The Devil's Staircase

Today is Wednesday, the 19th day of July and the 200th day of 2023.  The Day of the Temple, according to the Universal Solar Calendar. On this day in 1969, Ted Kennedy crashed his car into a tidal pond on Chappaquiddick Island, killing his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne.  Now, 54 years later, his nephew is running around claiming the covid virus was "ethnically targeted" to spare Jews.

The Hungarian composer György Ligeti composed a cycle of 18 études for solo piano between 1985 and 2001. Etude No. 13, also known as L'escalier du Diable (The Devil's Staircase), has a reputation as one of the most challenging pieces to play on piano.  The composition features an ascending chromatic scale that moves up and down the keyboard, requiring the player to cross hands multiple times, and even bang the keyboard with a closed fist, before resolving into an impression of ringing bells.

I bring Ligeti up because a challenge I encountered earlier this year while playing a video game reminded me of The Devil's Staircase. It's been a while since we've heard from the Gaming Desk here.  Almost seven months. Preoccupation with Big Ears and righteous indignation over Cop City - not to mention a six-week hiatus from blogging - distracted me from giving the Gaming Desk a forum.  But it didn't prevent me from gaming, though.

Last the Gaming Desk posted, I had just started playing A Plague Tale: Innocence. I initially liked the game - the game-world was beautifully rendered and the storyline was different and original.  But soon the wonky mechanics got to me - if you don't complete a mission exactly as the developers intended, your character dies. It's trial-and-error until you can play through "correctly" without dying and they give you precious few clues on how they intend for you to play. Tedious.

Still, the game had enough going for it that when I was through, I went on and played the sequel, A Plague Tale: Requiem.  It was even worse than the original, though, as if they doubled down on everything bad about the first game but also dumbed down the story and made the characters even more annoying.  Still, I soldiered through, if only to complete the game for the sake of completion. I took very little pleasure in it.  

At my age, I'm still good at figuring out puzzles in games and I have the patience to complete the grinding necessary to acquire the gear that some games require.  But my reflexes aren't what they used to be, and I'm not so good at games that require lightning-fast reflexes for Quick Time Events.  The Plague Tale games have lots of QTEs.           

One odd mission in particular frustrated me. Your character, Amicia, is in the basement of a tower, and suddenly has to run up a long spiral staircase to escape from a horde of carnivorous rats nipping at her heels.  But no matter what I did, my Amicia would drift to the right-hand side of the staircase, toward the wall, and the contact with that wall, however brief, would be enough to slow her down and allow the rats to kill her. I'd do it over and over again with the same result. Starting from the far-left side of the staircase didn't improve things, and the micro-second it took to make a slight left-hand correction to her trajectory would be enough for the rats to catch up. I couldn't escape no matter how many times I tried. I even reset the game's Difficulty setting to "Easy," but that didn't help.  The rats won every time.

I searched online to see if others had this problem and how they resolved it, but found nothing.  Online playthroughs showed Amicia running up the stairs with no problem. If you look hard enough, you can usually find hints or suggestions online on how to solve almost any conceivable gaming problem, but it seemed that no one else in the world was having my problem.

Of course, I closed the game and restarted, and of course, I rebooted my PC to see if that would help ("when all else fails, turn it off and then back on again"). I even used the Epic game launcher to check the integrity of the game files.  No help.

I finally went for a Hail Mary solution, and uninstalled the game from my PC, and then reloaded it.  Fortunately, my system "remembered" where I was in the game and I didn't have to start over from scratch - it probably would have crushed my spirit to play the whole game through again just to get to that part and see if my solution had worked.  

But to my joy and my amazement, it did - Amicia ran right up that Devil's Staircase away from the rats without interference from the tower wall, just like in all the YouTube videos I had watched.  I don't know why my original download was bugged, but the second installation seemed to work just fine.

I was pretty proud of myself for solving my problem, but unfortunately, the fix didn't make me enjoy  the game more.  In fact, it made me even less patient and more irritable about the whole thing.  But at least I managed not to rage quit on The Devil's Staircase.