Tower of Life
We begin by talking to a guy named Effigy, who's a bit of a wordy spud:
He's contracted some builder to construct his tower, but they're on strike, and he wonders if we wouldn't terribly mind doing something about that? Xurdtwos: champion of the people, off union busting. Talking to Bonafido, the leader of the builders, reveals that they're on strike because they thought Effigy was doing something really weird, and they wanted to know more about what was going on before they finished the job. This sounds like an eminently reasonable request, and considering the Priest in Peril incident I'm frankly astonished that Twoie doesn't demand the same thing. But no, we decide to try to finish the tower for Effigy, but Bonafido won't let us in until we're properly uniformed. Alright, health and safety, I can get behind that.
Getting the four pieces of the builder's outfit requires talking to the four laybout builders, all of whom have a different puzzle:
- "No Fingers" refuses to give us anything, so we pickpocket him for his boots, which he was keeping in his pockets as one does
"The Guns" very kindly offers the shirt he's never worn, because seriously look at the guy:
But he wants a beer before he does. That seems reasonable, so I pop down to Yanille (which he specifically mentioned) to buy a 2-coin beer. Seems like it would have been easier to go to the pub in southeast Ardougne, but since he said Yanille that's the one I went with.
"Black Eye" offers to give us a hard hat if we pass his quiz, which consists of trivia relating to the Construction skill. I'll be honest, I wasn't totally sure of a lot of the answers, but there's only three questions with three answers each, so it's not tough. Though I'm not sure it's wise to trust the hat he gives me:
That seems safe...
- Gummy doesn't want to give us his trousers (imagine!), but after some needling reveals he lost them in the river, and that we might find them if we look on the river bank. There's some searchable plants, and soon enough I've got them
Yep, purple checkers: this is what tradies look like. But Bonafido isn't convinced yet, we need to convince him that we can think like a builder. This is a more annoying puzzle than Black Eye's quiz, because there's no obvious way to intuit the answers, they seem to be a random assortment of Runescape memes ("Ahh, nothing like a nice cuppa tea"), hyper-masculine stereotypes, and madness. For example, one question is "how do you know when to replace your trousers?" Answer: when your legs start getting cold:
This is lunacy. Luckily it's not super egregious, because once again there are only a few questions with three answers each. That done, we're allowed to enter the tower to finish construction. First, though, I decide to go trumpet my accomplishment to Effigy and his three friends. One, "Transmute", doesn't seem very impressed with my new career trajectory.
It's certainly a step, Twoie my dear, though I don't know if I'd call it a positive one. Moving on, I enter the tower and take stock of the situation. A bunch of crates on the ground floor, which appear to contain building supplies, and some broken machines on the upper floors that need fixing. Okay, I can figure this out. On the top floor, though...
...yeah, that's not concerning at all. Moving swiftly on, the gist of the remaining puzzle is this: I have three things to fix (the pipe system, the pressure machine, and the cage), and each one requires a certain number of parts, which I can obtain by searching the crates on the ground floor. I both like and dislike this puzzle. I generally like it, I don't think it's a terrible puzzle, and I love the quality-of-life feature of tracking which parts I need and have in the quest journal:
The main thing I don't like is gathering the components. Each part (and there are eight unique components) can be found in one of the crates on the ground floor. That part's fine. What's less fine are two things:
I can only get one item at a time, meaning I have to search each crate a minumum of three to six times, each time with a three-second-long animation:
- There's a chance that searching the crate will fail, and I'll get nothing, and have to search it again
This is just padding. There's no logic in having a failure mechanic, and the overlong animation just drags things out more. I wouldn't even mind clicking on the crate six times if the animation was reasonably-lengthed. Come on, Jagex, this doesn't need to be a five-minute process.
Once a machine is repaired, there's a second puzzle; this time a unique one for each machine. These are generally fine, but to go through my comments for each, briefly:
- The pipe machine has a puzzle where you need to connect a few pipe pieces to the inflow and outflow sockets on the machine. This is a basically fine jigsaw puzzle, made slightly annoying by the fact that you have to click on arrows to move the pieces around; so it's very click-intensive, but not a bad puzzle otherwise
- The pressure machine has a puzzle where you need to use balls to fill holes in the pipes, and then crank the pressure. The actual solution is pretty straightforward: pressure up until the ball is just past the hole, then pressure down. The trouble is that the interface is very non-intuitive. In addition to four wheels (one for each of the four pipes), there are two levers which in various configurations activate different pipes and make the wheels raise or lower the pressure. I eventually figured it out, but I swear the controls were not behaving consistently; one configuration would increase pressure in a pipe until it wouldn't, and then I'd have to fiddle the levers into the exact same configuration and the pressure would start rising again. So quite frustrating
- The cage has another jigsaw puzzle where you have to identify the orientation (horizontal/vertical) and length of pipes to fit holes in the bars. This was a pretty easy puzzle once you worked out that one "cell" of the cage was two units long, and from there it's just mechanical. Again, not terrible
With all three machines fixed, we return to Effigy and his friends who are keen to go up to the top of the tower and complete their experiments. What experiments, you ask? Why creating life, of course.
Foreshadowing starts digging outside of Manor Farm
This is a really cool lore connection, because The World Wakes is still five years away at this point, and I'm somewhat suspicious of the notion that Jagex already knew Guthix was sleeping underneath Ardougne. If they did, this is excellent foreshadowing; if not, it's a really cool (and possibly unintentional) connection between the quests. Either way, super neat!
What's not super neat is that these three wizards (sorry, alchemists) conjure up some abomination, and immediately start abusing it for daring to ask to maybe not be trapped in a cage, please? It gets mad, the alchemists scarper, and they ask us "pretty please with a cherry on top" (that's literally one of the dialogue lines) to go calm it down.
We reluctantly agree, and there follows one of the weirder parts of the quest. Apparently, because the homunculus (which is what we're calling it, I guess) was created from both "logic" and "magic", it's confused about which path it should follow. So it asks us a bunch of questions, and we have to guide it to one path or the other. I chose the path of logic, but it turns out not to matter too much:
Oh, okay then. I don't really mind that the choice was ultimately pointless, because it makes the scene interactive and brings us into the quest in a way a cutscene or exposition dump wouldn't. I'm more confused about the tension between logic and magic, which isn't something explored in any other content I'm aware of. Indeed, the Wizard's Tower seems to conduct its study of magic in a very logical fashion, so I'm unclear why this quest is treating them as competing ideologies. It feels very out-of-place, is what I'm saying.
But after that, it's all over bar the shouting: the homunculus comes down to scare off the alchemists, and we discover their creepy dissection lab underneath the tower, and quest complete!
Oh, and also the homunculus will create monsters for us now. That's not a joke, that's really the last line of dialogue in the quest. Despite the fact that the whole last act of this quest was about how creating life from nothing is a bad idea, we're going to continue creating life from nothing. That's...tonally peculiar.
Final analysis: it's not a terrible quest. The puzzles are decent, with some slightly annoying interfaces that can probably be chalked up to technical limitations of the 2007 engine. Narratively there are some interesting elements, especially given later storytelling, but there's a lot that just doesn't fit. It's especially interesting to revisit this quest post-Sliske's Endgame, when the idea of "true creation" of life has been discussed. What is the homunculus if not true creation? It's not really a corruption of things that came before, like the nihil or the monsters made underneath the Tower of Life, it appears to be a wholly unique being. So...does that mean Effigy is an Elder God?
Probably not, and I don't really expect this to be brought up ever again, but it's still fun to think about.