When East Met West: The Pact of Steel

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Released
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Size
90.4 KB
Rating
5.00 / 5.00
(2 Reviews)
Board Count
66 / 68
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Date
5 months, 4 weeks ago (Nov 04, 2023)
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When East Met West is an ambitious game, but also quite buggy. Here are merely the bugs to watch out for during gameplay to avoid "softlocks" which render the game impossible to win and force you to restart, reload a save or cheat.

(WARNING: Accessing the board list through the links may spoil major plot points via board names.)

  • In the Berlin apartment, the tea kettle on the stove implodes to reveal a required item using two animated objects. However, neither of these objects disable their touch code when animating, so touching them will stop the animation and prevent the required item from ever appearing.
  • The RPG battle will freeze entirely if you close the window without picking a choice, because the dialog box is never looped.
  • In the ruins, after talking to Louise, she will give you a Yes/No prompt during the following scene which differs depending on whether or not you have a tape measure, but which is not looped in either case. If you don't have a tape measure, closing the dialog box without selecting a choice will softlock the game because the flag required for it to be invoked again will never be set. If you have one, selecting "no" or closing the dialog box without picking a choice will softlock the game because the object will never unlock itself, and selecting "no" will also jump to part of her cutscene animation and get her stuck because it uses the same label as what it's supposed to jump to.
  • The man at the boat is supposed to get shot and then give you a map before he dies, but his object is locked before his assassins appear, so not only is he never shot, the game never lets you retrieve the map from him. Thankfully, the game never sets a flag for the item and merely assumes that you have it, so you can just go in the boat afterward.
  • The boat encounter with the Russian naval captain will softlock the game if you do not select a choice because his dialog boxes are never looped.
  • The blue "Chief Scientist" in the Robotics Centre can be shot before he is supposed to be, softlocking the game because you can only access the robot by talking to him. The "down" button for the robot also waits for six cycles to unlock itself after being pressed unlike the others, which is long enough to ignore the command sent to make it disappear when you free the green key, so you must wait a brief moment before moving the robot east to solve the puzzle.
  • The encounter with the head scientist at the Research Centre will softlock the game if you do not select an option because his dialog boxes never loop. In addition, although he runs toward the player to begin his scene, his subsequent movement code to initiate the warhead sequence relies on him standing directly east of the central machine when it starts. If he started his scene on any row north or south of the machine, he will run all the way to the west, and then run south and get himself stuck, so the warhead sequence will never begin.
  • Accessing the Cryogenics Lab through the Research Centre jail rather than the Centre itself is supposed to make it impossible to solve the control panel puzzle as intended because the hero does not know what the password is; entering the wrong password will lock you out from any further attempts. However, this fails to account for the player already knowing what the correct password is and entering it to gain access, so the cutscene code for solving the puzzle assumes the head scientist led you here and is in the room. The result is that if you go on to solve the puzzle, his object will be in the wrong position to start the cutscene and get stuck, softlocking the game.
  • If you run to the desks to either side of the bunker in Finland before the man inside gives his speech, you will be locked in with them by the objects meant to prevent this from happening.

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