Recruitment Drive
This was a quest I was very much looking forward to, partly because I like the Temple Knight quest series, and mostly because I remember it as a puzzle-heavy quest, and I'm always happy to exercise my little grey cells.
We begin by talking to Sir Amik Varze, who asks if we'd like our name to be submitted to a secretive organization. Seeing no way this could possibly backfire, I agree...
That's strange, because so far Sir Amik only knows me from Doric's Quest, where all I did was act as a saleswoman for a dwarven weapon smith. Not exactly spy material, that. But nevermind, I'm told to report to Sir Tiffy Cashien, in Falador Park, for evaluation. Ahh, Sir Tiffy: the beloved NPC who basically hasn't been used in nearly a decade, apparently (according to a recent Lore Council stream) because his dialogue tree was getting insanely complicated, on account of the frankly insane number of quests he's a part of. And, yeah, walking up to him is like walking through a forest of quest start icons:
And, once again, Twoie's reputation precedes her:
This is another situation where the story makes more sense if you do quests in release order, rather than this "Timeline" order. By release order, by the time you reach this quest you'll have done Legend's Quest, among others, which would make enormously more sense for singling you out as a candidate for the Temple Knights. As it stands, the most heroic thing I've done so far is...save the life of the Emir of Al Kharid. That's not nothing, but it doesn't seem like quite enough for how much they're building me up.
That's not really the quest's fault, more an observation that (yet again) Timeline order is weird. But I'm sticking with it, because I wasn't hugged enough as a child and Sisyphean torture is the only way I know how to feel anymore.
Continuing the quest sends me to the Temple Knight testing rooms, but first I'm going to get some flavour text out of Tiffy. This one jumped out:
This is a neat bit of lore, because it takes on additional meaning in light of recent revelations about the gods. In early storytelling (as I think I've mentioned before), Saradomin was portrayed as a very New Testament-esque all-loving god of Goodness. The only thing he disliked was Zamorakians, and he was so wholesome that rainbows literally shot out of his arse (not literally).
In the context of that storyline, this description of the Temple Knights is darkly ironic: they're supporting Saradomin's goals by using methods he wouldn't approve of. It's very black ops, SAS kind of stuff.
In more recent storytelling, though, post-Sixth Age, Saradomin is portrayed as kind of a dick, and certainly not above using shady tactics to get what he wants; this attitude is what drives a wedge between him and Armadyl. In the context of that storytelling, the Temple Knights...actually probably do have Saradomin's permission to do their dirty deeds.
I don't really have a point to this observation, because it couldn't possibly have been intended at the time, I just like it.
Anyway, moving on. The bulk of the quest is a sequence of five puzzles, chosen randomly (ish; some are always included in the rotation) from a list of seven. I ran through the puzzle sequence multiple times, and did each of the seven puzzles multiple times, so I'm going to discuss my thoughts on each of them. Order is, essentially, reverse order of how much I have to say about them.
First up, Lady Table with a memory challenge. It's not tough, there are only two variables: colour of the statue and what weapon it's carrying, so it's pretty obvious which is the new one.
Next is Sir Itchood, the poet. He straight up tells you that his song includes the code to open the door, and then he sings a four-line song. The door code is four letters. Do I need to draw a map? My only real gripe here is that the interface for entering the door code is pretty click-intensive, but considering it also signals the length of the code it's probably the best way they could have done it.
Next, Sir Tinley. He gives you the clue of "patience", and then ejects you if you do literally anything but stand there for a few seconds. This is an interesting puzzle because it plays with player expectations. It's reminiscent of one mind-expanding puzzle from the X-Men game for the Sega Genesis, where you're told "Reset the computer." The solution? Literally press the "Reset" button on your console. This version is infinitely less frustrating for a variety of reasons, but it's a neat and different puzzle.
Next is Sir Spishyus, who presents the classic Fox, Chicken, Beans puzzle. This one might be tough for a little kid, but as an adult this is one of those stock puzzles that comes up in video games a lot.
Next, Sir Ferentse. This is another slightly mind-expanding puzzle, because you can fail it before you even enter the room. This is the one where you have to fight the level 7 Sir Leye, whom no living man can kill. The solution, in what may be a first in video game history, is to have your gender changed so that you're a woman, and then you can beat him easily. I can see this being a very annoying puzzle, but I had no trouble with it here because Twoie is already female, and because it's basically wholesale stolen from Lord of the Rings.
Another observation, but since we're not allowed to bring any equipment into the testing area, this fight feels more than slightly unfair for other reasons:
That's a knight in full plate armour, carrying a spear, going up against a barehanded woman in yellow shorts. Man or woman, I should be dead.
Anyway, next is Ms. Terprett, who has some logic questions for us. I got pretty lucky, because I only ever got some elementary algebra questions; one was a "two equations with two unknowns", which would have been tough for me when the quest came out (in 2005 I would have been 13, so just learning one-variable algebra), but now that I've graduated with a math-adjacent degree it's quite trivial. But then I went on the wiki to fact-check for this post, and I saw some of the puzzles I could have gotten. Some aren't so bad (the wolves will be dead after 30 days of no food, that's a pretty stock logic puzzle), but some were frankly insane. Example:
"Ms. Hynn Terpret" wrote:
Counting the creatures and humans in RuneScape you get about a million inhabitants. If you multiply the fingers on everything's left hand by a million, how many would you get?
The answer is "zero", apparently on the logic that "everything" excludes "everyone." That is lunacy. Even assuming you picked up on the fact that "everything" should include inanimate objects that don't have either fingers or left hands, it's not at all obvious to me that "everything" shouldn't also encompass all the things that do have left hands; one would, in fact, expect that it should include that category. So I call bullshit on that riddle.
Moving on to maximum bullshit, we have the final puzzle: Miss Cheevers. The challenge here is simple: open the door. Except the door has no handle, so we have to use the items in the room to construct one. There's a second level to the puzzle in that the second door is locked, and the key is chained to the wall on the other side of the room. Nominally, this is a chemistry puzzle: we're given a bunch of vials containing things like "cupric sulphate" and "acetic acid" (which is vinegar, now you know), and we have to combine them in such a way as to solve the puzzle.
So, I ultimately had to go to wiki yet again to solve this one, because I was endlessly frustrated with it. There are a bunch of problems that all sort of Voltron together to make this puzzle massively frustrating:
- Because each vial can only be obtained once, any mistake makes the puzzle unsolvable, and you're forced to start again
- It's not always clear which combinations of chemicals and containers are actually mistakes and which are intermediate puzzle steps. There's a hint book, but it only appears if you talk to Cheevers a second time (which isn't great programming, logically it should only appear after talking to her a third time, because that's when she tells you it exists) telling you which chemical combinations are useful, but unless you combine them in the right containers they're still useless. Example: I combined gypsum and water probably a dozen times, but always within the vials. That combination is useless (they need to be combined in the cake tin), but nothing tells me that. Some combinations do have an examine text along the lines of "I think I made a mistake", but I wish more of them did.
- Relatedly, you're never actually told when you hit a dead end. I've sometimes heard this called "dead man walking" syndrome, where you've made a decision that makes the game unwinnable, but you're not told that. Dead man walking syndrome is very, very frustrating
- Once you've realized you're in a dead end, or you just get annoyed and leave, you have to do the entire puzzle sequence again. This isn't really hard (with the exceptions noted above), but it's very tedious and frustrating, especially since you also have a six-second or so unskippable cutscene of Tiffy leading you into the testing area
Really? Well you failed in that regard, hon. Though I did get a chuckle out of some of the flavour text, like this bit:
For those who don't know: acetic acid is vinegar, and socium chloride is table salt; what I've shown above is essentially a recipe for french fries (or "chips" for the Brits out there).
One last thing that annoyed me about this puzzle:
Can you see the key there? Because I couldn't, at least not until I got my face right up into my screen, which probably should not be necessary and is very bad for both my back and my eyestrain.
Anyway, I eventually got through with help from the wiki, and that's it; quest complete.
I think what annoys me most about this quest, aside from the fact that failure is so expensive, is the unevenness of the puzzles. The Miss Cheevers puzzle is orders of magnitude more complicated than any of the others, meaning the difficulty curve of the quest is absolutely whack, even before you account for the fact that the puzzles you get are random. It adds up to a frustrating experience that doesn't ramp up so much as it roller-coasters in difficulty. There are things I like about this quest, and I have generally fond memories of the Temple Knight series (though I'm beginning to re-evaluate those), but the puzzle design here is...less than stellar.