WARNING – spoilers ahead!! It is recommended you finish the game before reading further!
Today I’m going to talk about the last two story beats of Act 2. They are among my favorite beats to write for and really help to keep the player glued to the story.
The first beat we’ll talk about is called the All Is Lost beat. It follows the Bad Guys Close In beat and is kind of like the Catalyst beat in that it’s usually something that happens to the hero. It’s called the All Is Lost beat because whatever happens to the hero it seems like it’s the worst it could ever get. It’s bleak, depressing, and feels like a total defeat. It’s usually the part of the story where the mentor character dies (think Obi Wan). Almost always there’s a whiff of death. It’s dark stuff, and it's supposed to leave you with a sense of…well, how is the hero going to get out of this one?
In Elohim Eternal: The Babel Code, the All is Lost beat is featured when Joshwa, Beyoz, and Ruthia finally return to Jericho with the Babel code in hand. They are greeted to a scene where a Jehudan soldier kills an Attikan soldier. And if that wasn’t already bad, we see that this Jehudan uprising is Lamech’s doing and he has both Gemara and Alkandros tied up and has already killed Beyoz’s father, Kaisar. Worse yet, he kills both Gemara and Alkandros. We don’t just have a whiff of death, we have an ending like Hamlet.
To make matters worse, Joshwa is seemingly in league with Lamech, giving Lamech the Babel code and allowing his friends, both Ruthia and Beyoz, to be imprisoned (and when they go to Jericho’s jail cells what do they find? A massacre of the Cainite prisoners—even more death!).
Clearly this is the lowest our heroes have ever been in the story. It almost seems like their entire journey was for nothing and they’ve just relinquished the Babel code to a murdering, religious fanatic.
This leads us into the next story beat – the Dark Night of the Soul.
If the All Is Lost beat is like a Catalyst beat, then the Dark Night of the Soul is like the Debate beat. Here, we have the hero absorbing the loss of the All is Lost beat and coming to grips with what he needs (remember, the need is that internal goal/life lesson for the hero, totally separate from the external goal/want of the hero). It’s at this moment that the hero humbles himself, admits that he is only human, and yields control over his want. It’s here that he gets a glimpse of that life lesson he needs to learn to succeed in the story. It’s a moment of surrender. It’s like needing to hit rock bottom to discover what it is you really need. That’s the Dark Night of the Soul (and we have all had our own—perhaps several!).
For Joshwa, this is when he returns home to his mother’s villa. He mopes around, he questions himself, he questions all he’s believed in, including his uncle. His mother realizes what he’s going through, and she gives him the journals his father had left them, and in one of the journal entries, Joshwa discovers something shocking: it was Lamech who placed the infernos in Mount Sinai, and it was Lamech who detonated him. This was all Lamech’s doing.
With that realization in mind, with Joshwa starting to piece together all the questions he’s been facing, Joshwa decides to set out and confront his uncle Lamech.
This leads us into the start of Act 3.