Clod of Cthulhu: Beware the Ides of Marsh

When we last left Jack Walters, he was doing extremely dangerous work for a man who’d just tortured him for no reason. Oh, I know what you’re thinking: he doesn’t have a choice, right? Herbert Hoover will send him up the river if he tries anything funny, and Jack can’t just shoot him, or else…

…yeah. Exactly. Or else what? He’ll dock the pay that he’s not giving me for participating in this raid? Oh, okay, I guess there’s a bunch of other guys who might report me. Except: within 10 minutes of entering the level, they’re all dead as Dillinger. Fate conspires to remove all possible witnesses to the most justifiable homicide in history, in a way that makes it all the more justifiable. I mean, when the people who are trained to handle this sort of situation starting dying in truly unpleasant ways, you know there’s trouble. In fact, at one point, Hoover’s last man is injured and incapacitated, and Hoover stone-cold shoots him in the face. Then he says, “Don’t look at me like that. These men knew the risks!” Then he proceeds to give me a job not unlike the one the guy who just got killed had. I don’t care if you’re Mother Theresa, at this point in the employer-employee relationship, you’re going to want to submit a formal complaint by way of bullet.

First half of this level’s pretty boring stuff, mostly. You run around and do a bunch of improbably dangerous things, have some visions, and catch only occasional glimpses of your target (the Marsh guy) through a haze of chemical smoke and dudes you have to kill. Nothing terribly stupid, up until it starts going downhill at this one point halfway through the level.

See, at some point, Marsh manages to string Hoover up over a vat of gold, and starts lowering him into it very slowly. To rescue Hoover, you have to fire on Marsh to drive him away, run up, reach the controls, and then punch yourself unconscious in an act of self-defense to prevent yourself from doing something so stupid as rescuing Hoover. I mean, seriously, check yourself here. Consider the situation. This utterly loathsome fellow, the only thing between you and a fruity cocktail at a relaxing nightclub, is being lowered to his death. There is literally, like, nobody else who would ever find out if you just ditched Hoover and went off to get burgers, but if you dawdle and don’t manage to free him, I’m pretty sure it’s game over. Why? I’m pretty sure I don’t need that guy. I’ll just figure out whatever’s least in my interest, then stick my nipples in an electrical socket until I decide I want to do it. Frankly, getting Hoover killed is my real game objective at this point. When you get a game over for achieving everything you’ve ever wanted and deserved, you know there’s something wrong.

At least Hoover  has the decency to not be even remotely thankful, and to berate me for letting Marsh escape while I was busy saving his life. My new instructions are to go hunt the guy down, and when I hesitate even a moment to do this, he yells, “What are you waiting for?” A reason why I shouldn’t have given you a golden bath would have been nice, thank you.

Uh. That’s, that’s a bath in molten gold. Like, dipping him in the hot gold. That’s all I’m talking about. Shut up.

I chase after Marsh, he lures me into a trap, and I end up fighting a big ol’ nastiness called a shoggoth. It’s an intense boss fight, and fun (when it’s not making me reload the checkpoint every five minutes to go through the same monotonous tasks), but it’s also fairly standard, so I’m not going to talk much about it. I’m just going to move on to the next part, and believe it or not, this pissed me off almost more than anything that’s happened so far.

I escape the shoggoth, get topside, and find out that Hoover managed to grab Marsh on his way out. He’s a total pill about this, too, berating me for not having caught him myself. Sorry, but if you want competent employees, try hiring people who were trained to do the things you yell at them to do. Also, consider a hiring process that doesn’t involve gratuitous torture, maybe.

We’re not done here, though—oh no. Hoover found a key on Marsh’s person, and he wants me to go down to the lower levels and search for something it belongs to. This would just be annoying, except for three things:

1.)    The elevator’s broken and neither of us can figure out any way to get down there,
2.)    There’s still a kill-crazed unkillable shoggoth down there that I just barely managed to escape a second ago, and
3.)    Hoover is inexplicably going to plant timed explosives before I go downstairs, meaning that if I take too long finding my way back, I’m going to die in a fireball.

To recap, this is the Hoover recipe for success:

1.)    It’s best to make sure your employees are loyal and motivated. Kidnap them, brutally torture them, and threaten to ruin their lives by wrongly imprisoning them in an asylum.
2.)    When an employee saves your life, be sure to reward this behavior. Try abusing them slightly less in your very next sentence.
3.)    Make sure your employees are efficient! Plant bombs before they go to explore an area. Make it clear that if the employee is still inside the building, they will die when the bombs go off, and that you don’t give a damn about this fact. This will motivate them to seek simple, quick methods of problem solving, like shooting you until their gun runs out of bullets and then skipping merrily away.

So, yeah, I’m not loving this plan. Jack does tell him to go to hell, to which Hoover replies: “I told you in the asylum, Jack. I don’t make requests.”

Oh yeah? Well, see, that’s just one difference between you and me, because I make requests all the time. Here’s one for you: piss up a rope, you sad sack of monkey turds.

Of course, Jack says nothing of the sort, and only asks for a new pistol to replace the one he lost a few minutes ago. Hoover gives him one. See, there’s another point right here where you could kill Hoover and absolutely nobody would witness it, but Jack lets it slide in favor of going up against a shoggoth and a host of plastic explosives, all in a quest for stuff nobody cares about.

Mind, I would probably be much more angry about all of this if I were still rooting for Jack. I literally have not met a person who wasn’t doing their damndest to get Jack killed, and this includes all of my ostensible allies—and myself. And really, how can you like a guy with that many enemies?