3 relics are pretty good. Don’t underestimate Lightfoot – regaining stamina may not sound like much, but you regenerate fairly slowly in combat and being rewarded for dodging can enable you to play a lot more aggressively.
Ironspine is probably the weakest of the three, as it’s generally better and easier to dodge or parry than to to block.
Bloodshot is just good. I like blood. You like blood. Everybody wants blood.
Ultimately, choose what you feel most fitting for your own playstyle.
Outpace, Outcast, Outlast
It’s a Souls, you know what to do
The game doesn’t deviate too hard from the Souls formula. You’ll find soon your Immortal Blood Injector – AKA, the Estus – you have vaults where to level up your skills by expending your experience, and your experience doubles as money. Naturally, dying sends you back to the last vault you visited – AKA, your bonfire – and drops all your experience on that spot. Dying twice without collecting your old experience forfeits it.
Combat Options – because there’s more than Swords in life
Immortal Planet is an ARPG, and you are given more than a stick to whack your enemies with.
Along with you, you have 4 slots of consumables.
Two of them are dedicated to items.
Two of them are dedicated to psychic abilities.
You can increase the uses and efficiency of these abilities increasing your Willpower and Intelligence, respectively.
As you can probably figure out, there are many more items to find in the world that you can swap out at your Vault. Entering any change menu will force you to rest and respawn all enemies and consummables.
But How Do You Sword?
Combat in Immortal Planet tends to reward a more defensive and measured playstyle.
See what the enemy is doing, and exploit their weaknesses, wait for them to make the first mistake.
You probably have noticed that you have a stamina bar, good.
You probably noticed that enemies have the same stamina bar, so that it gives them the same constraints that you have for combat.
Bash it Baby
Bashing is one of your most powerful skills.
You can bash by dodging into an enemy with critically low stamina.
Be warned! Bashing into an enemy with good stamina will stun you instead.
Bashing successfully stuns them for a considerably long time, enough to refill your entire stamina bar and give them a good whacking.
Weaken Them!
You have a few ways to deplete the enemy of their stamina, other than waiting for them to empty it themselves.
Parrying is your friend – attacking an enemy while they are about to unleash their own attack will result in a sword parry, where both blades clash and neither combatant is stunned, so sword parrying combos can often result in enemies attacking until either them or you are spent.
Frost damage will utterly decimate their stamina and give you almost always a free bash, at the cost of a consumable.
Going Outward
Where the FUG am I going?
As soon as you leave the Temple you are met with the frozen surface, which is a nexus that connects to 3 areas. You can go wherever you want, but you may want to visit them in order of difficulty.
Consider:
Archives – to the South (bottom left)
Prison – West
Fortress – North
And eventually, the pit, or returning to the starting Temple.
Challenges
If you noticed some statues that ask you to press A to ???????
That’s a challenge, completing them will reward you with more uses for your Injector, and a longer time of blood clotting to regen with Bloodshot Eyes.
Each zone has a challenge (perhaps more, as I recall the Temple having 2), and almost all of them consist in 3 waves of enemies in a void arena.
You may enter challenges as soon as you have a functional brain, perhaps extracted from somebody in the Prison.
Endings And What Comes After
On endings: The game actually features only one ending, which is called the Bad Ending.
Once you complete the game, you may want to Continue and try to find anything that you may have missed, before trying the Nightmare Mode, which remixes the game’s elements and increases its difficulty.
