Declawing the Cat God

I've now finished all the main content for The Secret World's Halloween content and it more than lived up to the hype. It was certainly very different to the Halloween content of other games.

Have a wallpaper I made

The questline was excellent, easily matching the high quality of the other quests in the game, with some genuinely mind-bending investigation required, and a fun mini-dungeon to finish off. The twist at the end was superb, really unexpected (though watching my wife play it through afterwards there were actually quite a few hints, like the Haitian accents of the cats, the fact there is a character called Incognito, and the references to stitching things together). Considering the issue is called The Cat God, and all of the promotion material was based around the Cat God, the final twist showed what a great piece of misdirection the event was.

I loved that despite all that the Cat God himself was actually never the protagonist. As far as I can make out Baron Samedi simply took on the guise of the Cat God Irusan in order to get the cats to dig things up for him. What exactly? I think body parts were mentioned, and that together with the reference to stitching something together and clawing at the curtain makes me wonder what he's up to. It doesn't sound good...

The true villain revealed

Anyway, it was great to see the Baron, and there are some very heavy hints we'll see him again. Perhaps we'll even get to visit Haiti. I just hope we don't have to wait a year for the story to be resolved.

There were some great touches in the story. I loved the little coda at the end that suggests there may be some hope for Moose and Andy getting together after all ("I'm trying to convince Andy he needs to experiment more"... "shooting straight will only get you so far... in... uh, you know.... cases..." "You bet sweetie. Go get 'im"). It's weird how I'm rooting for two minor NPCs in a game to get together, and it's nice to see the story move things along for characters, rather than leaving them in the usual MMO static limbo.

The rewards for the event have been fun too, with some nice costumes available in the shop and some amusing glamour candies available as loot drops. My favourite rewards were the clothing rewards from the questline and the filth-cat pet.

My cool new threads

My only quibble about The Secret World's first Halloween event was that it is a little short. It's certainly different from any holiday event I've played in an MMO, and the quality level of the story, questing and design is superb, but once the storylines have been played through there is little else to do.

Stonehenge, location of our victory over the Cat God

Sure, you can hunt Incognito and do your bit for the server-wide faction competition, but there is limited replayability. Perhaps that's the price we pay for such a high quality event. Luckily the community has really stepped up, and as I wrote previously there are many community events going on.

Overall I was really impressed with the Halloween event. It was fun, tough and had some great rewards. I just want more! Still, the teases of future content it gave us will have to do.