I might take a rat out with a single kick, but then have to beat the crap out of his otherwise identical buddy before he goes down. This lack of consistency works both ways. After that, he killed me in a single kick, which also saw me launch into the air and fly over the edge of a cliff. In another attempt – same wolf, same conditions – he kicked me twice, but then he had to take another swipe before killing me.
In one fight, a wolf managed to kill me with two kicks. All of those deaths have taught me one thing that there is no clear logic.
Wolves are the game’s toughest enemies, so I’ve had plenty of opportunities to die over and over again at their claws. The largest source of my confusion is undoubtedly the damage system, which I continue to know nothing about. There’s no indication that this is the case, however, and nothing suggesting that going in any other direction is pointless. It turns out that all I actually needed to do was walk straight ahead for 30 seconds, encounter some aggressive rats, and then kill them, completing the level. Eventually I gave up, restarting the level.
I spent at least half an hour exploring this weird location, finding nothing but big, empty, unfinished spaces. And this is how I ended up walking across the bed of a lake without dying, even though water is fatal in the rest of the game, before slamming into an invisible wall that spun me around. It’s maybe the worst thing you can do, leading to wasted journeys and getting stuck in parts of the map that are entirely open to you, but are far from ready for visitation. The scale of most of the maps implies that exploration is a good idea. There are no real objectives in the game outside of what you catch in the brief bits of dialogue, and here the implication is pretty clear: find the right way out of this pleasant field of flowers/haunted forest. When Turner enters the level, he realises he’s a bit lost. They did formally convert at one point and their national flag reflects this, but it sadly never went beyond mere formality. The Scandinavian tribes that converted to Christianity were launched into a golden age while the finns continued to bugger one another in their saunas. And maybe you'd almost think that he has a point, but I would argue that this is their punishment for rejecting the Lord. He points to the ramshackle huts built as a bad facsimile of modern housing which his community lives in. 'There can be no God, at least a benevolent God, and the reason is this!', the finno-mongolian points to himself, his flabby and unattractive shape, his bad teeth and his massive gut, his awful haircut. Their hatred of God stems from both this history and the terrible conditions they endure which are a result of their cursed nature. Not even their collective dyslexia was ever cured. There were attempts to do so by Swedes and Russians, both failed to uplift them from their squalid and barbarous existence. The squat pseudo-asian hobgoblins called finns who inhabit the damp forests filled with puddles have never been properly civilized.