Seeking Mr. Eaten's Name - The most infamous quest in gaming?

[Coolio55]

Yeah when I read through it it seems like it's a reference to him being betrayed and eaten by his fellow Misters. Which is what I think happened but I'm not sure.

I'm only vaguely familiar with Fallen London but IIRC his body was used as payment for one of the cities and was eaten by a bunch of high ranking people there who were granted strange powers.

 

[Safir]

So, Mr. Eaten is Julian.

I don't know what this references but SMEN was the last piece of content Alexis Kennedy wrote for Fallen London. Whatever retarded shit is coming out now is COMPLETELY unrelated to him. The trannies at Failbetter know nothing whatsoever about the original plot of the setting and are struggling to come up with a replacement.

it doesn't really since sunless skies takes place in an alternate history of FL like cultist sim, yes they do inhabit the same multiverse and presumably the next game from AK Book of Hours is also taking place in the same multiverse as well.

Fallen London is currently owned by Failbetter Games. Cultist Sim and Book of Hours are owned by Weather Factory and are set in a different unrelated universe. The treatment for Sunless Sky (then singular) Kennedy wrote wasn't set in an alternate history and didn't involve the Bazaar leaving the Earth.

 

[Kiwi & Cow]

Didn't read anything else besides the OP (Don't need a TL;DR because I don't have the attention span of a goldfish and thought this was interesting enough to be worth reading), so no idea if it's already been said, but this shit's gay.

This is literally rightwing meme vs leftwing meme personified into text.
No russian: "Genocide" that's all you need to know
Mr Enter's name: [If the wall of China and the wall of Berlin had a baby text]
No wonder I didn't know this was even a thing, it's like the devs tried hard to be edgy with this one just for the shock factor and nothing else.

Say we have a person A and a person B, person A says "Nigger" out of his lungs then person B kicks another dude's balls until he dies. This'll get the same amount of press, but you can tell which one is funny and which one is fucking cringe.

They're not comparable, No russian is an in/famous classic and this is gay shit nobody outside the game's community even cares about.

 

[CptnSnshn]

But what was his name

Mr Candles

 

[bile demon]

"...for this year's finals of the all-kiwi Summarize The OP competition..."

 

[brocktherock]

I started playing this recently but don't like the format, I saw other kiwis talk about how the drip fed content ultimately made them lose interest in the end and I don't want that to be me. Are there any good browser games out there that don't limit me with a stupid AP system and what CYOA games can I get that aren't plagued with diverse tranny writing? I used to play Urban Dead but that's boring on your own and I'm not touching the vampire game it was based on.

 

[Zilortha]

I know the thread's old but I didn't realize that before writing all this shit out so lol:

This quest reminds me of the method to become a Jedi in Star Wars Galaxies before they changed the whole game and then shut it down lol.

Obviously it's different as you don't sacrifice your entire character for basically nothing, but the way that some of the in-game statistics influence quest objectives seems similar, and the process of unlocking your force sensitive slot could take months. It was similarly a long, convoluted, and obscured process. Most players at the time didn't understand it in the slightest, and that lead to a lot of speculation, mythmaking, and prestige around Jedis in-game.

But becoming a Jedi wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. It was a long, difficult, grindy process that involved training basically every class in the game, a ton of trials and exploration, and the number of Jedi were limited by the server. If you died as a Jedi, your character would permanently die, (I remember hearing if you relogged you'd basically play as a force ghost for other Jedi, but otherwise unable to interact with the world, but I can't remember if that was true or just a rumor). This often lead to Jedi players trying their hardest to conceal their nature, as showing off robes and a lightsaber was equivalent to ordering a death squad to your location (which many padawan found out the hard way).

So despite being extremely powerful to the point of the absurd, Jedi would often be attacked by teams of bounty hunter players who would get quests to hunt down Jedis and were sometimes even hired to work together by other force sensitive players hoping to get their chance at playing a Jedi. Of course most of those players would just get killed in the same way, but that was the cycle of life for many Jedi in SWG.

It was a cool system. It's rare to see such intricate autism in modern games. I miss that kinda stuff.

 

[Safir]

Mr. Eaten is the stupidest fucking name for a Lovecraftian Elder God I have ever heard. Even as a "he who must not be named" type pseudonym it sounds super gay. Might as well have called him Mister Spooky or some shit.

The Masters' naming scheme is a joke about the Br*tish. Fallen London, before degenerate troons and roasties got to it, was foremost funny (the Br*tish type of funny). It wan't a horror game. The unfortunates of Fallen London were typically victims of their own machinations and moral failings. Very few things in the settings were truly monstrous before dirty whore Meg Jayanth, with Kennedy's permission, write industrial-scale torture, slavery, and casual pedophilia into Sunless Sea that you could only choose to promote.
This is how the game used to start (bolding mine):

Four decades ago, London was stolen by bats. Dragged deep into the earth by the Echo Bazaar. The sun is gone. All we have is the gas-light of Mr Fires. But Londoners can get used to anything. And it's quiet down here with the devils and the darkness and the mushroom wine. Peaceful.
But then YOU arrived.

Mr Candles

No!

All those forgotten names
The Khan of Dreams, who is merry. The Khan of Swords, who does not speak, but who wields a blade in either hand. The Khan of Fires, who rules incense, and now candles. The butcher Khan of Hearts, the farmer Khan of Roots. The Khan of Drums, whose dance cannot be denied...
They have other names now. But their enemies – the Rosers, the Copper, the Motherlings – do those survive in any form?

What was the Third City?
No-one talks much about the cities that preceded London. The Third City seems to have been acquired a thousand years ago. It had five wells, they say. And the weather was better.

Mr Eaten was eaten as the price for buying the third city in the ninth century AD, and before that he was trapped in Amarna for over two thousand years. It's safe to say he was never Mr Candles, as "Mr" is a Br*tish form of address the bats adopted around 1859 or so.

 

[reptile baht spaniard rid]

There was (is?) an achievement or quest or something in World of Warcraft to get exalted reputation with all factions. The problem was that getting exalted with one faction involved ending up hated by Booty Bay which meant you couldn’t enter it at all without dying to guards. So to undo that you had to grind one specific mob or something for hours to rebuild your reputation.

From my cursory searching I can’t find it, but it may be that it’s an account wide achievement and so now is gay and easy.

 

[The Littlest Shitlord]

There's also something else I forgot to mention entirely: when you obtain St. Forthigan's Candle by listening to the first six sermons at the Chapel of Lights, you discover that in order to proceed, you need something to open the Gate:

[…]the Gate that you must open, to speak his name and bring what must come - you can find no mention of a key for the Gate. If there ever was one, it was drowned in another age.

(And this is why you have me. Here. This is my heart. Take it to sea.)

The heart in question is of course that of Lilac, the disembodied woman who now shares your body after you obtained the Candle of St. Erzulie and talks (in parentheses). It is not an actual item, but instead a quality, the Hollow Heart:

"Mortal, machine. The heart is destiny's engine."

Again, you don't obtain a hollow heart, but you now have a hollow heart, a characteristic given to you by a female possessing entity. You will also open up a new sailing route: to the sea zee near the Elder Continent, to the south, to a route named "Nothing is certain. Nothing is impossible.":

Set a course for some place east of the Carnelian Coast, though maps will be worthless for the final leg of the trip. Do not tell the crew where you're going.

Setting this route will set your destination to "A place not worth visiting". Reaching this destination will set you on a long tedious voyage on a rowboat, where you need to click the same option over and over and over in order to progress, with no indication you are even getting anywhere, with only Lilac's voice in your head for company. You will then have a conversation with her.

(There'll be nothing left of us, you know)

The boat creaks. Its sides are weakening under the river's caress. (This is what the Search will do to us. Leaves. Husks.)

You can choose three options:

(That's not very kind.)

"It's true, though, isn't it?"
For the rest of the journey, she says nothing

This is a remarkably callous way to treat your phantasmal companion.

(I wouldn't say that.)

(A rag, a bone and a hank of hair is all we'll need. And there's more to you than that. My candle.)

(That’s not a simple question.)

(Remember the Treachery of Maps. ‘Here’ is an elaboration of a difficult sentiment. In a sense we’re somewhere else, but in a sense I’m on the Surface, learning tattoos. And this is a real journey, make no mistake. There are great powers who would very much like to know how this will all come out.)

It's only after this that the player talks to Nicator and chooses to destroy the Neath. Then after that you have the choice, in order to gain the Candle of St. Gawain, to sacrifice one of three people:

A brown-boned skinless eyeless scarecrow, tattered into tendoned gristle, skull-glyphs ablaze. Perhaps there is enough left of it to make a candle. Perhaps.

He gapes as you approach, but does not run. “In the bones of us,” he quavers.

Place your head in the hollow. Await the blade, and your death, that you may become a candle.

The last choice is of course the one that gets you your own severed head as a hat.

Anyway, the OP always felt incomplete to me without this information.

 

[Alabama Gamer]

I have a really high level (end of the Railroad) FL character that I haven't touched in a while. I think I can encapuslate how they lost the spark fairly well. There's no longer the sense of seeing scraps of a mystery beyond your (or at least your character's) comprehension. The old way of doing it was that there'd be a thousand tiny hints about a thing spread across dozens of unrelated stories. You'd collate all these little secrets in the back of your mind until finally something clicks. For instance, suggestions that certain establishments in the city are ordering substantially more candles than might be expected can take on a much more horrifying meaning when you learn a single additional fact. Those who play already know what I mean by that.

Anyway, the point is that the unraveling mystery is the key. That loses its shine when your character is near the top of the heap. When you know about the space bats, the space crab mailman, the Judgements, the alien giant sea urchins that hitched a ride on the space crab mailman in exchange for something to do with love, the natures of the previous Cities, what lies behind the mirrors (an acid trip, mostly), and who exactly John Galt is, there is no longer much chance at uncovering something greater. Then we come to the GHR arc.

For those who will never play FL, I should explain that the Great Hellbound Railway arc is an extremely late game story in which your character, being at this point a prominent member of society and heavily tied to one of several factions, is involved in a plan to explore the wastes to the west of London and lay track through it. Along the way, I started to get the old feeling again. You're learning about things that are unknown to even someone like your character, It was the sensation of realizing that you're not a big fish in a small pond. You're a big fish in a tidepool, and the tide is coming in. Heck, we're talking about stuff that even the Bazaar itself wasn't fully cognizant of. Anyway, just when you're starting to piece together what's going on for yourself and feeling like a real clever boy, the Masters SWAT into a GHR board meeting, literally sit you down so they can explain the plot to you in exquisite detail, and then recruit you in solving it. Once you do, the problem is finished. The even older eldritch thing which is annoyed at the Bazaar having guests over without permission and letting them wander over into its side of the Neath is appeased. It was honestly insulting, and was such a perfectly-timed letdown that it felt almost deliberate.

 

[Safir]

The last choice is of course the one that gets you your own severed head as a hat.

That last option made it, with some edits, to Sunless Sea. There's no choice to sacrifice the priest or the executioner, the PC can offer him/herself or flee.

Reaching this destination will set you on a long tedious voyage on a rowboat

It's not long and tedious at all, it takes 20 actions on average, so one candle or 3 hours 20 minutes of downtime. I don't even remember much of the later Seeking because it went by in a blur, and I've done it a bunch.

SMEN has three main grinds.

The first one is increasing a point per week, from 3 to 28. It doesn't take many actions or resources and happens in London, the game's main location where you must be if it's a sacrificial character you intend to see the end with or should be if it's your main character you're trying to power up. It just takes the passage of IRL time.

The second one is collecting scars, chains and stains for St Arthur's Candle which puts you into boring penalty timeout areas 15 times -- this is about three days to two weeks depending on how committed you are, but you can do things inbetween -- and then six betrayals (seven but the last one is free) of other player characters (the cheapest option) which you can ask for on the online but are easier created and ground to a betrayable state.

The third one is the Winking Isle. Winking Isle is a special location in the game where you have nothing to do but play a martingale over and over, and each time you go there, you need to spend quite a lot of actions and get rid of worldly concerns by selling and storing away many, many resources (you can read the list in advance on the online but the first person in had to do it by trial and error, advancing a step each time and getting sent back) useful for regular grinds and quests, so you better go there once and complete the grind in one sitting. This takes your character out of action for at least two weeks, or significantly longer if you only log once a day and aren't setting alarms.

Additionally, for the conclusion of the quest, you need your own ship (that you will then wreck), and to get one, you first need to become a Person of Some Importance (basically complete a lengthy tutorial / introduction to the setting). This is just normal gameplay (that can be done in parallel with the weekly waiting) but fairly annoying to do on a throwaway account.

And for St Destin's candle, you normally need to give up Notability 12. Notability is a quality that degrades over time Persons of Some Importance spend some actions to grind and maintain from week to week, then spend on something and gradually build up again, but getting it from 0 to 12 requires over a week of actions with alarms and cannot be done casually. The mechanical purpose of undertaking Seeking on your main character is specifically to make Notability 1 point easier to grind in the future, this is how FUCKING ANNOYING it is. (Also, to remove some trash cards from the event deck in which demons offer to buy your soul.) The alternative is waiting until the last third of the IRL calendar year, where three events can give Destiny: Torment, a penalty that's hard (impossible?) to remove without paying real money that cripples a main character but is unnoticeable on a throwaway.

I have to stress that NOTHING of this is costly. Seeking has MANY, MANY options to waste in-game money, and a couple options to spend IRL money (I won't say "waste" here because it's as much as a waste as other paid content -- you spend money to read words), and quite a few options to permanently cripple your character and render him/her effectively unplayable even if you do turn back, but none of them are mandatory and all are harder than the easy and cheap alternative.

---

I really like Seeking and I miss the game. Unfortunately it's not worth playing Fallen London right now. Take a look at this: does this gross tranny fill you with confidence about the direction of the game? The rot had set in long ago, at least at the time of Sunless Sea --

Spoiler

the main theme of Fallen London is coexistence with all the weird shit. Yes there's gross stuff, and sometimes fates worse than death, but most characters who suffer them used to deserve them or at least bring them upon themselves. Characters don't get hurt permanently. You can be overconfident and get killed on a duel, then go vote your killer in for mayor the following day. Despite the game's one-time catchphrase -- "welcome, delicious friend" -- Mr Eaten's fate here, actually getting eaten, is so horrible by the standards of the setting that it demands the destruction of the setting as retribution!

This changed when fat street-shitting whore Meg Jayanth wrote the Isle of Cats in Sunless Sea. The nun and tranny (another tranny!) who run the Isle of Cats capture or buy humans, lock them in cages, and let wasps breed in their eyes and eat their minds, and the victim is conscious and in horrific pain throughout the process, to manufacture a drug. This is the drug that turned Queen Victoria's children into monsters so its existence was established in the setting; however, the fat whore wrote it that you can't do anything except help or ignore these monsters, and you must cooperate with them and let the tranny eat your mind and grant it immortality if you want to play the main quest of the DLC.

-- but Kennedy's betrayal of the playerbase and departure left the game directionless: as a vain and pretentious writer who's good at "dropping tantalizing hints" (bullshitting, making mystery boxes and filling some of them), he wanted to prove himself a singular genius and left the company no notes as to the contents of the many, many remaining boxes. He thinks it's funny when current Failbetter hires approached him at events and covertly asked questions about the setting, but they were actually doing it to deliver the story Kennedy had promised the players to deliver and had raked in absurd amounts of money from whales under the pretense. This didn't succeed because Kennedy would rather keep his ideas for his new company and his new family, and thus, if you picked the Ambition (long-term character goal, more costly than Seeking) Heart's Desire, for example, the conclusion to your potentially decade-long story is a some TDS lib seething about the return to monke meme. Seriously.

You probably remember Kennedy was unsuccessfully #metooed -- well he didn't leave because he was #metooed, he left because he got a girlfriend, Lottie Bevan, in the company, and according to his own retarded woke rules he couldn't work with her, and he wanted to work with her (because she's apparently a like-minded and objectively interesting person and they suit each other) -- so he left Failbetter and founded Weather Factory with her. (They're now married.)

And then he got (unsuccessfully) #metooed by the fat street-shitting whore Meg Jayanth, whom he'd previously let wipe her unwashed distended anus with the Fallen London setting! One of the other two failed #metooers, Emily Short, is now Creative Director at Failbetter. You should not be giving money to her.

You probably shouldn't be giving money to Kennedy either. He's actually a shit designer. His "quality-based storytelling" is garbage, but with the incredible power of survivor bias, he happened to hammer out the one game that sort of worked. Cultist Simulator is trash: the design (short abstract roguelike that you can lose) is the opposite of Fallen London (elaborate long-running multiplayer story where you go from strength to strength and show off in front of the others) and both the old QBS design and the new PC/tablet browserless interface are extremely bad for it, and the main conceit of it is so retarded that it makes me think there was some truth to the #metoo. Book of Hours I haven't played, but by their own patch notes ("you could lock yourself out of lower-level recipes if you increased your crafting skills too much") not much has improved (but this time around Kennedy is doing UI rather than hiring an outside "expert" so there's hope). It shares the setting of Cultist Sim with its retarded central conceit. I somehow paid for Cultist Sim twice so as far as I'm concerned Kennedy owes me two working games.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

Edit: I realized why you sperged out and it's because I implied you were very defensive about Bellingcat in a different thread in a throwaway post lol

Which thread was that? If it's Bellingcat I'm interested.

 

[VargReallyDidNothingWrong]

Which thread was that? If it's Bellingcat I'm interested.

it was some nothingburger thread that was entirely unrelated to Bellingcat, someone just brought it up and he sperged out.

 

[Sister Miriam Godwinson]

I somehow paid for Cultist Sim twice so as far as I'm concerned Kennedy owes me two working games.

I was pleasantly surprised by Book of Hours and he spent several weeks post-release to patch out the retardation both in the interface and the gameplay.

It became my go-to game for a couple of months, but I enjoy watching the timers spin as I listen to podcasts, and unlike Cultist Sim this one does not make you restart if you get distracted and miss one at the end of 10+ hours invested.

Notably, some of the endings do have the apocalyptic SMEN-vibe to them (you can incite the invisible gods of the world to a cannibalistic battle royale orgy if you are so inclined), but this time there is no pressure.

Love Kennedy, but the theme of cannibalism is somehow central to all of his works for some reason. Except maybe the Worm-in-Waiting chain in Stellaris.

 

[Alabama Gamer]

Heart's Desire, for example, the conclusion to your potentially decade-long story is a some TDS lib seething about the return to monke meme. Seriously.

I did Heart's Desire (started with Light Fingers, but fuck that noise) to completion, opting to begom spess bat, and I don't remember anything seethe-y about it. Granted, that was a while ago, and you might be privy to some meta-knowledge that I'm not.

 

[BillionBisonBucks]

MUDs are full of this sort of thing. When I was younger, I played one briefly that had previously hosted a bespoke quest for the game's biggest powergamer that culminated in a philosophy battle with the game's god/the admin and was also a job interview, with the whole thing being simultaneously in and out of character. I always hoped more complex games would get to that point. Maybe future AI will be able to manage it.

 

[WTBOnlineFather]

There was (is?) an achievement or quest or something in World of Warcraft to get exalted reputation with all factions. The problem was that getting exalted with one faction involved ending up hated by Booty Bay which meant you couldn’t enter it at all without dying to guards. So to undo that you had to grind one specific mob or something for hours to rebuild your reputation.

From my cursory searching I can’t find it, but it may be that it’s an account wide achievement and so now is gay and easy.

At least that was just a grind doe. The real pain point was the Shendralar reputation which was eventually removed along with the entire faction, and shit like the Darkmoon Faire rep which you would mainly gather by monthly turn-ins.
I saw the title of this thread and came here originally to drop a line about Mankrik's wife until I saw the 6 gorillion paragraphs of hyper autism in the OP. God bless, this is what RPG gaming's really about.

 

[BallsOfaKiwi]

This is actually a worthy writeup OP, well done. Though I'm not sure I follow completely. I don't quite get what you mean with having the destiny? Wasn't it forced upon you through the:

" And if you didn't already get the Torment destiny, you'll be giving up any other destiny you might have once possessed, with no ability to get a new one to replace it. And finally, give up your solitude:"

Anyway, who was this man/monster? Mr Eatens? What was his betrayal? What was his destiny?
For all this narrative, there's very little story there, at least from what I can gather.
But the narrative was amazing.

I can't think of anything quite like it in how long it supposedly takes and the negative consequences of it. There are quests that destroy you, like in Fallout where you dip into the FEV virus or in "I have no mouth but I must scream" where you get to be tormented in eternity by an AI.

What I mostly liked about the quest was how gruesome the "progress" is. How its an inversion of all that is gaming. I wrote somewhere here that I'd love to play a game where you or your family merely struggle to survive, something like a mix of "Papers Please", "A Plagues Tale" and say Fallout. Where there is no great reward at the end of the "rainbow", where you do not become the hero to save the world but where you are content having managed to outlive all the challenges set before you. Maybe saving your family or forming a community at best.

But I have never really encountered a game where you slowly and methodically destroy your character. I imagine it could work very well for a RPG, because that would be a natural way of increasing the difficulty of the game as you "progressed" or rather "regressed".

 

[bango skank]

I wrote somewhere here that I'd love to play a game where you or your family merely struggle to survive, something like a mix of "Papers Please", "A Plagues Tale" and say Fallout. Where there is no great reward at the end of the "rainbow", where you do not become the hero to save the world but where you are content having managed to outlive all the challenges set before you. Maybe saving your family or forming a community at best.

Unrelated to the topic at hand, but have you tried This War of Mine?