Yes, they called this game Earthbound. Let's just get that out of the way. Despite the obvious reason for that title being bad, it doesn't even make sense. As we'll soon see, this is a reenactment of the season 5 episode Bad Blood. The script to that episode will help with 2 puzzles. Yes, they also misspelled Scully's name on this page.
It starts, like others, with an email explaining that you are following Mulder and Scully.
The registration page is roughly the same.
You then get an ID that does nothing. I wonder if there's some way to stamp out those 4 season boxes? Like maybe by reading all the recaps?
Right away this is obviously looking at Bad Blood. You can then choose which agent to follow. That idea works for this episode. I think this was a good design choice.
I started with the Mulder path since it was first. This leads to a fill-in-the-letter puzzle.
The solution is a location from the episode.
This follows the pattern of the other games. There are some emails to read before continuing.
After reading them you're again asked which agent's path to follow. I'll stick with Mulder on the first playthough then loop back to try the Scully path.
The next mini-game is painful. I mean that in the physical sense. It's been a while since I played something that caused so much eye strain. There are four video clips that you have to restore. This means playing with the 6 sliders until there is a clear picture. You need to fix the vertical sync and feedback filter first to stop the image from constantly moving. Once it's stable you can tackle the other sliders.
I couldn't get the first three solved right away. The fourth was either easier or I got lucky. Solving it helped with the others though because now I knew what it expected the final product to look like.
After that it's a return to the case files with some odd character encoding issue.
The next (last?) game is a maze-like one. You control a green dot and try to avoid red dots. The first screen is easy. The second screen (which is later on) doesn't have an exit I could find. I mean, you'll see, there's an exit but all routes are blocked.
The game over screen at least doesn't speak to your character suffering some horrible fate.
I tried to go back and play the Scully route but kept getting errors.
After hitting "Reset Case Files" I could start over fresh. In the Scully route the first puzzle is the same but the solution is different.
I didn't capture this the first time through but there are short video clips that act as scene transitions. They look alright.
Not this nonsense again... It's the same as the video clip puzzle but now with blood samples since Scully is a doctor and all that.
Here's what they expect the images to look like. It took a while to figure out which colors they wanted. That green cell is definitely not healthy.
We're back to the same maze game. Here is the second screen. I can't figure out any route to reach the goal.
After hitting "Quit" on the game over screen we're taken to the credits and an ad for another book.
Although the visual correction puzzles were challenging, this was the most straightforward game so far.
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