What’s On The Shelf | Games, Music & Culture

Welcome back to the Race to Git Gud, where the journey through the FromSoftware catalog continues with all the confidence of someone explaining The Godfather while clearly missing the point. Day 8 wastes no time raising the stakes.

With the Vampire reduced to a pile of vampire salts and Grenfoel Church fading into the rearview mirror, Katia arrives at the Coliseum for a long-awaited confrontation with Helena. This isn’t a standard encounter. Helena fights just like Katia—runestone in hand, summoning monsters into a chaotic, constantly shifting battlefield.

It’s one of the more interesting fights in the game. Instead of playing around fixed enemy patterns, the fight becomes a scramble of positioning, timing, and resource management. Demon Hounds snap at your heels, giant stone heads slam the ground like something ripped straight out of a Thwomp nightmare, and Helena casually heals herself with Fairy cards as if none of this is particularly urgent.

The earlier fight at Castle Grayl feels almost like a tutorial compared to this. Helena’s deck has improved, her pressure is relentless, and—crucially—her cards are unlimited. Yours are not. That single difference turns the fight into a war of attrition that demands constant aggression. There’s no backing off to regroup. Every second spent hesitating is another summon, another heal, another step toward getting overwhelmed.

Eventually, Helena falls. In victory, Katia claims the final runestone and gets a glimpse into Helena’s motivations. No spoilers here, but it reframes the conflict in a way that adds a bit more texture to what initially seemed like a straightforward antagonist.

Naturally, the card reward screen immediately hands over duplicates instead of the elusive Sasquatch—despite it taking up half the available slots. That’s just how it goes.

With the full set of runestones secured—and a welcome bump to health and magic capacity—it’s back to the Apothecary for one last side quest. The destination: Lake Bestriel.

This is where Lost Kingdoms decides fairness is optional.

Lake Bestriel is structured as a large outer ring with several islands in the center. Reaching them requires crossing the map and spending magic stones to form bridges, each one costing more than the last. It’s a clever system on paper, forcing resource planning and route optimization.

In practice, it’s brutal.

The enemies here are faster, stronger, and far more durable than anything leading up to this point. Every random encounter feels like a boss fight in disguise. Magic stones—normally a flexible resource—suddenly become a currency you can’t afford to waste, and every card played carries real weight.

Surviving the trek to the center island brings Katia face-to-face with the Hydra. Whether or not it’s related to the one lurking in Darkroot Garden is up for debate, but the resemblance is close enough to raise an eyebrow.

The fight itself is chaos. Poison mist blankets the arena, limiting movement and making positioning a constant problem. The Hydra is faster than expected, its attacks come quickly, and there’s very little room to recover once things go sideways. Cards burn fast here—faster than feels comfortable—but eventually the creature falls, leaving behind the pathway to the Stone of Cleansing.

That would be a satisfying endpoint. It isn’t.

The final stretch demands clearing two more islands, each guarded by an Elephant King. Massive health pools, wide-reaching stomp attacks, and very little room to maneuver turn these encounters into endurance tests. By the time the last island comes into view, resources are nearly gone.

The situation: low health, ten magic stones, and six remaining cards.

One of them is the Trickster.

That single card ends up making the difference. Its rapid attacks stagger the Elephant King repeatedly, locking it into a loop where it can barely respond. It’s not elegant, but it works—and at this stage, survival is the only metric that matters.

Battered, barely standing, and running on fumes, Katia slams the Stone of Cleansing into place and finishes the level with a one-star rating. No hesitation, no second attempt. A win is a win.

It’s at this point I put some thought into the fact I could’ve just backtracked. Listen, I never claimed to be a smart man.

Up to now, there’s still only one death on the board—from the Will O’ Wisps back in Castle Grayl—but this is easily the closest things have come to falling apart entirely.

Next up: Mt. Jarndunn, an active volcano standing between Katia and the Ruh-Arok Temple.

Nothing about that sounds concerning.