Then, showing impossible foresight, Jonathan leaps from the mine cart just in time to avoid a crash with a door, somehow coming to a complete and harmless stop the moment he touches ground. How silly? Towards the end, Jonathan is pulled inside of a demonic mouth carved into the mountainside, because again, this is “that kind of game,” and I love it. Of all the first game’s laughably audacious action sequences, this is probably the one I like the most as a legitimate action bit, though that doesn’t make it any less silly. Once past, it begins to go at high speed into a pre-rendered CG, almost a roller-coaster across an extremely narrow patch of land barely wide enough for the tracks, into blue fog that parts to reveal that we’re actually outside, under the starlight. Due to the huge amount of clutter in these two rooms, and the small size and unusual position of the winch (above your default view height, but not that high) the hook might take a long time to find, especially if you ride the cart back and forth between locations, trying to do something with the FUEL barrel perhaps?Īfter you pull the switch, the mine cart can be driven towards a door that otherwise wouldn’t open for you. The winch is attached to a hook that you can remove, and you can use that hook to jerry-rig a fix for the switch station’s central switch. Indeed, I only really discovered that it’s shown in the FMV to begin with because of Christine Zarubin’s hints at Universal Hint System, my preferred walkthrough site for Adventure games. You’ll also knock aside a winch that’s easy to overlook, probably the item I most frequently forget about during replays. If you can find and loose the brake, which is a task in and of itself because it’s not only by your feet but hidden by the dark, you can ride the thing back to the first room, where you jostle some FUEL into your cart. Despite all the clutter, you’ll be surprised to find that there’s nothing to interact with in the entire room, at least not yet! No, you have to move to the hall to discover a mine cart switch station to find an operational mine cart (all the carts in the game are marked “D.R. You find yourself in a large room that seems to serve a variety of purposes: it’s a break room, a storage room for quarried blocks (the quarry presumably continued operations after the completion of the castle), and there’s an odd construction at the other end of the room that stores, among other things, barrels of “FUEL.” There are two barred doors blocking exits to presumably irrelevant parts of the quarry, and a hallway that you can still access. Whatever, the linear parts are over, let’s move on to the actual meat of the chapter. Dude, go back and re-use the beam from earlier, it’d be way safer. It’s really not an impressive obstacle – a more athletic character could have jumped the gap. The item you just picked up is a strange stick with two loops that allow Jonathan to do a needlessly over-dramatic, trailer-bait, action sequence over a broken bridge, where he slides down some chains for all of four feet, and then climbs the other end. You folks all know that a four hundred year-old, decomposed skeleton doesn’t have the tendons to hold an arm together, right? In between rooms, Jonathan walks down a slope with an incredibly stiff marching animation, which makes a lot more sense when you realize it was borrowed from his stairs animations later in the game. If you bring a lamp to the bars, you’ll discover an item beyond, which you can only reach by picking up the skeleton’s arm and use it as a stick… you know, instead of your crowbar. No, it’s so pithy that even “scare” doesn’t really work… “jump squirm?” Yeah, I don’t know. The next room is basically as simple, with you pulling down some stones and discovering another barred passage, but this time with a skeleton that falls at you in a pithy jump scare. Somehow you manage not to bring down the rest of the ceiling with it! You end up using one of the beams as a bridge over the gap, and that’s that. Thankfully, the first few rooms of the mines are mostly linear, so you’ll probably solve most of the puzzles without much trouble for sheer lack of options! You basically have to pull apart some support… chains?… to pull down some of the support beams, which I’m positive wouldn’t actually work in reality. You’re back on the way to hell after all, but you can’t get very far because one “hallway” is barred and the other has a gap in the floor. You’re back in the supposedly haunted quarry you heard about from Mischa, just like he predicted with his NPC magic. First things first: the game dumps your inventory, leaving you with only the Dragon Ring, crowbar, and lighter.
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