Last time I tried to play La Mulana, I got frustrated and quit. I'm going to try again today with a fresh new game...

Last time I tried to play La Mulana, I got frustrated and quit. I'm going to try again today with a fresh new game. Any advice for me?

Hey, I did the exact same thing exactly three months ago. I ended up getting a little further than the first time then getting frustrated and quitting a second time.
Good luck, and be ready to hump every single wall and backtrack through every room in the game every time you do anything, no matter how minor it is.

Give up

Play the original, it's easier. More or less.

If you are playing the remake, take a lesson from and pay attention instead of assuming you have to constantly revisit every room. The Shell Horn is the best indicator when something important's happened, but there are also audio cues (from the left or right speaker/headphone) to tell you where something has happened, in addition to animations in the background, clouds of dust, force feedback, etc.

Gate of Guidance and get the grail and kill amphisbaena

Graveyard, Temple of the Sun, and Spring in the Sky can all be done pretty much interchangeably. Then kill Viy and return to the surface for Tower of the goddess.

At this point, youre about 1/3 of the way done and the last three areas will keep you very busy because they involve the backside areas and generally the whole ruins.

The last 1/3rd is solving the mantras and medicine puzzle

Yea, no thanks. Great game otherwise but theres a difference between good puzzle design and time wasting cancer.

lel git gud kid.

Every puzzle has a hint tablet

Always somewhere completely different from the puzzle itself.

Yes because thats the flow of the game retard

Give me an injection that gives me a photographic memory.

Even if you're too lazy to just write shit down or take a screenshot, there's an in-game tool that records hints for you.

Except the tool has very limited space.

Are you fucking autistic?

Take screenshots, or better yet, notes.

Are you fucking retarded?

Grown men taking notes for a fucking videogame.

And you wonder why you are still virgins.

I'm not sure how else to reply.

fucking daygo's

If you're going to start again, make sure to keep track of what your intentions are for progression. You're likely to quit partway through then pick it up again and not know what you needed to do next.

Keeping a log of what you did and things of note to backtrack to later on should make things a bit clearer so you won't have to restart for the Xth time.

Pathetic.

Bump
How you doing, OP

Oh nevermind, it was (1) and done.

As someone who is currently stuck at the mid into late game of it, my best advice is as follows.

Buy the handheld scanner and the translation software and the map software. They're essential.

Get the holy grail, check the manual on how to do so.

You have to pretty much whip stuff quite a bit before it breaks or does something. If you hear a sound and you don't get shocked, keep whipping.

Get a notebook and write down stone tablet stuff, a lot of hints to puzzles lie in different areas. When you get the software that stores 10 messages, you can easily find the upgrade to 20 in the place where the skeleton says "He's hidden some software and no one will find it." It's pretty fucking useful.

Some of the puzzles require you to understand the scripts of the stone tablet, at least to recongise some characters. In the mausoleum of the giants, there's a stone tablet talking about the children which will give you the most important ones.

If you can't progress in an area, chances are you don't have the right item. Explore every area and check out the shops.

The gate of guidance can be done without leaving the area proper.

The temple of the sun will open up proper after you beat the spring in the sky.

You need to kill the bosses in the gate of guidance, the temple of the sun, spring in the sky and the mausoleum of the giants before you can really start exploring new areas. That being said, you can get to them being available all at the same time, so don't rush to beat them.

And it's a (1) OP.
Fuck. I guess the advice applies to anyone else who has the game sitting in their library and they don't know how to start.

Honestly, while I've kinda burnt out on it, the game truly amazed me with a lot of the twists it has and some of the really amazing boss intros with gimmicks. I haven't had a game give me such curiosity in years besides programming logic games.

It's really worth the punt to anyone who isn't too sure about it.

Also reading the manual is mandatory. No seriously, otherwise the only way to solve one of the final puzzles is bruteforcing it which can take hours.

Everyone I've ever talked to has bruteforced the mantras, or looked at a guide.

I bought this game on a whim a long time ago. Played it a bit, but it didn't really feel well made, especially the controls, so I shelved it.

Now I've seen it pop up a few times and realize it has some kind of cult following. What makes this game so popular? It didn't really seem that special.

It's actually challenging, and also incredibly well made.
Just because it has stiff physics doesn't mean it's bad. The entire game is carefully designed around it.

If so many people like it then I guess I must have judged it too quickly. It's only 200MB it seems, so I've already installed it. Gonna give it another shot too then.

Make sure you get the holy grail before leaving the gate of guidance for other deeper areas. Theres also a boss but i didn't find it my first time

The holy grail lets you teleport between save points

OP here, finding the game wayyyy easier this time around. Last time I played it I made the mistake of using ankh jewels from one area on boss summoning things from other areas, so I lost track of which areas I still needed to explore. I was also not nearly thorough enough in my note-taking. I only had to cheat once so far, and that was because the "stand below wedjet" clue was misleading; you have to stand below the EYE of wedjet, not the statue. I've beaten the bosses of the Gate, Sun Temple, and Mausoleum, but I'm stuck on the Spring boss. The flare gun helps, but the wonky boat controls are fucking me up. Anything I should go find before challenging this or should I just get gud?

Spending ankh jewels in a confusing way is a common beginner's mistake that really fucks you over, this should be the number one advice about La-Mulana.
The axe is very useful against Bahamut because of its range. You only need to defeat him for access to a seal, so you can explore a lot without him. At least I think the axe is accessible without the seal, it's been a while since I played.

Bahamut is easier to fight if you have the Axe, since it has a longer range. It shouldn't take a few minutes to get the axe if you've already beaten the Sun Temple boss.

Otherwise you could just get good, or you could go do something else instead. There are barely any bottlenecks in the game where you have to do something right now to advance, there's always somewhere else you could look around.


>At least I think the axe is accessible without the seal, it's been a while since I played.
Yeah, you just need to get to the lower part of the Moon Temple, there are like three ways to do it, none of them involve that item.

When he splashes up, there's a certain rhythm/sweet spot you can move to with the wave's force. You don't overshoot it or you bump him. But you can kinda just get in there and hit him two or three times.

When you get to him, you'll love Viy. He's a total asshole but designwise, probably my favorite boss mechanically.

>tfw fighting Palenque without realizing he's a subweapon boss

Once you get the first seal, you can basically get the next two immediately. This will start to open up a lot of areas. Your mid-term goals should be to open the infinite corridor which is done by completing the gate of illusions. This will give you access to the shrine of the mother. Once you've defeated 4 bosses then you can fight Viy, which unlocks the temple of the goddess on the surface. Those will give you some direction, but if you haven't already found the bronze mirror you should know that each area has a backside, so there's like 16-20 maps in the whole game

Happy adventuring!

>tfw fighting Palenque without realizing he's a subweapon boss
It's a little more obvious in the original since practically every boss is designed around the subweapon you find in their area, but yeah, that fight is fucking painful with melee. Give me the chakram and a subweapon fairy and I can kill that bitch in five seconds. It's a shame that fight isn't a little better, their first game was a shmup after all.

>Once you've defeated 4 bosses then you can fight Viy, which unlocks the temple of the goddess on the surface.
Just use the shortcut, man.

I like how for AGDQ or whatever, the speedrun record like 1:15:00 or something, but they said that because of the route and massive amounts of wall clipping they do, it can't really be considered a guide/spoiler, which was hilarious

'le mulan' is p. much one of the rare exceptions where it's shame-free with how often walkthroughs/playthroughts are followed

I didn't know you were supposed to play La Mulana with a steering wheel.

You lack commitment, user.

Don't rely on the game's text recorder.
Carry a notebook irl and write your own notes of EVERYTHING and draw your own map with extra notes.

This room was shit. Or rather, getting to this room was shit.
You're supposed save your time stop for this room to make the jump, thus getting to the room itself quite irritating.
Fuck that. Use the time stop on the room before and leap into any spikes that won't throw you off the screen. You can still make the jump from the lower bed of spikes.

>You're supposed save your time stop for this room to make the jump
Well, sort of. Getting up there in the first place is pretty difficult without that item, but the room itself doesn't need it. In the remake, anyway, in the original you HAD to use it to stop the pot from falling. The real trick is getting back up there after you already beat the miniboss, which is possible.


Vibrator, whatever.

Didn't look like it would be possible to get up there after the boss had been killed, but I didn't try for too long.
It's been too long since I played through the original to remember that such a room even existed there, or maybe I just didn't have any trouble and it wasn't memorable.

One approach I had is that if there was an eye in a certain room then it means there's a 95% chance that a specific puzzle or something to unlock an item in that room.

Though there is one room somewhere with a treasure that you expect there to be an eye, but there isnt

I seem to recall that it's surprisingly easy to hit him with caltrops. As you move out from under him as he lands, just toss a few over your shoulder. Their damage is pretty high for early game so it cuts down the fight time considerably.

You can also cheese iframes with caltrops, too.

Are there any other games that have such massive ups and downs as this one? Some part of the design is just incredible, but after having thought about it for a while, there's just no reasonable way to justify many of this game's puzzles.

What puzzle games need to be, first of all, is *coherent*. The puzzles that occur need to MAKE SENSE in the context of the narrative, otherwise how are you supposed to narrow down your options? Sure, there is a stone tablet SOMEWHERE and it gives you a pretty good idea of what you need to do, but in the context of the story itself it doesn't make any sense, and there's no internal logic behind it.

For example, you remember this 'map' you find in The Chamber of Death? I fucking stared at this thing since a tablet told me that a map would guide my way and tried to figure out some 'pattern', but this was all I got. A good puzzle game doesn't shoehorn you into solving the puzzles, but it should be possible to figure out when you're wasting your time, and when you can't progress somewhere, you ought to know if it's an artifical limitation that you can't pass, or if you just didn't look hard enough yet.

That said, I still heavily recommend this game. It's probably the most patrician Metroidvania I ever played. Music is great, combat is nice, level design is cool. I believe that the ideal way to play it is with a friend who already played it and can tell you when you're just wasting your time.

They made up whatever locations, items, and rooms they needed to for whatever puzzle situation they wanted to create, and then made up the lore afterwards. This isn't Riven, not every puzzle game needs to have some intricate worldbuilding around which to base the puzzles.

Yep, in the original WiiWare version it's just a blank tablet until you get the program that lets you scan walls, then the letters appear. They made the letters appear ahead of time in the PC port so more people would know to come back to that room eventually, and the puzzle isn't even present in the original. They tried to help, I think you got a little too autistic on this one.

I'm not asking for intricate puzzle worldbuilding, I'm asking for a certain degree of coherence. This kind of puzzle game is heavily based on associative thinking, the issue is that there's always just one way to solve the puzzle, but many possible solutions you can think of and have to try.

For example, you can't know when you don't need a key fairy.
You can't know whether you're able to progress here at all, or if you need to return later. The statue that breaks after you defeat Viy is just absurd, what were they thinking?

The thing is, a broad outline why the puzzles exist in the first place nudges the player into the right direction if it's done right, ideally by paying close attention to the game you should have a general idea where to go, this is something La Mulana fails at.

Well, you never need a key fairy to complete the game, those are all optional puzzles.

Are you sure it's not your own failure? Continually attempting to do something and still failing to progress should be an indication that you're wasting your time, I don't know what further indication you think you need. I don't know how you looked at that mural and spent who knows how long trying to make a "map" out of it, it looks nothing like a map or any map the game has shown you previously, it's pretty clearly a bunch of written characters.