Moving on with Darksiders, I went past The Crossroads into the game’s hub area, the Scalding Gallow, where I fought a barking, mean dude called the Phantom General, evidently the leader of the oddly weak goat men I’ve been fighting. I say they’re oddly weak because the game threw tough Fleshbursters and Gholen at me right away, but held off on introducing the goat-men Phantom Guards unless later, even though the aforementioned enemies are far tougher than them.

Whatever. Met Samael, the kinda generic-looking demon dude who’s supposed to be able to tell me how to kill The Destroyer. He tells me I need to kill The Destroyer’s Chosen, tear their hearts out and bring them to him.

…Cheerful. Sounds legit. If you’re not familiar with Darksiders, the title of this post is probably making some sense now.

So I traveled through some new areas, including my current personal favorite, the Choking Grounds, complete with surprisingly easy to kill scary bats, and surprisingly hard to kill undead knight dudes. Been finding some secrets along the way — digging the secrets and collection aspect — and checking out the area.

After waking up the second Tormented Gate (giant, seemingly benevolent monsters who The Destroyer clearly thought would make more impressive barriers than, you know, an actual gate) I had to do a series of “Shadow Challenges” in which I fought The Eye of Sauron’s minions in battle gauntlets with specific victory criteria. Pretty fun.

Racked up a lot of souls so I bought some upgrades and the Scythe from Vulgrim. Um. Why does he like… flirt with you while you’re trying to browse his items? He won’t stop talking and saying things like “nice sword” in a raspy whisper…

After navigating the ruined highway “Broken Stair” area, I struggled a lot against the miniboss, Trauma. This mother-… son of a-… huge piece of-…

…

I had a lot of trouble against him. Just like I did against the Gholen earlier in the game, I had to reset numerous times to get the hang of him. It was a lot more annoying though, since you start at the beginning of the Broken Stair every time you die and have to trek back to him. Eventually got him though.

Then I took a break to play some Star Fox… I mean, I had to do a rail shooter minigame where I rode on some angelic mount and flew fighting some angels, and then a lot of bats and stuff, on my way to the lair of the first Chosen, the Twilight Cathedral. In other words, the first dungeon of the g-

Whoa holy crap. Tiamat is cool, appearing constantly throughout the dungeon, fighting the gryphon creature.

I haven’t been impressed with the game’s music until now, but I gotta admit, the first song that plays in the Twilight Cathedral — not so much the later ones — is pretty cool. I wish it had played for more of the dungeon.

Anyway, it’s a long dungeon. I was surprised at how large it was once I got the map and looked at it. But after a long trek through the dungeon, getting the Crossblade (Boomerang), and solving a load of puzzles, I confronted the disgusting yet cool miniboss, and then tackled Tiamat.

Great boss fight. She’s a cool character with a cool voice, and the battle has some awesome presentation. Challenging fight, and a lot of fun.

I’m a little worried about future dungeons in this game, because as I understand it, a lot of them have more grounded, less interesting settings than the Twilight Cathedral, but I’ll see if they reach the standards set by this one when I get to them, I guess. I wish more of the Twilight Cathedral had taken place in the upper floors, but either way I enjoyed it.

Yay, more Vulgrim! Also, War, you totally should have killed The Watcher.