Topic: Foreshadowing abounds in the Land of Vampires

[Lumi Kløvstad]

As I continue my playthrough of the first Lords of Shadow, I am flabbergasted by the amount of subtle foreshadowing of Gabriel's fate, Zobek's true identity, and the nature of Satan as the man-behind-the-man that I missed during the Wygol Abbey mini-arc.

Abbot Dorin's accusations that "The devil has sent you! You are demons who serve him!" turns out to be almost 100% correct with a bit of poetic license, and he also says "He told me you'd come! He does it to torment me!", which in hindsight is all but telling you outright who the real big bad is, but because Dorin is mad as a hatter, both Gabriel and the player automatically discount what he's saying.

Zobek is also mysteriously able to beat Gabriel to the top of the tower by means no human should be able to achieve, which later turns out to be not such a huge problem because he's not human. He also then tells GABRIEL to pick up the Holy Water rather than do it himself, and indeed doesn't seem like he can cross the threshold into Dorin's room at all until Gabriel physically destroys the door, or he'd have done it and just been like "hey Gabriel, grabbed this for you. Shame about that crazy guy." All of that definitely foreshadows his actual role as the Lord of the Necromancers, the unholiest of unholies.

Gabriel of course by this point is too hell-bent to question any of this, and because he doesn't, the player doesn't... because the game is totally playing straight the rules that most games play by, which I think is a super clever design and writing concession to hide major plot foreshadowing: hide it right in plain sight but underneath things the player already expects.

This game really is a small masterpiece. I'm definitely enjoying and appreciating it more this time around.

[Reinhart77]

awesome, glad that you are.

[Dracul_Belmont]

I enjoyed that game a LOT