As far as I am aware, there are no consequences to going full-bore on the powers, and there's no real reactivity to not using them beyond the Emperor insisting 'but you must.' Basically, if you don't use them, you miss out on cool power-ups.
You're correct about that scene from EA. It was very different -- after killing the cultist, a tadpole crawls out of the corpse and you had to pass two really tough checks to crush it as it resisted you with its psionic powers. It was basically the introduction to the idea that even the tadpoles were a really worrying threat and weren't just harmless bugs, they were potent psychic creatures. I know people did not like how difficult it was to crush them (myself included) but it felt very deliberate.
As it is, the scene is odd. It's like your introduction to the idea of absorbing powers through other the memories and psychic presence that the tadpole evidently consumes and stores (???) but this doesn't ever really come up (there are no plot revelations from, say, consuming Disciple Z'rell's tadpole, for example) and while the game presents it as a magical function, the game's UI presents it as consuming tadpoles so they take up more space in your brain. I'm pretty sure the ability of the tadpole to hijack your body to make you consume another one doesn't ever come up again, and raises big questions as to who and what was behind it. Was it the tadpole, or The Emperor? If it was the latter, why doesn't it go anywhere? If The Emperor was able to protect us from the effects of the tadpole, why did it still happen? It's also very easy to sequence break -- if you walk into Nettie's sanctum, the Guardian will tell you to pluck the tadpole off the table, even if you've never met the Guardian yet.
Last edited by Milkfred; 16/08/23 04:51 AM.
