Part 6: Wherein Life Choices are Reconsidered

Here it is guys, the one you've all been waiting for...




Music: Cave (Tindeck)

Last time, we solved a stupid puzzle and gained entrance to the Serpent's Grotto Labyrinth. This time, we'll tackle what's widely considered the worst part of the game. This is the part where a lot of people just outright ragequit the game. I actually couldn't beat the game the first time I played it because I got stuck here. Maybe I was young and impatient, maybe the Labyrinth is just an awful place to be, or maybe it's a little bit of both.

For now, let's just assess the situation and look around a bit. In our inventory is the apple we picked up way back at the beginning of the game, a tulip from Timbermist Woods, and the scroll Darm gave us. We left the flute and all our precious gemstones behind when we came in here. We're going to need the inventory space going forward.

As this is a new area, Brandon has brand new words of insight complaints about the situation to offer!



It seems like these caverns go on forever. You'd think somebody would have a map of this place!

If only we could be so lucky. Let's check out the north exit first.



A dead end with a glowing bush in it. Nothing to do here, so let's go east instead.



Another fireberry bush, but this time there's another exit on the other side of the room.



That's an interesting room. Well, it looks perfectly safe; we can just continue onward--



Butts. We can't go back to Timbermist Woods anymore. Too bad all our riches are back there.

The iron grate must be attached to the dish and counterweight mechanism.

If only we had something heavy enough to weigh that dish down, we could escape. Unfortunately, apples and tulips aren't going to get the job done, so for now, all we can do is proceed onward.



Huh, look at that. Another of those bushes. All right, let's keep going.



I can't see a thing in here!

What, are you afraid of the dark now?

Music: Tightrope (Tindeck)





I guess Brandywine did warn us about horrible things lurking in the Labyrinth.

The gimmick of this place is that if you ever set foot in a room that isn't lit up, it's an instant game over. Fortunately, once you fall for it once, it's pretty easy to predict whether leaving in a particular direction is safe or not and you won't have to be surprised. Right now, the only exit we can go through leads to one of those rooms. How do we solve this little conundrum?



Maybe these will help me find my way in the dark.

Excellent idea, Cramden. Let's put your theory to the test the only way we know: by rushing blindly into mortal danger.



Luckily, it works just fine. As long as you have a fireberry in your inventory (or in your hand), you can pass safely into any room and the berry's glow will keep any horrible bitey beasts at bay. This particular room is just another boring T-junction. Let's check out the room above.



Spooky. At some point, we're going to want to find out what's on the other side of the chasm, but there's no way for us to get across right now. There's nothing to do but go back...



... and try the right exit instead. Hey, does that fireberry look a little fainter than a moment ago to you?







Betrayed again!

The bad news: Fireberries don't last forever. Once you've moved three rooms ahead, they go out, leaving you in the dark again. Filling your inventory up with fireberries doesn't help, as they will just all go out at the same time. It also means that if you want to make it back to where you were, you can't go more than two rooms out or the fireberry will disappear before you've made it back to safety.

The good news: There might be more fireberry bushes in the labyrinth. If we can find another one before our fireberry runs out, we're safe. We still can't roam very far, though, and we don't know where the bushes are.

Fortunately, there's a trick. If you drop a fireberry on the floor...



... it will sit there, lighting up the cavern, and it will never go out. I'm sure this implies something about Brandon, since the only time the berries fade out is when he's carrying them. This also means we don't actually have to worry about getting stranded between dark rooms; we can just leave a trail of fireberries behind us and be assured that at the very least we can make it back to where we came from.

We can now formulate a strategy for exploring the Labyrinth: pick up three fireberries from the nearest bush, drop one on the floor of every room we enter, then proceed until we run out of berries. Hopefully by then we've found another fireberry bush. If not, we backtrack, get more berries, and try another path. If that sounds really tedious, that's because it is.

More bad news: This place is big. Like, huge. There are a total of 84 rooms in this stupid labyrinth, most of them nearly identical to the rooms we've already seen. Sometimes you can go left, sometimes right, up, or down, but they're all the same featureless "dark, mysterious caverns". Some of them have fireberry bushes in them, but most don't.

We have two choices. Either we can amble around randomly, trying our best to keep fireberries with us and constantly getting lost, or we can make a map. Neither option sounds very fun. Seriously, Westwood, 84 rooms? We don't even know what we're looking for in here. If this were the good old days, I'd be doing this on graph paper, but for the purposes of this Let's Play, I'll be drawing a pretty little picture.



This shows the rooms we've visited already. Unique rooms (like the chasm and trap rooms), and caverns with fireberries in them, are marked accordingly. Question marks indicate rooms we haven't been to, but we know should exist because there are exits to them in adjoining rooms. Using the fireberry trick, we can start exploring the area to the east now.



Alas...



... it's nothing but boring, empty cave rooms. In order to explore the room south of the second dark room we entered, we have to double back to the fireberry bush and get a new one before going south. Of course, it's another empty room. Our first expedition has yielded this map:



Now, we have a problem. We've already gone three steps outward from the only fireberry bush we know of near the border of unexplored cavern. There are three rooms we have immediate access to, but we can't safely enter any of them. What do we do? Sadly, the answer is... once again, we have to employ trial and error. A few minutes of savescumming reveals the top two rooms are both instant death. Going south...



... takes us to another fireberry bush, which is keeping this room lit, and Brandon alive.

There is nothing to do but begin the mind-numbingly boring task of mapping the hell out of the labyrinth. I'm not going to show me doing this, or show any of the "normal" rooms on the way. It's boring, it involves a lot of going back and forth between bushes to get new berries, dropping them on the ground, and repeating ad nauseam. Whoever thought this was compelling gameplay needs to have a serious talking to. It's also worth pointing out that the "drop the fireberries" trick is by no means obvious. If you never realize you can do this, the Labyrinth becomes all that much more frustrating to deal with - but it's still beatable, leading some people to just assume it was meant to be done the hard way, never realizing there is a way to take away some of the difficulty.



While exploring, we come across a room with a big rock in the middle of it. As this is a point-and-click adventure game, this inanimate chunk of granite is going to be of paramount importance and we'll immediately pick it up. I'll mark it on the map with a little rock icon.



Back to mapping. We keep going back and forth between bushes, filling in the map as we go. On the way, we pick up another rock.



Eventually, we find ourselves nearing the edge of explorable space again.



There are two rooms that are safe to enter from this position; one near the top of the map, and one near the bottom. We'll do the bottom one first.



Ahh! I thought I'd never get out of there!

You think you're out, Brandon? We've got more than half the maze to go! On the plus side, there are neither vampires nor werewolves in sight. Instead, on the ground is another rock (on the right), and a gold coin (on the left). Both blend into the background and are easy to miss.

This gold coin is ENORMOUS!

We'll stash both and move on. Unfortunately, the room to the right isn't safe, since it's too far from the closest fireberry bush we've seen. We'll have to visit the room up top instead.



For a place called the Pantheon of Moonlight, there sure isn't much light around. There are two purple... things hovering to the sides, and if you look carefully, it looks like there's a slot in the center pedestal.

Is something missing here?

Brandon has noticed as well. Let's examine one of the purple things.

Video: Will-o-Wisps (Youtube)



Oh jeez, it can talk.

I have been waiting for so long! Can you take me with you?
Please ignore her. She cannot think clearly.

The other one can talk too. The left wisp has a female voice, the right wisp has a male voice. Both of them have this sing-song quality to them, like they're forcing themselves to sound extra pleasant and accommodating.

I am glad to see you and would like to go with you when you leave.
We both can't go!
I hate it here!
I have been here longer. I should leave first.
We came together!
You will recall, I entered first. You were taunting shadow wraiths.

I hope we don't have to fight any shadow wraiths.

One of us must stay until the altar is completed.
Why don't you finish it yourselves and then you could both leave?



I hope we don't have to fight the Master of Tides and Love.

We are not craftsmen!
But YOU could do it, though.
And then we could all go!
What needs to be done?

Don't be so quick to volunteer to do complicated-sounding things for some weirdos you found in a cave, Brandon.

We don't know.

Of course you don't. Why would it be that simple?

WE only know how to float, and we could teach you.

On the other hand, that sounds like exactly the kind of thing we need to cross that chasm back there. Fine, I guess we'll fix your stupid altar. If we could go back and find Herman, maybe he'd have an idea or two. No, actually, he'd probably just make it worse. For the best that our way is still blocked, then.

If I can think of what to do, I will return.

Okay, since we don't have anything that looks like it could solve this problem, it's time to get back to exploring. We're all out of safe rooms to take a fireberry into again, so we'll have to take a chance on one room or the other. Luckily, the room immediately to the right of the Pantheon has another fireberry bush, and from there we can go back to repeating the same strategy from before.



We come across another rock near the top of the Labyrinth. A few steps to the east of that is...



Music: Emerald Cavern (Tindeck)

... a very shiny place. That's a lot of emeralds. Two of them are just sitting there.

I could have used these earlier!

I guess Brandon's referring to the birthstone quest, but the game hasn't really tried to sell us on the emeralds' usefulness, so this comment comes a bit out of left field. Of course, since you can't pry loose the one attached to the statue, it can never be a part of the solution, anyway. We could pick these emeralds up, but... our inventory space is pretty tight as it is, and we need it for fireberries. We can come back here later if need be.

By the way, the music in this room appears only here and nowhere else. The track is nearly three minutes long and appears in only a single room in the entire game, and it's a room you don't really have any reason to visit. Shame, because it's a pretty decent track.



We've almost got the entire map filled in now. Our next stop is the room in the bottom right.



What dark and horrible hellhole would be complete without a river of scorching hot lava? The only other exit is north. We can cross safely, as the lava is all the way down there and video game logic clearly dictates that there is no such thing as convection.

This heat is pretty intense... but I know I can take it!







In an interesting aversion, Legend of Kyrandia does tactfully observe the laws of thermodynamics, although possibly only because it's very inconvenient for us that it does so. Somehow, Darm predicted this would happen, and has supplied us with the means to overcome it.

I guess I'll give it a shot.



It worked!

It sure did! The river is safe to cross now for real, and on the other side...



... is a dead end containing an iron key. We haven't seen any locks that it might fit yet, but it's always worth hanging onto a key. There's only one area left unexplored, and that's in the top right. All that's there is another stone, though.





We've explored everything on this side of the maze. All that remains is whatever's on the other side of the chasm. To cross that, we will need to fix the moonlight altar, and to fix that we need to get back to Timbermist, because what this place really needed was more backtracking. Now that we have a sizable collection of rocks, perhaps we can do something about that counterweight. All we have to do is use one of the stones on the plate...



Made it first shot! Looks like I'll need to toss in more rocks.

Slow and steady. We've got more.



Made it again!

All right, there's no need to show off. Just get the rocks on there so we can get out of this stupid cave.



Why did that even work? Are the cavern walls actually made of rubber?



BRANDON WHAT DID I TELL YOU. This last rock better be enough to get this shit done.



I did it! I can get back outside.

Phew. We needed all five rocks to do it, and four would've been enough if Brandon wasn't an overconfident jackass, but at least we can get some fresh air again. It's time to go put that gold coin to good use.



Remember this place? Make a wish, Brandon.



Huh!?



That sounds like just the thing we need to fix that altar! Let's not question where it came from, or what moonstones have to do with wells to begin with.



I'm brilliant!

Of course you are.



Thank you! Thank you!
And now as we promised...



I feel strange. One of the gems on my amulet is now glowing purple!

We have unlocked the second jewel in our amulet, granting us the Will-o-Wisp spell! Let's try it out.



Music: Will-o-Wisp (Tindeck)

It feels like I'm completely weightless.

Indeed you are, Brandon. The wisps have taught us how to transform into one of them: a floating, glowing ball of sparkles. With this, we can cross the chasm we saw earlier, and finally find out what's on the other side. Once in Will-o-Wisp form, we can just float straight across the chasm, and as a bonus, any unlit rooms in the labyrinth are now automatically lit by our purple glow. There is also yet another long music track that plays only when you're in wisp form inside the labyrinth, something you'll be doing for a grand total of maybe 30 seconds.

On the other side of the chasm is another featureless room, and then...



We made it through that horrible, horrible place and into the next area! What a pain that was. Here's the final map for the area, in case you ever make the dubious decision to play this game for yourself:



I think the map is slightly different in the floppy version, with fewer fireberries.

In review, this area is not fun at all, unless you really like drawing maps. The combination of instant death traps, backtracking, leaps of faith, slow and plodding exploration, complete lack of variety (visually or otherwise), and unclear goals makes for a miserable, tedious experience. I don't know what made Westwood think this place was a good idea. At least it's over and we never have to come back.

Next time, we'll explore a brand new area, get bonked on the noggin, and learn the basics of alchemy.