- Jul 11, 2023
- 42
- 72
Well yeah, I've played the map hundreds of times. While yes their position are randomly selected, their path (from entering to exiting the map) is the same, it might be hard to see it on the first floor but it's much easier to see on the second floor.No you can't, their movement and starting positions are clearly randomly selected.
I've restarted this shop level at least ten times. Sometimes someone immediately beelines right from the entrance to the stairs, sometimes nobody goes up the stairs for a minute or more. Usually there's one person up there already when the level loads, sometimes there's nobody (which always seems to mean that somebody is going to head to the stairs immediately, it never stays empty for long) sometimes there's two (in this case, the second person usually leaves quickly)
The person up there has a handful of paths that they can cycle through, usually sticking around near the right-hand-side (while coming up the stairs, there's a chair on the right and left, and the view down into the shop over the balcony is in front of you) moving from the racks of books in the to the chair and back again, but occasionally they'll either go for the stairs or do a full circuit.
There's a couple of moments that make for good openings to sneak up/down the stairs while nude, but you have to duck behind a shelf or the pillar in the centre of the stairs immidiately when they turn to face you.
The problem occurs when they do a full circuit (starting at the chair at the right, cycling around the back to the chair on the left) while someone else is coming up the stairs, at which point you get pincered.
So you have to wait for the bottom of the stairs to be clear, ditch your coat, run up the stairs, then either sit in the chair on the left or crawl behind the shelves on the left... and then you wait for the mission to be complete, which seems to take 40-60 seconds.
But during this time-period you have to continue to crawl around the bookshelves staying out of LoS from the person at the top of the stairs, and if a second person also comes up the stairs, it becomes much harder to avoid them. Sometimes being outright impossible, depending on how their patterns line up.
... damnit.
I forgot this was even a thing. Every other item raises your chance of being caught (even the mask and dark glasses. hell, even the panties and skirt, which should logically serve to disguise what you're doing) so when I needed maximum time to escape, I just went with zero items.
In hindsight, bodypaint might be the trick.
The second floor itself only have two NPC movement pattern, you can immediately know where they will exit just by looking at where they will stand immediately after they got into the second floor. In fact out of those two only one path leads to an NPC sitting at the chair.
But anyhow, it's true the shop map is insanely luck based unlike the first two map, but the map itself essentially just needs you to complete 3-4 achievements (depends on your equipment) to be 100% guaranteed win.
Using the body paint is an easy way out, I also forgot it exists the first time I played this map, but it's possible to 100% the map without it even if you equip the entire equipment.
I don't want to rewrite my guide, so you can check it out if you're struggling with it, I post it here.