Part 9: Bonus Update: Roads Not Taken
For our final update, I'm going to be covering a few things that didn't really fit in a narrative sense that are just a bit of extra fun and content.
The roses in the castle aren't exactly the most helpful, but they do provide a few general hints about what we should be looking for. At this point, though, there's not much more than can tell us.
The mirror room version of the castle is as big as the normal version, with correspondingly warped areas. In contrast to the 30 points of life that the green water restored, having sulfuric acid poured down on his head costs Theo 30 points of health.
The throne room doesn't have another secret in the leg, but it does have a treasure chest..
Naturally the chest is a mimic. There are actually three kinds of mimics in the game, with the M Mimic being stronger than the regular mimic and the D Mimic being the strongest of them all. By strongest, it has about 100 HP and still just tries to bash your head in with no special abilities.
If you track yourself all the way back to the mirrored balcony, you get sent back to the very entrance of the castle where the ivy vine was to try again. I'm just particularly amused by the term warp zone.
Next, we'll take a quick glance at what happens if you go for the right vine path.
The gimmick here is a thick fog, with a bunch of exits that tend to wrap around and warp you back to a central point. Once you go up this path, there's only two ways out. A couple of spots will send you back to the vine path so you can choose again, but there is another way.
If you for some reason guessed that a random room would have a shortcut that you can reveal with the fairy lamp, then you win a prize. I went with the left path as it's also the less imbecilic option. Yes, 3 talking lawn gnomes was the smarter option.
It's kind of funny to me that they've only got one female portrait for the entire game. The darker side of this whole "Help a human and become a human" deal is that if you don't take the right path the fairy is still presumably in the lamp for the rest of your life. As a side note, the fairy warns you not to touch the door at the end of the path.
By end of the path, they're actually referring to the door that goes to a different location depending on whether you push or pull it. The right path shortcut ends up taking you to the same place that pushing on the door would have, which contains a teleporting room that leads to the castle gate. The push path is a bit boring, with no unique monsters and nothing to find other than a bit of fairly useless gold. It does, however, allow you to skip the river. Speaking of which..
Attempting to board the ferry provides you with a choice to make. The question as to why there are a bunch of people running a ferry in an underground river is best left unanswered.
Claiming to have a ticket results in being tossed off the boat, although you can go back a second later and give the "correct" answer. Saying you don't have a ticket gets you across by working for your passage but you take 40 damage from the exhaustion.
As far as the other options are concerned, the bridge is going to fall if you try to take that route.
The results aren't pretty, but they are hilarious. Take 25 damage and return to the start to reconsider your decision.
Trying to walk across on the rocks ends up with you in the river... and the realization that Theo was hardcore enough to be jumping from alligator to alligator in order to cross a river. Take a measly 15 damage and return to start.
Swimming is the other option besides the boat and the ferry to get across, and somehow results in Theo getting his toes nibbled on by piranhas and avoiding the alligators. You only take 10 damage with this method, but you do get across. Nothing like a piranha to motivate someone I suppose.
The raft is another no-go method, since it was evidently very shoddily made. Naturally, however, the noise and clatter of all those rocks is going to generate some attention..
And on that note, we close this LP. Thanks for reading!