Tonight we, the Spiral Knights Crusaders, learned that the dead can:

1) drop health pills and vials for the use of the living, especially useful for health revives. So even if you’re dead, at least the group won’t lose use of your pills; and

2) give gunslingers, over voice chat ((We use Mumble as our chat software, and it rocks.)), the extra information they need to kill the gun puppies off screen if the dead have been killed far ahead enough (darn you, isometric perspective view).

Otherwise, well, you’re dead. And we died. A lot. We were all rather out of practice; the others hadn’t played the game in a while, and I kept playing the levels before Tier 2 Basil and not as a bomber. Past Tier 2 Basil, Spiral Knights becomes a very different game, a true rogue-like where you need, need, need to pay attention and use strategy or else you die horrible deaths.

Like, for instance, making sure gun puppies don’t shoot at the gunslingers by doing this:

In more amusing news, on the way down I somehow managed to balance perfectly on a gate that my friends had pushed:

Very strange.

But after much to do, we finally got down to Emberlight, and by now my friends had filled out all their 4* requirements! In celebration I showed them around Emberlight’s various strange sights, which also include gremlins that sometimes wave at you from their second story flats:

And now we are very tired, and thus we didn’t go on to Tier 3. But I shall remember fondly the times when we shot, bombed, and stabbed monsters to death, often all at once.

… We are so going to need better stuff down in Tier 3.