Not max difficulty but imo this is way more fun since now every weapon is viable. I imposed a challenge where I have to switch out my weapon if I've already used it. Also intentionally chose the worst weapon available for Priestess.
I hate the bifurcator crossbow.
Just curious really about who's using what modifiers or if any at all. I think it's a pretty good system and I hope they add more modifiers in the future and let us stack more of them at once.
Kind of a sloppy run tbh. Might redo this.
This took many attempts but it's finally done. Probably could have beaten Legion without cheesing but I didn't want to run through the whole biome again.
Kinda sloppy, but I was high af when doing this. Also played the boss extremely safe with a poor weapon choice.
Now that we got an official album release, I'm curious what everyone's thoughts on the music are for Saros.
First of all, I want to acknowledge that Returnal and Saros are 2 different aesthetics and the music hits differently for both. I think both soundtracks are good and both carry a different feel.
I particularly like Shepards theme and the music as you're roaming the descretated fortress.
I don't know why I did this.
We arrived, from so far away, believing in ourselves. We were pure and impure, knowing nothing, wanting everything, unaware that we had been called. For each of us a purpose. Delroy would lead. Micah would find, Garcia would build, Nitya and Koudil would learn, and I would connect. Pioneers. Prisoners. We led and found and we built and we learned, then something else connected with us.
Micah found it first, out there beyond the horizon. Sleeping in the eclipse. It touched his very essence and he felt it. In that blazing gold caress he was transformed. He came back to us, with new purpose, new power: a prophet and a king. This is what he had never known he needed, and now all he ever wanted. To have been so small and now so great. He offered to share his gift with us, to show us that blazing gold promise beyond the horizon, so that we too could feel its resplendence. We argued and we dreamed of dark places, of spindly hands, too many hands, bathed in yellow light, grasping and taking. We knew, we knew. But we could not deny his beauty. We could not refuse his luminescence. As the sun died over and over, hope died with it, and we began to see salvation.
So each of us, we took his hand, we took his many hands and he led us to it. Beyond the horizon, we met its golden glory. We felt it course into our blood and our bones. It opened our eyes and our minds, triumphant and soaring. The last thing I remember, before the yellow took my flesh and myself, was Delroy. As the shape of his brow bubbled and tore, he stared at Micah, at poor doomed Micah, with such hate, such hunger, such furious disbelief. Why was it not him? But then I forgot. Then we all forgot. Our cares were new, our desires were great, our ambition endless. The Yellow Shore had spoken and we had listened. So Micah led and Garcia built and Nitya remade and Koudil reshaped and I whispered between the winds, joining all of it together.
But Delroy watched and waited. In his chambers in that great Cathedral we built together, he planned for something more. A great work, a forever work. But the wrong bones sat the blazing throne. So he whispered his promises with a twisted smile, until we understood, until we knew. Micah the weak, Micah the unworthy. Micah who would lead us into decay. Micah who thought only of what he wanted, what he needed. So we took Micah and cast him down, beyond the grace of Yellow. We bound him in a prison of rot deep below the Rise. So far below, the prophet of dirt, unable to see the eclipse, the sun's screaming death.
We cheered and wept as Delroy stood tall: our leader, our king, our chosen son and sun. And as the usurped king below fell into rot, we grew and grew. Our want was so great, our purpose so certain. This world was our kingdom, every leaf and every life on it turned to our design. The sun shone and died, again and again, every glimmer ours. First it was our minds but our flesh followed too. The crest upon our brows, the gold in our eyes, the all-holding arms, the burning coronas that gave and received the eclipse's devouring light. What we had been we were no more, and we did not know what we once were. We believed ourselves eternal. This was and is always us, the suns and daughters, fathers and mothers of the Yellow Shore. But we needed more. Infinite was our ability, infinite our aspiration, but why sully our resplendent hands in the dirt?
We knew they would come and after long years, after the sun died and our world was remade again and again and again, they did at last. The insect horde. Thousands and thousands of hungry souls, expecting to claim the gleaming golden tears of the yellow shore for themselves, to send it back to dying empires on a drowning world and to save themselves from the torment they deserved. But they found us and we found them. We took them, every last one, and we broke them. They saw us but they did not recognise us, so they cowered and they begged. A full half slaughtered; the rest in chains and sent to dig and carry and collapse.
Once the black dam stood above all, a testament to our splendour and a wall between us and them, we looked down upon those who were left, those who still lived, caked in their filth and desperation. We saw how they wanted to please us, how they yearned to be like us. So we took their greed and we made them new. It was her; some of it was her. That must be known, it must not be forgotten. The Magician, my Nitya, so kind and so pure. But it was her who changed them, the insects. She made them new, made them want and made them need. New faces, new flesh - shrivelled mirrors of ourselves. We gave them only scraps, the thinnest of promises that they would shine and soar like us one day, that anyone could become a King. We lied and laughed. They hungered and they built and they fought for us. They rutted and they consumed, until all this world was in our image. An eternal empire, the kingdom of the eclipse, the vanguard of the The Yellow Shore. All of it ours, but never enough, never enough. @?S!
We wanted every shining crystal underground, we wanted every atom of the sky above, and we wanted everything beyond, between the seams and among the threads. But he, the King, the once-man, he stood above us all and kept us in our place. Roles inviolable: The Architect, The Shepherd, The Voice, The Priestess who stood forever by his side. And somewhere far below, stinking and wailing, the forgotten Prophet. Each of us believed ourselves King. But there was Him. First and last, always Him. So she came to me, the Priestess, my Priestess, an she said what we must do. We mus take our world back from Him. The people loved her: she was their mother and their love. She promised she would take each of them to The Shore.
Long years since we had been together, since the turning of our bones, but we knew each other still, so well, so lovely. Trust, complete, even in this cycle of greed. She saw in Him what she had seen in another, long before, what she had fled from to win a new day. And together we promised that it must end. We planned and we whispered and we built our army. We were ready: but we were wrong. He knew, somehow He Knew. We struggled but it was not enough, never enough. We were taken from each other. She cast out, and me... bodiless. Form ripped from me. An echo, a Voice in the wires on the wind, the wisp of the Red Tree. She thought me dead, but it was so much worse. All that I had been given was taken away. And that was when I remembered. Who I once was. What we had all done together. The sins of our greed. In silence I wept. =&x+<^/&
The King chose a new Priestess, and another andanother. Never satisfied, forever suspicious. What if the hungry children loved Her more than Him? And in this fear grew weakness. And this weakness was seen. The Shepherd. The master of beasts. Never sated by his station. This would be his time. In this moment of weakness, the Blazing Throne would be his. He had wanted it always, been promised it by the first whisper of the ebbing light. He marshalled his monsters and he marched: to war against his King. Cities razed, countless lives upon the pyre. The King and the Shepherd, each too beloved, each with an ocean of faithful.
Our world in flames. our dreams dust, as gods went to war. Bodiless, I watched. Preserved and reborn, she waited: herself once more. She cared no more. She only wanted it to stop. She would wait as long as it took. In the sun-cursed wilds she hid, with her designs and her devices, for a hundred lifetimes. Crawling from the black pool, each time hoping that it was over. Each time she rose from the pool, she remembered it was her sin too, and she hated herself for it. So long ago, with the first gleam of yellow, she had believed in the promise of perfection: in the great mending of All That Was Wrong. But the want and the need had taken her too, and she had built monstrosity. The greed and hunger: dead in her, but alive and screaming in The King and The Shepherd.
Centuries of turmoil, towers of the dead: until the Architect at last made her choice. The King. She chose the King. And then it was over. The Shepherd fell. The Blazing Throne would never be his. Down down down in the depths he was cast, as the mould grew on his hide and his thoughts dissolved. The Architect, the King's saviour, demanded reward. No faith or loyalty after all: only opportunity. She would wrap those great wings around the world and name it hers. For the King his throne, his name; hollow totems. And so to the last they had all been traitors. So he took her mind. Another beast in the wilds, defending her fortress in his name, with animal rage. Just him now, and his Priestess in Yellow, who he hated, as he had hated all her sisters before her.
He looked upon his broken world, and he screamed. It meant nothing, nothing at all. King of collapse, king of despair, king of insects. He deserved more, always more. And so he left. With his most favoured, he sailed away, to the far shore. Into Yellow. A land of ghosts, the slumbering world. Lost children awaiting their father's return. One day, one day, He would stride from the eclipse and beckon them forth, to their reward. At last, everything they wanted, everything they needed. They clung to belief, they clung to lies. And all the years past and more still. They waited and they fought each other and they told their stories and their scriptures. Their old gods slept. The rotted prophet, the drowned shepherd, the weeping architect, the shackled priestess. And I, the formless voice, drifting, calling out to Her in hiding, but unheard, unremembered.
And then the sky spat out more insects expecting paradise. A third echelon of want, a third nest of greedy mouths. These were not taken, for there was no king to make it so. Instead, an echo of us. They heard the call, they felt the need, and they tore themselves apart over it. The Shore saw nothing in them; only the pleasure of their ruination. None would tread the path; none would rouse the old gods from slumber. She saw it all, of course she did. And she was afraid. There had been a King once; there would be again. More would come, always more, and more, and more. They would seek the path. They would seek to be the forever son of Yellow. Alone, despairing, she found purpose at last, after all those lonely years. Sabotage. A path denied. No more kings, no more, no more. If only she could hear me. Please, Nitya. Hear me, hear me.
And then, oh God and then. Years later, the fourth vessel. So small and so few this time. But one who blazed. One who was seen. One whose want spread like fever, fallen through broken glass and broken trust. The Yellow Shore roared in triumph. The Yellow King howled in rage. They heard him, the Shepherd and the Architect and the Priestess, even the Prophet in his rot. They awoke and they waited. And so did she hear. And, in horror, she Knew. Him. Of all people. him. Across the stars and far beyond time. lifetimes of wonder and horror and atonement and remorse and relief - so far away and so long ago, but still he had found her.