Pulsebound

THE THING ON THE CHANNEL FLOOR LETS YOU GO. If you saved on the bottom of the channel, underneath Captain Flinch's boat, and loaded that save, the game had forgotten where the boat was going: catch the guardian, beat it or swim for the surface, and you stayed on the sand in a room with no door. The boat now works out its own crossing again from where it left, so an old save made down there simply carries on to Sunlaid Beach. If you are the one who reported it: load your save, throw your Vessel, and you will come up. THE SIXTH HALL HAS SOMEBODY AT THE DOOR. Five of the eight halls had a steward who tells you how the hall works before you walk into it. Scorch Horizon, the one hall where the floor itself can beat your team, had a slate with the rules cut into it and nobody to read them out. Hall Steward Verrin stands by the door now, in English and in Dutch: the four rows of fire, the one way through each row, what a pit costs, who stops you and who waits, and where the master is. EVERY OPPONENT IS ANNOUNCED, NOT JUST THE FIRST. A trainer's first Whisp came with its type, its level and its health; every one after it came with a name and nothing else. Now each one that steps in gets the same line, so you know what you are up against before you choose. TWENTY-FOUR SCENES THAT NEVER PLAYED THEIR RECORDING. The championship announcer, the credits, the kidnapping, the Lodge, the laboratory and the three guardians all read out the NAME of their recording instead of playing it, and waited the wrong length of time before moving on -- which is why the next voice started over the top of the one you were hearing, and why six of the Dutch reports about English text after the kidnapping were all the same fault. They play now, in both languages, and they wait for themselves. SOUNDS YOU COULD NOT HEAR. Thought Jab had a sound file and no sound: everything in it sat below what a speaker can move. Twenty-three other attacks were the same, Tail Whip, Deepdelve, Shadowstep and Ironclap among them, and every one has been made again out of what the attack actually is. Nibblet's cry started half a second late, and so did forty-one other sounds; they start when they should. The mining camp's music no longer beats like a heart at rest. WHERE THE STORY POINTS. After the kidnapping the directions sent you from Cairnfell down into the mines and back up to Cairnfell again; the route now runs unbroken to the crack in the cavern wall. The hotels in Ponthy Bay and Cairnfell stop sending you back to a hall you have already won, and the hospital in Trenchmoor finally has a next step to tell you. VOICES. The market trader in Ponthy Bay speaks with his own voice at the stall instead of through the screen reader. The four turnkeys in the Lodge cells were one man four times over; three of them have their own voice and their own words now. And a person whose name is a title, like the Harmony lieutenant, is named in Dutch in Dutch. BRAILLE. The line the Book of Whispers sends to a display fits forty cells in both languages now; it used to run over in Dutch for ten species. AND UNDERNEATH: the whole bench of checks and every walkthrough were run again on this version, in English and in Dutch, and they measure the same in both.

THE GAME ASKS HOW YOU WANT TO HEAR IT, AND THEN GETS OUT OF YOUR WAY. Pulsebound has always spoken in recorded voices, and the written words underneath them were a safety net. Several of you said you would rather READ -- not because the voices are bad, but because of the pace: the game waits out a guess at how long your screen reader needs, and that guess is deliberately generous. So the first time you start this version it asks one question, in your own language, and it only ever asks once. Choose the screen reader and every spoken line now waits for ENTER instead of for a timer, the way Manamon does. Choose the recorded voices and nothing about your game changes at all. Settings, Voice Clips, if you want to switch later. AND WHOEVER IS TALKING SAYS SO. With the screen reader reading, every voice in this world came out of the same mouth, and five people in a row meant five sentences with nothing to tell you who said what. Now the name comes first: "Rival: there you are", "Hatchmaster Oberrow: four thousand, and I will find yours a match". Ninety-six lines through the world carry it, and so does everybody you walk up to and speak with. What does NOT get a name is exactly what should not have one: the game's own directions, a door, a machine, and the handful of strangers whose namelessness is the point of the scene they are in. R SAYS IT AGAIN. Press R and the last thing you heard comes back -- a menu line, a message, a spoken sentence, a recording -- in whichever way it arrived, from the same place in the room and with the same reverb. It is quiet only while you are typing a name, because there R is a letter. BRAILLE, A FIRST STEP, IN THE BOOK OF WHISPERS. If you read with your hands and have a display, switch Braille on in Settings. Open an entry in the book and the name, the type and whether you have caught it go to the display and stay under your fingers instead of going past in speech. How long it stays is your own NVDA setting for braille messages, not something this game gets to decide. It is off until you turn it on, and it changes nothing you hear. AND THE DUTCH SIDE IS FINISHED. Every room, every person, every object, every menu and every line of the story is in Dutch when you choose Nederlands, with 1418 Dutch recordings behind them. The caverns under Polino are the Polino-grotten now, the mouth of the old workings is the entrance to them, and a wild Whisp with two types finally says both of them in Dutch instead of in English. The woman in Rupon who renames your Whisps greets you in Dutch as well; she was the last person in the world who did not. SMALLER THINGS, IN THE ORDER THEY WERE REPORTED. A trainer no longer starts the battle in the middle of a repeat. The bag in battle is called the same thing as the bag in the pause menu. The Whisp PC and the item storage are called that everywhere. A Whisp you bred and then collected from the PC can be sold on the marketplace again -- the proof it carries was written without the save behind it, and that kept the whole chain out of the market for a week. A market stall says something shorter the second time you walk up to it, and the trader's name is in front of it. Trample, Boulder Clash and Nightbite have new sounds, made out of what those attacks actually are. AND UNDERNEATH ALL OF IT: every recording in the game was read back from the audio itself and held against the words on the page, so a voice can no longer say something the text does not. The whole game was walked through three times over, in both modes, twenty routes at a time, and then five times again over everything this version touches.

EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD HAS A DUTCH NAME NOW. If you play in English this update changes nothing at all for you: every word below is about the other language. Choose Nederlands and the nine towns, the hundred and twenty-two rooms and the things standing in them are named in Dutch -- the pilings and the mooring rings on the pier at Whisker Bay, the frozen fountain in Cairnfell, the spiral stair in the Harmony Lodge, the drying nets, the notice board, the bed by the wall. Seven hundred and twenty-five names, and the object list, the people list and the line you hear on walking through a door all read from them. NAMES THAT BELONG TO SOMETHING STAY AS THEY ARE, AND THAT IS A DECISION AND NOT AN OVERSIGHT. A Humgrub is a Humgrub, a Healing Vial is a Healing Vial, Tackle is Tackle and Barkeep Wilm is Barkeep Wilm. What your save file remembers and what the marketplace signs its papers with are those same words in every language, so a Whisp you caught playing in Dutch can be sold to somebody playing in English, and the two of you can battle each other without either side ever having to know which language the other picked. What did change is the people who are described rather than named: a woman with a ledger is now een vrouw met een grootboek. THE THREE SAVE SLOTS ARE CALLED ONE THING NOW. In Dutch they were three different things: a sleuf when you picked one from the main menu, a plek when you saved, and the line describing the slot itself was not translated at all -- it read your name and the room you were standing in in Dutch and then said "saved" in English, in the middle of the same sentence. All of it says slot now, and the line under each one is Dutch as well, an empty slot included. AND A HANDFUL OF THINGS WERE STILL COMING OUT IN ENGLISH MID-SENTENCE. Most of them in battle, which is where they were noticed: a wild Whisp appearing, a trainer wanting to battle, somebody sending one out or giving the battle up, and the question about changing your Whisp before an opponent's next one comes in. A trainer who still needs to rest told you how long in hours and minutes with those two words in English. So did the settings menu in half a dozen places, the box where you type a name, the distance to what you are heading for, the marketplace, the move tutor, and the download the game offers you when there is a newer version of it. All of that is Dutch now. AND NOTHING UNDERNEATH IT MOVED. The names in the game's own files are untouched, because they are what every signpost, every objective and every list looks things up by. Only what is said out loud goes through the translation. That is why an English game and a Dutch one are still the same game underneath, and why this update cannot break a save, a trade or a battle you are in the middle of. AND THE BEACON NO LONGER SENDS YOU BACK AND FORTH ACROSS THE CHANNEL. Once you had been up the road to Scorch Horizon, Sunlaid Beach had nothing left to tell you, and what it told you instead was to take the ferry back to Whisker Bay. Whisker Bay sent you to the pier, the pier sent you across to the beach, and the beach sent you straight back: a ring of three rooms that following the directions could not get you out of. It was there from your first step into Scorch Horizon until your eighth stamp. The beach now points at the road inland, which is the way on and the only door it has. Reported by somebody who noticed it after talking to the netmaker -- talking to anybody on that beach would have done it, because every flag that goes over makes the game work out afresh what to say next.

THE GAME SPEAKS DUTCH NOW. The first time you start it, it asks which language you want, and it asks in both languages so that the question can be understood whichever one you read. You can change your mind whenever you like: it is the first row in Settings. Choose Nederlands and everything this game says to you is Dutch -- the menus, the nine towns and everything between them, every person you can talk to, the Book of Whispers with all one hundred and forty-nine Whisps and two hundred moves in it, the battle, the shops, the marketplace, the help, the credits, and this list of changes. It is not a start that is going to be finished later. The world alone is two hundred and thirty-two thousand characters of writing and every one of them is across. AND IT IS NOT YOUR SCREEN READER READING A TRANSLATION. Every spoken line in the game has been recorded again in Dutch -- one thousand four hundred and eighteen recordings, counting the people who mutter to themselves while you walk past them, which is the sound you hear more than any other. Your mother, the professor, your rival, the trainers who step out in front of you, the man on the ferry, the master in each hall and the voice in the lab: they speak Dutch, in a Dutch voice, and it is the same person each time you meet them. Three sounds stayed as they were, because a sound is the same in every language: the door in the tavern back room and the call of a Twigstalk in the marsh. NAMES DO NOT CHANGE, IN EITHER LANGUAGE. A Humgrub is a Humgrub, a Vessel is a Vessel, a Healing Vial is a Healing Vial and credits are credits. That is a decision and not something left undone. What your save file remembers and what you hear are then the same words, so a game you began in English can be carried on in Dutch without losing anything, and a Whisp you caught in one language can be sold on the marketplace to somebody playing in the other. AND THE HANDBOOK IS IN DUTCH AS WELL. It is installed next to the English one and both are in your start menu, with the language in the name of the shortcut rather than inside the file -- because the name is the part your screen reader reads out before you decide to open it. IF WINDOWS HAS NO DUTCH SPEECH VOICE ON IT, the game tells you so in both languages and keeps the voice you had: the writing is Dutch and the voice is not, and you can add a Dutch voice under Speech in the Windows settings. If you use NVDA, nothing about this changes for you. This game has never touched the voice you chose there and it does not start now. THE LIST OF CHANGES YOU ARE READING AT THIS MOMENT SPEAKS DUTCH TOO, and until this update it did not. The Dutch was written and sitting in the language file; this screen simply never asked for it, so the heading came out in Dutch and the nine thousand characters behind it came out in English. Nothing said anything was wrong, because as far as everything that measures this was concerned the translation existed. AND THE TIME YOU HAVE PLAYED IS DUTCH. Press T in a Dutch game and you were told "3 hours and 12 minutes", with those two words in English in the middle of a Dutch sentence. It says "3 uur en 12 minuten" now, and it picks between singular and plural the way Dutch picks rather than the way English does, which is not the same rule. AND YOUR BAG HAS ONE FEWER EMPTY ROW IN IT. There was a fourth category in there called Move Machines, and there is not one item anywhere in this game that belongs in it -- so every time you opened your bag, walking around or in the middle of a battle, you walked past a row that could only ever answer that it was empty. It is out of the list until there is something to put in it. Nothing has been thrown away: anything you are carrying is where it was. AND IF YOU HAVE BEEN CROWNED, THERE IS SOMETHING WAITING FOR YOU AT HOME. There is a television in your front room. It has stood there since your first morning, your mother beside it, and for a hundred hours it has said the same thing: it is on, playing something quietly. Come home with the crown, and walk past it once. WHAT ASKS AFTER THAT ASKS THREE THINGS OF YOU, AND THEY ARE STANDING IN PLACES YOU HAVE WALKED PAST. One is on the floor of the Ashvent, behind a wall of fire that has never once opened for you. One is on the bottom of the channel, and you cannot walk to that one -- you are taken down during the crossing and you do not leave until it is finished. The last is in a hollow behind a split in the rock that grinds itself open, stands open a while, and closes again. A fire, a water and a ground animal, and there is nothing else like them in this game: level fifty while you are most likely around sixty, and built heavier than any other kind that exists, so what makes them hard is what they are and not the number beside their name. EACH OF THE THREE IS THERE ONCE. Beat it or catch it -- either one -- and it is gone for good. Not in five minutes, not after a restart, not in an hour. Losing is allowed and so is running: you can walk out and come back and try it again, and nothing is spent by failing. Each of them brings its own music, because something that happens once in a game should not sound like the seven hundredth patch of grass. And none of the three can be sold on the marketplace. That is not a promise the game makes to itself: the server refuses them by name. AND AFTER THE THIRD IT DOES NOT END, IT STOPS. What has been asking is no longer asking for a trial. It asks for a meeting, and it names a place you already know. What happens when you go there is the next piece of work, and it is not in this update.

A FIX FOR THE SEVENTH HALL, AND FOR THE SECOND. If you have stood in the seventh hall wondering what to do next, this was not you. The hall is a corridor with four channels of poisoned water across it, a lever before each one, and a trainer waiting on the far side. Pull a lever and you have five seconds to cross -- but the direction you were being given never moved on when you crossed. It kept naming the lever you had just used, which is behind you, across water that has closed again. It never mentioned the trainers at all, and it never mentioned the fourth lever: after the third trainer you were pointed straight at the master, with a full channel between you and him and nothing saying there was a lever for it. The directions now go lever, trainer, lever, trainer, lever, trainer, lever, master, and out. AND THEY START AT THE FIRST LEVER AGAIN EVERY TIME YOU WALK BACK IN, because the water does too: a lever holds its channel for five seconds, not for the rest of your game, so a hall you left halfway through is full again when you return and you are told so. Once the master is beaten the floor stays dry for good, and walking back in then points you at the way out instead of at a lever there is no longer any reason to pull. AND THE SECOND HALL HAD THE SAME FAULT. Each valve there opens one lane with a latch at the end of it, and you were pointed at the valve until the latch was done -- so after turning it you were still being sent back to the valve. It now sends you up the lane to the latch, and if you turn a different valve in the meantime it sends you back to the right one, because opening one lane closes the others. AND THE MARSH NO LONGER SENDS YOU BACK. Once the boy in Trenchmoor had his Twigstalk again, the town sent you out onto the causeway and the marsh sent you straight back to the town, over and over. The marsh was switching to sending you home the moment you had ever set foot in Sedgewater -- which happens the first time you walk through, long before there is anything to go home about. It now waits until the seventh hall is actually beaten. Three other places had the same habit of pointing backwards once everything in them was done, and they now point on. THE LIST OF PLACES IS A LIST OF PLACES AGAIN. Control Shift B answers one question -- where can I go from here -- and it had filled up with things that answer the other three. Whisker Bay listed its well and its fish crates; the tavern listed its guests; a garden in Rupon listed a Whisp. Nearly three quarters of every entry in the game belonged somewhere else. They are gone from it, and nothing is lost: Control Shift O already lists every object in a room by itself, Control Shift N every person, Control Shift W every Whisp, all of them nearest first with the distance. What is left in Control Shift B is what you asked it for -- the doors, the buildings, the ways out -- with what you are meant to be doing next still at the top. Thank you to the player who said it was cluttered; it was. AND EVERY SHOP NOW CHARGES THE SAME FOR THE SAME THING. The Greater Healing Vial was quietly two different items: in four towns it healed fifty-five and cost eight hundred, in five others it healed a hundred and twenty and cost nine hundred. Buy one in each and you had two things in your bag with one name that did different things. The three vials now heal twenty-five, fifty-five and a hundred and twenty-five, for three hundred, seven hundred and two thousand; the three Vessels cost two hundred, six hundred and twelve hundred; and every cure is fifty, everywhere. AND ONE SMALL THING: the man who keeps the market link had wandered out of his corner in the Serhexam hospital. He is back where he stands in every other one, at the back on the left. AND TRENCHMOOR HAS ITS HOSPITAL MUSIC BACK. Six of the seven hospitals played the same quiet track and the one in Trenchmoor played nothing -- which is also why the town's own music seemed to start late every time you came outside: a building that asks for silence fades the town out on the way in and makes it climb back from nothing on the way out. AND THE WHISP PC WILL NOW TAKE AN ITEM FROM YOU. The storage in those machines was always one shared box -- put something in at one and it is there at every other -- but there was no way to put anything in at all, only to take out, so it was impossible to tell. You can now put an item in and take it out anywhere, and both lists read the way your bag does, with the number said aloud: "Healing Vial, 3 of them". AND THE VIAL IN YOUR OWN DESK NO LONGER GOES MISSING: opening any other machine first used to count as filling the box, and the one item the game starts you with was never seen again. AND THE MUSIC NO LONGER STOPS WHEN YOU STEP INDOORS. In Pulse Town, Hedzar and Scorch Horizon the town's music simply carried on through a front door; in Cairnfell, Ponthy Bay, Rupon, Whisker Bay and Trenchmoor it faded away over two seconds and had to climb back from nothing when you came out again. Sixteen houses, a cellar and a garden now carry the music of the place they belong to. The hospitals and the hotels keep their own quiet track, as they always did. KEY ITEMS STAY WITH YOU, THOUGH: the Book of Whispers, the Heliwatch and the notes from the caverns cannot be put in a machine. There is no PC in the Ashvent, none in the caverns and none in the marsh, so a Heliwatch left in a drawer three towns away is an hour's walk rather than a tidy bag -- and a note with a door combination on it would be a cavern run you can no longer finish. Anything already sitting in storage can still be taken out. AND THE BREEDER IN SERHEXAM SPEAKS IN HIS OWN VOICE NOW. Hatchmaster Oberrow has had a recording since the day his hatchery was built, and you have never heard it: he muttered away in his own voice behind the counter and then answered you in the screen reader's. He also says something when you leave without pairing, and something when you come in with nothing to pair -- before, the first was silence and the second was an empty list. HE ALSO TALKS YOU THROUGH THE PAIRING ITSELF NOW, AND ASKS FOR THE NAME HIMSELF. Everything between picking one of your Whisps and walking out with the young came from the screen reader before, so he greeted you in his own voice, went flat in the middle, and said goodbye in his own voice again. And if you cannot afford it he no longer leaves you standing in silence: he says so, and his list opens again with what you are carrying at the top of it. AND NAMING A WHISP NO LONGER RESTARTS THE CONVERSATION YOU WERE IN. The Enter that confirmed the name also reached out into the world on the same frame, so naming your newly bred Whisp put you straight back into the breeder's opening speech. Backing out with "no" never did this, which is why it went unnoticed: only actually typing a name triggered it. AND THE EIGHTH HALL LETS YOU OUT AGAIN. Beat the master up on his ledge and the direction you were given pointed at the door, which sounds right and is not: walking south from the middle of that hall puts you straight back into the updraught that carries you north, over and over. The hall has always had a way home -- the draught behind the master's ledge, which drops you at the door in one go -- and you are now pointed at that instead, and at the door once you are down. AND THE EIGHTH STAMP NO LONGER CLAIMS YOUR WHISPS OBEY YOU UP TO LEVEL TWO BILLION. It says a hundred, which is the highest a Whisp can be; nothing about what obeys has changed. AND THE CHAMPIONSHIP HALL NOW POINTS YOU AT THE ARENA DOORS. Standing in the preparation hall with eight stamps, the direction you were given was the way back out to the beach -- the room had nothing else to point at, so it pointed you out of it at the exact moment you were meant to go in. The doors are an object rather than a door, so they were only ever in the object list, and nobody in that room mentions them. They are what you are pointed at now, every time you come back between rounds. AND THE LAST MOMENT OF THE GAME NO LONGER STARTS ITS MUSIC IN THE MIDDLE. Waking up in your own room after being crowned, your home town's theme came in seventy-four seconds deep, halfway through a phrase. The music remembers where an area track was when a battle took it over, so it can hand it back where it left off -- but between the arena and your bedroom it is a different track, and the position of one was being applied to the other. AND A MESSAGE YOU HAVE HEARD NOW STAYS HEARD. Sell a Whisp on the marketplace and a message comes back to say so, with what you earned; the same happens when an offer of yours runs out and when somebody takes a trade. You chose it in your message box, it was read to you, and it went away -- and then it came straight back, on the next thing that looks for post: closing the pause menu, speaking to the market agent, or the game's own look every eight minutes. The credits were always yours and the box was always right. What never happened was the game telling the marketplace you had heard it, so the marketplace kept handing it back. It tells it now, and a message you have heard is gone for good.