2518: The Pitioss Ruins

I finished Final Fantasy XV’s main story earlier on. It was a spectacular conclusion, but that’s not what I want to talk about today. Instead, I want to talk about the game’s “secret” dungeon, the Pitioss Ruins.

As you have probably surmised, spoilers are ahead, albeit not story ones, since the Pitioss Ruins is a purely mechanical challenge. I am going to talk about all the different aspects of the dungeon, though, so if you want to encounter it for yourself, look away now.

The Pitioss Ruins are only accessible after you’ve finished the game, since you can’t get the flying car Regalia Type-F until this point, and you need to be able to fly to reach the area of the map where the dungeon is.

You may have noticed the area on the map earlier in the game — it’s near the Rock of Ravatogh, marked as what looks like a yellow slash mark on the map. It looks like it should be an icon you can click on, but it’s just part of the map. In actual fact, this yellow stroke is a small dirt airstrip on which you can land the Regalia Type-F (carefully!) before proceeding on foot towards the Pitioss Ruins, which stand proudly atop a nearby hill, looking like a deceptively small stone structure.

Like Costlemark Tower, the Pitioss Ruins only open at night, though in this case it’s through a button activating rather than the actual entrance opening up. Noctis must enter alone by hopping through a narrow gap in a metal fence, pushing the button and descending via an ancient elevator into the complex.

The Pitioss Ruins are a pure puzzle dungeon — there are no enemies inside, meaning your only task is to explore it thoroughly and loot it of all the many treasures it has to offer. (And there are many treasures inside, including the Black Hood accessory, which allows Noctis to auto-dodge enemy attacks — immensely useful.) This does not, by any means, mean that it is a walk in the park, however; on the contrary, it took me just shy of four hours to clear it today, since it’s filled with challenging, interesting and unforgiving environmental puzzles.

The dungeon is split into several areas. You begin gently with a small area in which your task is simply to get a door open. In order to do this, you need to navigate around moving walls, hit switches to move rolling boulders out of the way and eventually smash an enormous statue to clear the way to the door.

This is subsequently followed by a puzzle that demands careful observation of the environment, including the small details, in order to succeed. Flipping a switch activates a room that rotates around its axis, with openings at regular intervals. You have to get into one of these openings, then stand behind a small “wall” (which becomes a floor when the opening is perpendicular to the ground) and carefully fall down a small hole, avoiding spikes.

Beyond this, there’s a section with a number of platforming challenges, some of which simply require careful jumping onto stationary platforms, and others of which see you standing precariously atop spinning spiky things.

After this there is one of the highlights of the dungeon for me. Opening a door, you discover a huge Demon Wall-esque structure rolling backwards and forwards across an enormous dark room. The front of the structure is covered with spikes, so you have to think and observe carefully to get around it. What then follows is a lengthy sequence where you climb all over and through the structure and the surrounding room in order to get out of a door at the other end of it. It’s a beautifully designed sequence that makes a huge amount out of a geographically small area.

Next up is another highlight: a section of dungeon where everything is skewed at roughly a 45-degree angle. Not only does this play havoc with your perception of perspective, it also presents the unusual traversal challenge of effectively allowing you to stand on not one flat “floor”, but instead two separate faces of the blocks that make up the area. Navigating this section is a perception challenge: can you correctly recognise which areas are safe to jump to, or which you can climb up?

Delightfully, dropping down into the next area heralds a complete change in perspective: the game temporarily becomes a side-on 2D platformer with static screens, Prince of Persia-style. This sequence is short but sweet, with some tricky jumps and a couple of mean tricks at the end.

This is then followed by a sequence that uses a similar idea to the skewed section earlier, but in which the angle at which the level is rotated changes at various intervals. Using a huge statue at the far end of the room to orient yourself, you need to ensure you recognise which way is “up” and carefully pick your way to the statue itself, at which point you jump on its tits and it falls over, conveniently allowing you access to the next area.

Following another climb over confusing angled floors — this time rather narrow and precarious — you find yourself back at the start of the dungeon from a different perspective, at which point you need to find a way to open the doors to the treasure and make your escape.

I absolutely loved this dungeon. I loved it so much that I didn’t even mind when I forgot to save after my first clear (the game didn’t auto-save, either!) and promptly crashed the Regalia Type-F on takeoff, causing an immediate Game Over and losing four hours of progress. My second clear was much smoother since I knew what I was doing, but it still took quite a while.

The dungeon design itself is really good. It’s well paced, gradually increasing in difficulty and complexity as you proceed. There are frequent means of unlocking “shortcuts” to various sections of the dungeon, so you don’t have to clear it all in one go — you can’t save inside, but you can step outside, save and return to where you were using the shortcuts without too much difficulty.

Perhaps the best thing about it is something that the team have clearly learned from masochistic platformers such as Super Meat Boy: instant respawns. Since you’ll be “dying” a lot in the Pitioss Ruins — it’s filled with bottomless pits and instant death spike traps — it would be a real chore to have to endure Final Fantasy XV’s hefty load times every time you fucked up. Thankfully, then, you won’t get a Game Over inside the Pitioss Ruins — “dying” will simply set you back to the nearest checkpoint, which may be the start of an area, or just before a particularly tricky jumping challenge later in the dungeon. Getting put back to these checkpoints is sufficient punishment to discourage messing up, but not so frustrating you want to leave the dungeon behind and never speak its name again.

All in all, the Pitioss Ruins proved to be a spectacular piece of level design, with some Nier-level mechanical mindfuckery along the way thanks to the skewed sections and the 2D platformer part. I really enjoyed clearing the dungeon, and I have no doubt that the Black Hood will prove to be very useful in the rest of the postgame content.