100% or Bust #2 - Infamous: Festival of Blood

Welcome to 100% or Bust, a subseries of The Platinum Road for getting the remaining trophies from DLC’s or just games that don’t have Platinums. This is the second entry and we’re covering Infamous 2’s standalone DLC, Festival of Blood, before the 100% becomes unavailable.

A fun what if?/non canon story that takes place on Pyre Night (A hybrid of Halloween and Bonfire Night). Cole responds to a call for help beneath the cathedral but falls into a trap. Taken prisoner by Vampires, his Conduit blood is used to revive the queen of the Vampires: Bloody Mary. Now he has until dawn to free himself or be a slave of the night forever. Man, they don't make fun silly DLC like this anymore. 

There’s only one trophy for story progression, that being ‘Fangs for Playing’ which is earned by killing Bloody Mary at the end. The other trophies are primarily related to collectibles and power usage. Many of them may seem like grinds but they’re not too bad at all. There’s not really much to do in Festival of Blood either – it's all the main quest with no side quests and only one map dynamic event. 

The trophy that seemed like it might be the most annoying grind is ‘Bite Club’ which is for biting 100 Civilians. For context, outside of hunting for the trophy I think I bit less than 10 people for gameplay/progression. I needn’t have worried though as I reached 50 civilians bitten by the time I got to the objective of the first mission. While on my little rampage, I accidentally stumbled upon ‘Dinner Theater’ which is for biting a street performer. 

Upon clearing the mission, I decided to wrap up civilians for Bite Club and moved onto ‘Give Them the Fanger’ for clearing out 20 Vampire packs, the aforementioned sole map event. The vampires are fun to fight, despite them all having powers they’re not all Conduit level threats. Spiked boomerangs and mini Uzis are amongst some of the weapons they use. It’s amusing that Vampires will use humans as meat shields but since there’s no Karma system in the DLC, you’re free to blast away. 

It’s during the second mission ‘The Barbed Cross’ that we are introduced to the remaining DLC features – Canopic Jars, Hidden Vampires and Bloody Mary’s Teachings. The Canopic Jars and Mary’s Teachings are the new Blast Shards and Dead Drops respectively. Hidden Vampires exist throughout New Marais and Cole can use his new vampire vision (His plague vision from the base game) to hunt them down. They’re distinctive from regular people by being blue when scanned and lacking the artery/vein system of a human. 20 of those gets you ‘Stakehouse’ and around the same time I got ‘Raising The Stakes’ for staking 100 vampires. I knew I wouldn’t have to grind for that one since staking regular vampires is just the act of finishing them off with melee. 

Finishing that second mission dumps you outside the catacombs which is the perfect chance to get ‘Underground Tour’ which requires you to travel the full length of the vampires den without being on a mission. Rather mercifully this isn’t a don’t touch the ground challenge or grind rail only, just get from Point A to Point B. 

While Mary’s teachings aren’t initially seen on the map, using Cole’s Vampire vision helps you see sigils pointing you in the general direction of the teaching, a ring of sigils on a wall. These are nothing of note, just Mary talking about her various kills. Getting five of the ten enhances your Vampire vision and seeing the Teachings on the map. I got nine of them on my own but I had to double check a map for the 10th one which earns ‘Bleeder’s Digest’ (Shoutout to these trophy names, they’re all very amusing). 

 Collecting half of the Jars earns you ‘Blood Bank’ which is very easy to do thanks to the enhanced radar you get from the Bloody Mary teachings. This might be the same one as the blast shard one from Infamous 2 but I used the UGC for collecting them all. I thought I was at the end of my collection before I realised there was a further 25. Shadow Swarm flying towards the next one, I crashed into one of the huge balloons knocking about. Destroying one earns you ‘Hindenburg Complex’. Turns out you also don’t need a full blood meter to earn ‘Flight Night’ which is just for flying 250 meters without crashing or touching the ground.

With all that said and done, there’s just the final encounter with Bloody Mary which isn’t even really a boss fight, more of a holdout against possessed humans and different vampires while Bloody Mary just dips in and out of the encounter. Honestly while challenging, the ending here is a little disappointing considering they could have at least made her one of the elite Firstborn bat monsters you’ve been fighting. That’s neither nor or there really, the DLC is still fun.

Our last two trophies are ‘Play. Create. Scare’ for playing 20 UGC missions and ‘Count Dra-Cole-a’ for getting all the powers, some of which are locked behind UGC missions. This is unfortunately where my journey ends however because despite playing before the shut down, I just could not get the UGC content to load. Reloading a save, restarting the game… nothing. Apparently this has always been a problem with Festival based on forum posts from 15 odd years ago. At the time of writing this, the servers are officially shut so there’s no going back.

100% or Bust? It’s an out of my control Bust.

I’ve got a couple ideas for the next 100% or Bust so stay tuned!