The Manticore is kind of a dick move, if you ask me. It’s part of a sequence where the PC is captured, and forced to do some guy’s bidding, where it looks like there may not be a lot of player agency involved.
At the end of it, there’s this Manticore; now, the game has already taught me that my life’s going to be a lot better if I don’t leave encounters looking like a dog’s scrapped toy, but so far I’ve been able to keep my rewinding to a thankful minimum.
With the Manticore, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of good enough choices; a lot of trial and error later, I’ve made some progress, but still far from happy.
So, of course, I go looking for tips, before frustration sours me on the game. Turns out the sorcerer has an ‘easy’ way to dispatch it, and luckily, I also took the ‘right’ path previously, and have the requisite items. There’s also a way to skip the encounter I had forgotten about, though probably that’s not going to be a very good choice in the long run.
What looked to me as an essentially forced sequence in what had felt, up to that point, free enough, has been, nevertheless, designed so that it can be tackled in many different ways, OTOH I still have two problems:
- ‘what if’, had I not collected the items. As an aside this also contributes to the feeling that I cannot play the game as freely as I’d like, that it’s a better idea to make the choices my class archetype would.
- The massive rewind spam kills the game’s sense of flow and adventure, turning it into something more akin to a Hotline Miami restart loop.
