Sims 4: Jungle Adventure – Into the Temple
I promised in my last post about Sims 4 that I’d spend a little more time with the new Jungle Adventure game pack, especially exploring a temple. I also said that I’d go back and find the name of the random Sim I chose to inflict this upon adventure with.
Turns out, his name is Javier.
He’d visited the jungle once already, but ran out of vacation time (still a rookie at work, hasn’t built up much time off), so I had to send him home before he got a proper look at the temple. I learned when I brought him back a second time that all the areas you explored before are once again overgrown… so you have to cut your way back through all the vines to re-activate the gates.
This wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for those darn random chance events you get opening each gate. These things are trouble… and dangerous. They really do expect you to have a Sim with fairly high skills in order to participate without penalty.
Twice, poor Javier was poisoned by scorpion bites due to these things.
I wasn’t sure what to do about that — I read that if you had high enough cultural knowledge to unlock the secret vendor in town, you could trade for an antidote. I didn’t have any cultural knowledge yet at all, so Javier was stuck having to fend for himself.
If he was going to be a gonner anyhow, I figured he may as well die exploring the temple. Stepping in harm’s way was something he was very good at doing…
The major issue I had was that Javier entered the jungle with a low Social meter. I tried to have him talk to the locals to raise it, but my time in the jungle was too limited for me to have him sit around town all day chatting.
That’s when I discovered… he wasn’t alone in the temple…
This bony guy is called a Temple Guardian. I was worried that it might attack Javier, but apparently Javier’s social need was so great, he didn’t care about who he befriended at the moment.
The skeleton was actually a pretty nice guy. When their conversation got interrupted as Javier was attacked randomly by fire flies… who literally set Javier on fire… the Guardian looked pretty concerned about the situation.
I mean, check out that expression. I was actually kinda impressed they were able to convey so much worry with just a skull.
Okay… moving on from the disturbing skull imagery.
So, progressing through the temple requires your Sim to respond to several traps and checkpoints. Basically, you click on something in the temple, and it gives you a multiple choice selection on how to try and disarm the trapped doors. Compared to the Sims 3 Adventure expansion, which required you to search for switches and traps and that sort of thing, these mechanics were fairly watered down.
The only up side is that the multiple choice element means that returning to the temple will require a different answer each time. So… there’s a little bit of RNG in there. But not like a whole randomly created temple layout or anything (as far as I know).
Selecting the wrong thing can have several different effects including bodily harm (set on fire), or emotional/need manipulation. I didn’t know at the time that you could examine things to get hints as to what the right answer was. Because I just progressed with trial and error, poor Javier was so bottomed out in his needs and emotions it wasn’t funny.
The only reason he finished the temple at all, despite his crippling emotional state, was due to the berries I’d picked from the Tree of Emotion outside the temple. Eating a happy berry (whatever it was called) was enough to override Javier’s misery just long enough to make it to the final treasure and back to town.
Oh, and as you can see from the picture above, somewhere in there, Javier was able to fight off the poison. So he didn’t die a horrible, writhing death after all.
The final chamber was surprisingly trap-free and included three different chests to loot from. One of them gave me a couple of special artifacts that apparently can be fused with pieces off other artifacts. Seems like there’s a “top” piece and a “bottom” piece. Don’t know what these do yet because I only got the top pieces.
I also got a nice artifact that was worth 8K Simoleons. Seeing that Javier is still scrounging to make a living in his apartment, this was a pretty nice find.
Javier was still in pretty bad shape, so I took him back to his rental. You can warp out of the temple automatically using the map feature, just like any other place in town… I’m not sure how I feel about that. But for the moment, I was glad of it.
I got the poor guy fed and rested… then I spent the remaining time letting him socialize around the market to help his bottomed-out social meter. This actually leveled him a point in the local culture. And he met a cute local girl.
Maybe I’ll send him back again to pursue that friendship. There are still lots of other paths I haven’t uncovered in the jungle yet, and other temples to explore!