Toggle Background Color
Let's Antagonize IVAN
Part 1: Peel Mountain and the evils of capitalism
IVAN is a hell of a game. It's widely renowned as a uniquely cruel roguelike, which is quite an achievement given that roguelikes in general tend to be pitilessly unforgiving. It's also well known for the utterly insane game mechanics that underlie the emergent comical horror unfolding in its cutesy blood-, sweat-, and vomit-drenched tileset. IVAN stops short of the mind-crushing complexity seen in legendary tantrum simulator Dwarf Fortress, but it differs from DF in that it lets you directly fuck around with its goofy material and limb mechanics in-game using a few different methods. In IVAN, YOU can be the legless dwarf who has a fey mood and makes a short sword out of diamonds! and then accidentally makes the smith god mad while trying to pray for AWESOME IRON LEGS and instead gets said rad diamond sword turned into a shitty banana sword
Let's get this out of the way: I am not good at this game. I am, in fact, rather bad at this game. However, I'm good at breaking it, using its features, "features," and bugs so egregious that nobody could call them features with a straight face. I really enjoy doing this, and IVAN really enjoys murdering me for it.
Yeah. IVAN can tell when your character is doing well and has lots of cool stuff, and will throw overpowered monsters at you to kill you. Instead of trying to balance all the dumb cheaty shit you can do, it just cheats harder and sends dominatrix hell warriors to shank you in a back alley. IVAN is a uniquely cruel roguelike. Playing the game is less like trying to overcome a series of challenges and more like engaging in a dickishness competition with an omnipotent Snidely Whiplash. You don't win IVAN. You outwit IVAN, strangle it from behind, seat yourself victoriously on its throne of crystallized angel tears, and then die because you sat on your wand of teleportation and it broke in half and teleported your pelvis fifteen metres to the west.
There's a bunch of story shit or something, who cares. We can't turn storyline into leprosy meat and then eat it to make our arms fall off! We skip this. You should read Big Sean's IVAN LP if you want "context" or "sanity" or "intelligent decisions" because trust me, the only thing you're gonna find here is a whole lot of ridiculous nonsense followed by an abrupt, stupid, richly-deserved death. Long story short, we're a slave, some asshole rich guy owns our village, we have to deliver a letter to some other rich asshole who owns Frog Catholicism or whatever.
This is us. We're standing on New Attnam, our village, and we're supposed to go into that cave there, naked and unarmed, and fight our way through a bunch of bullshit to get to Attnam and give the letter to the Frog Pope. We're not gonna do that.
Instead, we enter New Attnam and loiter suspiciously by the levitating ostrich landing pad. This is where the banana growers deposit their bananas for the magic ostriches to carry away. This is also where we steal infinite food and generate infinite death for the lowly earthbound fools of this village.
We stand around kicking bananas to the southeast for a few minutes. We have to be careful not to kick any banana growers or ostriches, because we are a scrawny naked weakling and the inhabitants of this village will crush us instantly if we assault anyone. We also keep an eye on our pet puppy, Screamy Jr. If we kick a banana into him, he's liable to attack us, and we might actually lose that fight. We kind of suck right now.
But we can remedy that. Step one on the road to asshole sorcerer godhood: bananas, gluttony, and malice.
We eat bananas until we're on the verge of vomiting, then drop a pile of banana peels in front of Huang Ming Pong the Sumo Wrestler's house. We are preparing to drop a single banana at our feet as bait, to lure the wrestler into repeatedly slipping on banana peels until he is severely injured to the point that a piddling weakling like us can beat him in a slap fight. Instead, Kaethos, the wise, kindhearted, one-legged village elder turned tour guide, wanders around the corner and into our trap. He takes a single step on banana peel mountain and both of his arms instantly fly off in a horrifying spray of blood while he screams in terror. Hilarious! We drop the banana anyway. He's still got one limb left, he'll be fine.
The wrestler ventures onto Peel Mountain a couple of times and knocks himself out. This could be our chance! We run down the stairs in his house to challenge him to a brutal bare-knuckle brawl wrestling match. This requires us to be really full and makes us hungrier. Fortunately, we're only fighting using holograms or some shit, because this guy is ordinarily capable of creaming us.
He is conscious when we enter the arena, and creams us.
As the tourist family following Kaethos files out of the arena, their child steps on Peel Mountain and is decapitated through foul and horrible magics. Nobody seems to particularly care, including his mother. Tourists are the worst.
We decide to fight Huang again since he's bleeding pretty profusely and we're worried he'll die next time he tries to ascend Peel Mountain. He creams us again.
Kaethos returns to Peel Mountain in search of his arms and is flayed asunder by the banana gods for his impudence. Rest in peace, Kaethos.
Huang's repeated visits to Peel Mountain finally claim one of his arms. We decide to challenge him again.
Jesus Christ we suck.
Huang dies to Peel Mountain. Now we cannot acquire the belt of levitation, which is basically a requirement for our malign schemes. We decide to ascend Peel Mountain ourselves. We'll restart a couple times to get the belt; what I'm doing here is really not the optimal way to start the game, but you'll see what I'm working towards in a minute. Right now we're going to join Huang, Kaethos, and that dead kid on Peel Mountain.
Grisly. We score Kaethos' book of Silva, the nature goddess, and read it. Then we pray to her.
She gives us a sick nasty arm made out of gems. Then we dance on Peel Mountain until our torso and groin explode and we die. We really want that belt.
We create a new character, kick bananas for a bit, and carelessly bounce a banana off of someone passing by, which makes everyone very upset. We die brutally, bitten in half by an ostrich.
Our third character nails it the first time. Huang Ming Pong, despite being one-armed and on the verge of death, opens the fight by punching us in the crotch so hard that it almost pulverizes our pelvis. We are understandably a little upset about this and feebly slap at him in retaliation, which is enough to defeat him in his fragile state.
Hooray! We are the heavyweight champion of New Attnam! I guess Huang teaches us to punch crotches really hard and Asshole Village Owner gives us a sports jersey or something but we don't really give a fuck about that.
We are now the lord of the skies, looking down contemptuously on the peons below. We can fly over land mines, bear traps, banana peels, and broken glass without incident. Also, oceans.
Apparently Screamy Jr. died on Peel Mountain, and now Huang is slowly devouring his corpse in front of us while staring us right in the eye. Jesus, dude. (Ironically, he survives Peel Mountain and then dies immediately when he slips on the three banana peels he left carelessly lying on his floor after his last meal. Rest in peace, Huang Ming Pong.)
We leave New Attnam, consider the spooky cave we're meant to delve into, and then turn around and fly directly across the fucking ocean because fuck you, we're the lord of the skies. We have just skipped the first dungeon. We'll be going back there for a lantern and whatever gear we can scrounge up, but I wanted to do it this way because it's ridiculous. And also because the belt of levitation is really useful and makes everything a little easier, first dungeon included. But mostly because it's ridiculous.
We arrive in Attnam and sell the shopkeeper there our giant pile of rotting leftover bananas for a little spending money. Having picked up Peel Mountain to spare the people of New Attnam its terrible fury, we immediately mitigate our rare act of charity by dumping the entire thing somewhere at random outside the shop, for the local farmers to blunder into and die upon.
We bring the dumb letter to the Frog Pope and stare through him, slackjawed and apathetic, while he mumbles Thees and Thous at us for a while. He wants us to go into a different dungeon and kill Frog Satan, basically.
On our way out, we barf on his floor as a protest against the decadent Frog Church that has permitted our people to be subjugated.
Nobody gives a shit.