Forums

My roommate and I recently beat The Forbidden Sanctuary! First time playing with the new cards from WGUMCD also. I'll share how it played out, and then I'll go over how we felt about it.

My roommate was Eliot Pendleton and I was Ferdinand Lachapelliière. We found that the starting location was right next to the entrance to the Forbidden Sanctuary, so we decided to go in right away. But we were immediately stopped by the first puzzle, which we couldn't solve as we had no clues, so we left to explore the archipelago (taking a short detour to go beach hunting) and the continent at large. At that point we knew we had to use the card as much as we could.

The first thing of note we found was a . My roommate thought because it was so close to the start, solving it would lead to something that would help us for the curse, but more on that later.

We knew from previous curses that finding food was the most important thing to do, so we hunted and fished at every opportunity. This lead us to find the pretty early on, allowing us to use the new card, which really came in handy. We also explored the and found a 350 which turned out to be .

So we explored the island trying to get as many 050s as we could. We first went to where the said to go - which turned out to . We also were able to collect all cards from the ability on the curse clue card (but it really sucked that ). Then we made our way back to the sanctuary to try again, but we were stopped at the second puzzle because . We went with just picking randomly, but we chose the wrong one and it . From then, we resolved to go searching for the clues that the curse mentioned.

It was at this point that I suddenly realized that I knew two of the locations that the clue was talking about: and . So long story short, we first went to the , then went to the and got into the , where we found . Then we went up north to the and used what we got - which it turns out wasn't necessary but still a really cool discovery - and then went to the , where after a tough set of challenges we got .

Somewhere along the line we had the opportunity to rest and spend our experience points. We chose to get the , which we knew we'd never build but we took because it had on it - which soon became the subject of so many jokes, because chances to build it kept popping up when we didn't have it in hand, and when we did have it in hand we never had a chance to build it. Like we would enter a room with and I would say, "Hey, now I can build it for 3!" or we would find a room with and I would say, "Hey, look at this!" and just point at the resource icons and we would burst into laughter, or even when I mentioned the new "Prodigy" mode to my roommate, showed him the cards and said "This mode lets you start with 5 in your deck!"

Back to the story. Eventually we had enough to solve all the puzzles (the one that was missing, we had accidentally already solved by trial and error). So we and went back into the sanctuary. And to make a long story short, we .

Statistics from the game:

• Small spoiler

  ×"Secret of the Sanctuary" cards found
  : 5
  
• Advanced Skills purchased: about 5
  
• Total time: about 15 hours, spread out over four or five sessions.
  

Overall we enjoyed this curse very much. We liked the interesting puzzles and we liked that it made us use everything we knew about the continent and let us explore an entirely new area. But we were left with a few questions after we solved the curse:

1. Big spoiler

   ×Where's the 6th "Secret of the Sanctuary" card? (Even though we ended up not needing it.) I can't tell if there's a third card that's hinted at on the clue card. What is it referring to when it mentions "wind?"
   
   
2. Big spoiler

   ×Some of the puzzles in the sanctuary, like pressing the buttons on the panel or turning the wheel to lower the water level in room H, feel like you're doing something at complete random. We ended up not pushing any of the buttons on the panel and by luck we guessed the right way to turn the wheel. So how do you know which option to pick and which option will screw you? Or were there hints to the button panel and/or the wheel on the 6th "Secret of the Sanctuary" card?
   
   
3. Big spoiler

   ×We loved the puzzle in the steam tunnels where you have to activate the machines in a certain order, but we didn't like that, because we had no clue for it, it felt like we were doing it at complete random and we ended up getting screwed because we activated the first machine before the second one and had to do that awful skill challenge just to un-screw ourselves (or save and load the game to return the permanent event). Were there any clues for this, or is this something you just have to learn by trial and error?
   
   

That's all for now. This is my first in-depth review and session log so I hope you enjoyed it.

1.
2.
3.

In one room, you get a hint along the lines of

I am so confused by this - were my least favorite parts of the curse that otherwise I enjoyed very much.

I know it's been talked about elsewhere, but I don't think I ever had a satisfactory explanation:
I understand that is what must be done to get the card, but WHY? Why is that the only way?

I don't think I have ever seen a clue that tells you to do this (something like would make it at least plausible, or that mentions that it should even be there. Is this a translation issue, that it is slightly incomplete information? Taking that action just felt really ... out of place. The other things you can get from that course of action make sense, but not that. I feel if there was one thing in this whole game I would change, it's that there would be an alternate way to get the sixth clue to the temple. Maybe