Stuck in the insanely twisted yet ineffably entertaining game Edge of Reality? Tired of fruitlessly scouring the internet for a walkthrough or walkthru of the AGS game Edge of Reality by Blake Speers? Sick of posting questions about the game Edge of Reality to internet forums and getting absolutely no response whatsoever despite weeks of waiting?
You've found the solution!
Below is what I consider a full walkthrough for Edge of Reality. The game is large and complex, so perhaps a few odd matters are left out in what follows. However, the detailed walkthru below shows how to obtain both major endings for the game.
Before reading on, take a moment to consider whether you really need or want a full walkthrough for the Reality on the Norm (RON or RotN) game Edge of Reality by Blake Speers. The game offers a lot of content, and is very difficult. Yet despite several utterly irrational and completely unfair puzzles near the end, ninety-five percent of the game is in my opinion designed with notable attention to fairness and offering the player a sporting chance.
I didn't have a walkthrough or any help whatsoever in any form from anyone, yet I was able to complete the game-- so maybe you can use me as a role model and try to beat the game yourself since I've proved this can be done. You'll probably feel much better in the end if tackle the game alone, as you'll attain a considerable achievement that will boost your self-esteem. If you'd like to conquer the game the honest way, I'm confident anyone can do so if they keep the following principles in mind:
1) If you have a job, demand a month's paid leave or quit. If choosing the latter option, take consolation in the fact that unless you are The Man, most jobs working for The Man are so categorically lousy that you should later easily be able to find an equally sucky job working for somebody who is just as big an incorrigible, lying, ignorant, incompetent jerk as your previous master. Solving Edge of Reality isn't for slackers, though-- you'll need a strong work ethic. Plan to do absolutely positively nothing else except play the game for twelve to fourteen hours a day every day for at least three or four weeks straight. Since you'll be busy with this challenging game, go to the grocery store beforehand and stock up on essential items like coffee, cigarettes, and liquor. Though everyone except nitwitted statist weenies understands a man can not merely survive but positively thrive subsisting solely on these three essential staples for decades, you may also want to buy some food-- but only because the game is mostly about food, getting food, preparing food, eating food, and so forth. Your appetite will be very stimulated because you'll be thinking about food the whole time you play.
2) Read the documentation that comes with the game. The author there provides many clever hints in plain sight. The three most important things the author has to say are:
Quote from: Blake Speers
3. Assume the game actually works. I tested it a lot. A LOT.
3. There is one key to winning the game: Figuring out how to solve the puzzles and then solving them. Also, walking from one place to another.
6. Adventure-game logic is not the same as regular logic. Think more oddly.
Though I had my doubts many times, all three of these statements are quite true and are all the hints you really need to solve the game, especially if you keep in mind at all times the famous saying of that uncannily smart fella from Queen Victoria's day:
Quote from: Sherlock Holmes
How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?
3) Exercise your index finger daily to gain endurance in preparation for playing Edge of Reality-- in practice, most of your time will be spent feverishly clicking all over the screen as you engage in countless pixel hunts and trying randomly to combine one item with another.
4) Dr. Emeritus, one of the characters in the game who is a keenly intelligent professor dude, says at one point:
Quote from: Emeritus
I daresay something terrible is happening all about us, something far more dreadful than anyone may have feared. We must consider breaking fourth walls and opening ourselves to potentialities far removed from the confines of our mundane, narrow perspectives...
He doesn't say it exactly that way, since the game is rife with spelling and grammar errors as well as frequently poor English syntax. Maybe the author got frustrated after working on the game for nine years and was so eager to release it he forgot to use a spellchecker. However, I think if Emeritus could have written his own lines his words would have appeared just like I noted.
In any case, the point here is-- the game is very hard. I suspect this why no other walkthrough exists despite the game being released years ago; everyone else simply gave up instead of fearlessly forging forever forward as I did. Though most of the puzzles are logical and integral to the story, some of the later situations Mika Huy faces are flat-out unfair and nonsensical. Therefore, to solve this game I found that I occasionally had to quite literally think outside the box as Dr. Emeritus suggests. In one case I needed a sound-recording program to study certain sounds in the game. In two other cases, I had to use a hex-editor to search through all the game's text stored in the exe to find the solution to a puzzle. Both kinds of programs are very common, but if you don't already have them two freeware programs I frequently use are Audacity (sound editor) and Frhed (hex editor).
5) If Step Four seems like cheating to you, let's be honest: why are you here searching for a walkthrough for Edge of Reality, anyway? However, if you'd rather skip Step Four and have only the bare minimum of absolutely required hints to puzzles no one could ever solve on their own except through blind luck, keep these ideas on a sheet of paper taped to your monitor:
--The game is highly prone to frequent CTDs whenever using a telephone or playing the half-dozen minigames. Save your game frequently.
--Mika has serious trouble guiding a certain turgid pole into a particular gaping orifice. The whole affair is merely a pixel hunt-- if you keep this in mind from the start, you'll figure it out sooner than later.
--If you're having trouble luring a certain dancing phenomenon somewhere, try not doing anything once; when the game automatically restarts the scene, the enemy will respawn farther away and you'll have more freedom of maneuver. Furthermore if he turns invisible (a bug), just go back to where you found him the first time and talk to him again to restart the sequence of events.
--To talk to the King, randomly click around the area to left of his feet. Don't use the Teleporter there, either-- the game will crash in all cases.
--Nope, neither green spot on a wall does anything important-- so don't waste your time.
--Put the stupid mask on BEFORE, PRIOR TO, AND IN ADVANCE OF going there. This means one particular time when you arrive in a certain area, if you're not already wearing the mask you'll never ever finish the game with the best ending and will likely go bonkers trying to figure out what you missed. In many cases during gameplay Mika can't even walk around while wearing the mask, so to accomplish this unintuitive result you'll have to set things up where she can wear the mask and then just click on something to leave the screen rather than try walking to an exit. Since solving this puzzle both intrinsically demands knowledge gained by the player in retrospect which could not possibly be suspected by the player-character at the time it all goes down and breaks sharply with otherwise standard interface conventions the player has previously learned, this puzzle is ONTOLOGICALLY UNFAIR and in violation of the Nelson Act of 1995. Furthermore if you're able, just leave the mask on until you clearly no longer need it-- you'll know when.
--A certain disembodied head doesn't like eldritch refrigerator magnets. However outrageous, facts is facts. Perhaps the issue wouldn't be so piquant if the player had more than a few seconds to react after a lengthy cutscene during which the game cannot be saved, with failure meaning the player-character's doom and a reloaded save to spend another five minutes doing the whole thing over-- twenty or thirty times.
--Coral plus Dove White equals Pink. Either the author's monitor was not properly calibrated, or in whatever odd locale the author lives "Purple" is apparently referred to in common parlance as "Pink." Among other things I'm a graphic artist, so I know all kinds of technical info about both colors and keeping my monitor calibrated-- therefore I am eminently qualified to point out that purple is not pink, that fuchsia is quite distinct from heliotrope, and that red-saturated amber plus white does not make any of these. However, if you want to beat the game you'll have to leave aside quaint conventions like "the color wheel."
I enjoyed this game very much, and am convinced almost everyone who plays beyond the first chapter (namely, the original demo material) will feel likewise. Just keep at it, and stay sharply focused on one matter at a time. Though I've previously thought quite poorly of the "surreal" styled RON games (many of which seem to be wantonly hurled crude insults rather than sincere efforts at providing anyone except their authors entertainment) from which Edge of Reality draws at least some inspiration and I have preferred more traditionally styled games such as "Purity of the Surf" or "The Postman Only Dies Once," after extended play I now consider the full version of Edge of Reality among my favorite RON episodes.
*****
If pondering the above notions hasn't helped or you just want the walkthrough already, we'll begin. Because my comments exceed the maximum character limit for any individual posting, I was forced to split up the remainder into the several replies to myself that follow.
All compass directions are relative to the player-character's current location:
East = right edge of screen
West = left edge of screen
North = top of screen
South = bottom of screen