The Risen 3 Report, Day 5: The World's Longest Arm Wrestle

The story so far. Now: arm-wrestling.

Four minutes. Four long, boring, exhausting minutes. Am I trolling this guy, or do I just not know how to arm wrestle?

Little of column A, little of column B. I have heard the mystics tell of 'quick time events', an ancient scourge from a far-off land, but as accomplished an arm-wrestler as I might be, it took me a little while before I could adjust to the additional complications of this otherworldly evil.

You win a special prize if you manage to sit through all of this:

The special prize is that you will continue to believe you can hear that creaking noise for the rest of the day.

Creak, creak, creak. Motionless faces. Silent mouths. Creak, creak, creak. Arm wrestling is VERY SERIOUS. So serious that, even on this island full of demonic terrors, conversational ghosts and far, far too many giant spiders, we successfully proved that one man has a slightly stronger limb than another man. Good job, men.

I'm arm-wrestling this guy because of a woman. To clarify, I am not at all interested in this woman, but the other guy very much is. Despite the fact that his best mate is too. Despite the fact that she's privately agreed to marry both of them. Despite the fact that they seem to have been stood right next to each other while she arranged this deception. Despite the fact that her skin has this funny spectral sheen to it.

I mean, come on, she might as well be wearing a hat which reads "Hello I'm a demonic hellbeast in disguise and rather than just attacking everyone on this island with my massive bone-claws I'm for some reason going to trick two of them into falling in love/lust with me then wait for a wannabe-heroic passer-by to come along and kill them for me, and also isn't this an impressively wide hat?"

Yes, she's just asked me to murder both her suitors, with the promise of Special Cuddles if I do so. Clearly, she's another hellbeast in disguise, much like that accursed duck-turkey. I should probably try and kill her, because saving the world and all that jazz, but the thing is, those two guys have been saying awful things about women. Awful, awful things that I'm not going to repeat. They're a pair of one-track-minded arseholes with zero respect for anything except their pork swords, they really are, and they're going to end up in a well-known series of online videos about how women are depicted in videogames if they're not careful. So I'm not altogether disinclined to attack them instead of her.

Really though, there are no heroes here. I don't want to be the one to stab first (or fire first. I've got a crossbow now, which pleases me enormously). Fortunately - in a horrible sort of way - I manage to talk someone into attacking me first. I do this by swearing at them.

Unfortunately it's Shimmery-Skinned Blatantly Demonic Lady who throws the first punch, having taken umbrage either at my potty mouth or the fact that I've somehow rumbled her cunning and not at all completely obvious deception. She turns into a hellbeast, and its fight, fighty, fight.

What's really sad about this whole affair is that the guy is too broken-up to want to arm wrestle anymore. Aww. It was oddly relaxing.

Elsewhere on Fog Island, I:

• Convinced a man to not eat a funny-looking fish, because that's clearly what happened to his missing best friend. Unsurprisingly, another hellbeast was behind it. What, exactly, is their masterplan? What's the endgame for turning people into fish or disguising themselves as wildfowl and clearly mendacious shiny women? Presumably it didn't involve me stabbing them all to death.
• Got taught how to pull teeth out of animals' corpses. This sounds minor, but I was rather perturbed by previously being unable to do anything with the corpses of my enemies. You gotta have a trophy, right?
• Found the corpse of a ghost's long-lost daughter but he wouldn't tell me what to do next so I abandoned that quest.
• Became increasingly annoyed that the locks on all the chests around here were too complicated for me to pick.
• Won a fight against a Ghoul despite getting my foot stuck on a bit of rock and being left unable to move for the duration.
• Listened to Bones tell me a story about his itchy leg. I've actually got another crew member who's probably far better at fighting than my scenery-chewing voodoo chum, but honestly, there's just no way I could leave Bones behind.

All in all, it's been a pleasant diversion, but I suppose I'd better get on with the business of rescuing my soul from the underworld now. Let's go and find a wizard or something.