With the Midpoint beat completed, the player has experienced about half of the game’s story. Now starts the second half of the story and where we switch from the protagonist’s want (or external goal) to their need (or internal goal).
The beat is called Bad Guys Close In because things start to ramp up for the protagonist. The Bad Guys are both external and internal (psychological). External Bad Guys can be literal bad guys, whereas the internal Bad Guys are all the anxieties and fears and inner critiques we all face on a day-to-day basis, but on a much grander scale. The internal Bad Guys is the protagonist wrestling with what he needs and soon coming to the realization that he does really need it.
In Elohim Eternal: The Babel Code, Joshwa’s external Bad Guys are Goliath and the other anakim, the giant azars that come crashing down from the planet Kenoma, and eventually Ham and the judges, the civil unrest between Jehudan and Attikan coming to fruition, and the Kosmokraters coming after Joshwa at the Dead Sea. Even the Dead Sea itself is a Bad Guy as it’s a dungeon full of poisonous traps. That’s a lot of Bad Guys coming after Joshwa and company, trying to stop them from returning to Jericho to deliver the Babel code.
The internal Bad Guys also ramp up. Joshwa is losing his rapidly losing his faith in the Kosmokraters, and isn’t sure what the Jehudans, led by his uncle Lamech, are doing. He starts to question a lot about his life. If we go back to the theme of Elohim Eternal: The Babel Code, which I’ve summarized in a previous post as “Who is the bad guy?”, then we see that Joshwa is faced with more and more doubts in the Bad Guys Close In. He doesn’t know what’s right or wrong anymore.
And that’s the Bad Guys Close In. Generally speaking, the author typically throws rocks at the protagonist that they must avoid and overcome. In the Bad Guys Close In beat, those rocks become boulders.