Project Gorgon: Syp has a big head

Another day, another delightful outing in Project Gorgon. By the way, congrats to that team for busting through their Kickstarter goal in six days — I’m rooting for them to make $50K by the time it’s said and done.

So I logged in to find that my offline “hanging out” activity had completed with Lawara (aka “amnesiac cave girl”). Some nice flavor text as a result, along with more favor and unarmed XP. Got a couple of new skills in unarmed, actually, so I took off my sword and spent some time cobra striking pigs.

That’s Syp. Hero and professional pig-killer. Hey, can you kill a pig with your bare hands? It’s tougher than it sounds.

Some people in chat told me that Lawara can help me with my lice problem by giving me a comb if my favor gets high enough, so I’m working on that for the time being. Hygene is important (and a game stat).

I couldn’t let my curiosity go. I just HAD to find out what happened if I died to the tutorial cave boss. And now I know: It curses me with a big head.

I mean, people have accused me of having a big head, but this is silly. Silly AWESOME. The big head effect means I can’t wear helms until I get the curse lifted, but it did compensate a bit by bestowing me with +25 power.

I tried to take on the mega-spider again with another player, but I bit the dust pretty hard on it. I got a weird debuff afterward saying that I couldn’t see green for an hour due to a delusion, although the game continued to show that color anyway. It was suggested that I roleplay it, although I don’t know how I could pull that off other than randomly shouting, “HARK! That grass is stark grey!”

Anyway, you’d think that having lice, a big head, and a “can’t see green” delusion would be annoying, but it’s actually incredibly immersive. Instead of being on combat autopilot, I’m feeling engaged and entertained by the game world, willing to go along with temporary inconveniences because there’s a path to solving them.

Back out of the cave I spent some time investigating my menu options. The skill menu is pretty important to keep tabs on the scads of skills this game throws at you (I have around 15 or so right now). It not only shows you your progress on each, but what rewards you’ll get for level milestones. Some skills, such as dying or combat, have buttons for more information and to rearrange abilities. Here, I’m showing you all of the ways that I’ve died so far. How many MMOs ever bother to track that? Not many, I can tell you.

Oh, another nice UI feature: there’s a sort button for inventory. That’s very helpful, because the inventory is a mess of tiny icons otherwise.

From what people are telling or hinting to me in global chat, Project Gorgon is made up of five open world zones right now, and what you see on your map is the full (square) zone. There’s no larger world map at the moment. You can annotate your map with pins, and the more you level up cartography (which I do not have), the more pins you can put in.

So the zones look like they’re managable in size, which actually makes me feel better. I like the feeling of smaller zones that are insanely content-rich for explorers.

Here I found a giant stonehenge-thing wiht a warning sign. Syp likes to ignore warnings because Syp is a cat with eight lives left. This is why Syp found himself dying quickly to a guardian elemental.

When I rezzed, I was in a tavern in the middle of the town that I don’t even know the name of, because this is my first time there. I wasn’t ready to go to the town yet! One thing at a time, game!

Someone told me that the elves in Project Gorgon are sex-crazed maniacs. I haven’t encountered many yet to verify that, although outside of the tavern I caught two elf ladies talking about human male anatomy and “only having one down there.” I had a lot of questions about this, but wisely decided to walk away briskly.

One last little detail I noticed before I logged out — a board that allowed you to toggle on a “hardcore death penalty.” Of COURSE Project Gorgon lets you choose your own death penalty. I am not this hardcore, however. I’m still struggling with lice.

Blaugust #2: Udderly awesome.