Part 18: Day 4 Part 4: The King

I've edited the OP with information on buying the game! I thought I had that in since the start, but it looks like I forgot.

This game looks neat! I want to buy it!

It's amazing but true: YOU CAN!

The best place to buy it is probably directly from the developer site. It's a $5 download. There's also a $9 package with the game, soundtrack, and a walkthrough. Boakes is more or less an independent developer so I'm sure he'd appreciate every sale.


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All right. Nigel's got four Anglo-Saxon symbols and has bested the ghosts of Thomas, Frederick, and Nathaniel Ager. He's freed a lot of innocent spirits and even ended up on good terms with some of the Saxton townsfolk, despite their almost-unanimous request that he stop looking for the Lost Crown and go home. Let's see if we can find this crown and really show 'em who's the big man around here-parts who knows what's best for Saxton!



This is the most puzzle-heavy section of the game, or at least it feels that way because of the nature of the puzzles, and the lack of dialogue with other characters. This is where Nigel puts together the final clues and the player realizes the end of the game is very near at hand. Only a few updates left!

Nigel told Rhys that he had something to do tonight- but first he has to figure out where that something is. We've gotten four location symbols, and four being some kind of magic number, that's what we need to locate the entrance to Ganwulf's kingdom and retrieve any crowns we might find.

Back in Harbour Cottage, we drop off our last couple of photos and recordings and then we lay out the map Nigel stole from the train station a few days ago:



We put the spirit photos on the map. These are read in clockwise order, like so:
The Town, The Eye, The Fens, The Hill



According to the Anglo-Saxon symbols book, the meanings change slightly when rotated. Depending on their rotation, they mean variously "within," "through," "beyond," and "beneath." Nigel helpfully recalls this as we rotate the photos in order to form sensible directions. This puzzle wasn't solved like I thought it was the first time I played: The spirits sometimes "gave" us some of the symbols with a rotation, which you can see by looking at the backgrounds of the photos, so I thought we were meant to preserve that and thus build the directions. Nope. You just have to form coherent directions.



Beneath the town of Saxton, through the Fenland Eye, beyond the Fenlands to a place beneath the wooded hill. The treasure is beneath the Carrion Wood!


Pretty simple though! Nigel makes a trusty to-do list:



Down on Saxton Beach, the Fayre is still going on and Lucy is manning her Ghost Train. We can talk to her, but for some reason Nigel doesn't mention his errand nor does he invite her. Rude.

Be sure to take part in the treasure hunt.


However, the treasure hunt stand is gone so Nigel can continue down the beach to the Fenland Eye. So I'm not sure how visitors would do that.



Here we are going through the Eye. Hey, do you remember the ghosts that were inside that creepy cell, in here? When we listened back to their recording, they said "You can help us." Well, we can't help them. I guess since they're not directly related to the hunt for the crown Nigel doesn't really care. Sorry guys.



The ale is still here! Geez. Is it okay to just sit around like that? Thankfully, the train tracks aren't haunted tonight (or maybe we scared them away with Nanny Noah's good-luck charm), so the trip to the Carrion Woods is uneventful aside from some distant train noises.

You may have noticed that we haven't visited the Karswells since we learned that they died in a house fire a long time ago. The game has been pretty clever about not letting us revisit some critical areas. Sometimes the path is blocked. Sometimes Nigel says he has more important things to do. Sometimes we're auto-warped to the next location. Since we can access the Carrion Woods area now, I can make one last attempt at revisiting Northfield Church or the Karswells. However... Nigel just comments:

I'd better not disturb anyone.


I can understand not wanting to bother with the church, but how is Nigel not even curious about the Karswells? He doesn't have to disturb them, just... take a peek at their house or something. I can imagine that even if we could travel back, everything would seem normal like it did before... but I did think it was a bit funny that Nigel's excuse was out of politeness, and not something like, "I have a long-lost treasure that I really want to recover."

As we're tromping Nigel through the woods, we come across a small pile of pinecones on one of the woods screens and although we couldn't do anything with them before, we can pick one up now. So we pick one up now. Good luck figuring that one out on your own.



A sticky pinecone, oozing resin.


Nigel will also now take a semi-hidden path that he wouldn't before, and immediately finds a rather obvious mine entrance. Anglia hides her secrets well from the casually curious!





It's a bit dreary in here. It has the sound of a mineshaft- a low rumbling tone like wind in the tunnels below, tiny scatterings of falling rocks, and faint knocks in the distance. Amongst those barrels is a detached plunger/lever, which I have Nigel grab. If we walk into the dark tunnel:





It's a dead end, but a dead end with an unattached explosive wire. We can backtrack to the main room and look at a side room, and find:





If Lost has taught any of us anything, it's that old sweating explosives are a great idea. If you look up "gelignite" on Wikipedia, you'll find out that "unlike dynamite, gelignite does not suffer from the dangerous problem of sweating, the leaking of unstable nitroglycerine from the solid matrix." Yup. I'm not sure who T.G. is, some miner I suppose, but it seems he was superstitious enough to abandon the mine at the critical moment when he heard "knockers."

Knockers are short little guys in Welsh and Cornish folklore who live in mines and EITHER: A: start knocking on the walls to warn miners of impeding danger, or B: are actively knocking away at the walls to make them cave in on the miners. It's likely that the knocking noises were actually caused by geologic or structural stress, but still signalled danger. When that region's miners came to the US for work, they brought knockers with them and in the US they're known as tommyknockers, which are not stupid aliens from a book. Whatever the cause, hearing knockers meant that miners should get out.

Nigel is smarter than that though, he's not afraid of any unstable mine resettling noises. I have him plonk that mystery explosive material at the end of the wire in that blocked-off tunnel, then come back and do this:



...and get a result, a definite result!



The deep wind is getting louder here. There's one screen further which has an interesting book:



Well, Nigel's better than this guy, right? He at least took care of... well, most of the Ager ghosts.

A few more steps in this dark and dangerous mineshaft....




They lit up on their own! That's a good sign, right? Also, it sounds like there is a really large alpine horn playing some extended notes in the background.

We can look at some of the stuff on the walls around here:



As we look at this carving, we can hear those deeo horn notes in the background, but more clearly. Using our audio recorder, we get a recording of three specific notes.




What is that strange creature???



Okay this MUST be a remnant of an ancient Anglo-Saxon society, just look at it! That water wheel isn't turning- it's held up pretty well for a thousand years, but maybe only because it hasn't been splashed with water all that time.

But we can change that. We just have to fix the trough, which has a hole in it.



A pinecone shaped hole.





Now that we've powered the waterwheel, Nigel can head over to a dead-end nearby and push a "down arrow" button on a wall and make the wall go down. On the other side is an "up arrow" button we have to push also, which makes the wall go back up, but also opens a related door one level below (they can't be open at the same time).



The structure is full of deep clockwork clicking noises, stone grinding, and more of the mineshaft-wind. It sounds convincing in here, even if the rest is a little silly. As we explore this surprisingly well-put-together and waterwheel-and-clockwork powered Anglo-Saxon underground place, we come across some funny discs:





And a small dining-hall sort of room, with a funny thing:





I call it the wedding cake. This is where we are meant to replay the recording we took a few minutes ago, and recreate the three deep horn notes by rotating each level to the correct configuration. (Each different hole configuration plays a different note.) Anglo-Saxon feasting instrument?



Ah, no, just another ridiculous adventure game puzzle. What's with ancient civilizations and their obsession with puzzles? This thing had some serious engineering though- each level started rotating and retracting into the base automatically, then put itself back after we grabbed the disc.

We can go down a level and look around at the base of the water wheel- peeking between the rotating spokes, we see this carving:



Surely that won't be important!

Except then we find this contraption:



OK, we don't need to know that the geometric symbol meant "spring," what we need to do here is rotate the rings to recreate the water-fish-spring order in the clue we just saw. The season markers on the outside are immovable though, so our "solution" is going to move to the right (because the symbol we want is on the right), from the center. Kind of like the Skyrim doors, but going right instead of going up, and we don't have to use Grindle's claw. Like so:



The wiggles are water, then you can see the fish, then the symbols for spring. Who cares about what the rest mean? The centre of the amazing ancient puzzle machine opens and we get a fourth disc.

And then we reach this room.



In the centre is another malevolent black mist and threatening music. I'm pretty sure that's William, the only Ager we haven't really dealt with yet. If we hang out too long Nigel retreats. There's also those pedestal things around the edge. Nigel can't deal directly with the mist, so we look at the pedestal to his left:



Each pedestal has a bowl of water on it. Note how that one has an image from the beginning of the game- the arrival of the Sleepwalker in Sedgemarsh Station. We can't interact with it. However, moving to the next one, we can flip through a series of images showing memorable points from the game. Northfield Church, the Karswell house, the Old Net Store, etc.

The puzzle here is to set each bowl so it reflects Nigel's time in Saxton in chronological order, starting with the Sleepwalker bowl. Again we do this in clockwise fashion, until each pedestal is set. Helpfully, as we flip through the images, they're already in order! So we don't actually have to remember which happened when. We just have to remember what the previous image was.

Successfully reviewing Nigel's journey gets rid of the black mist, because the only Ager exorcism that made any sense was when we used that hedge witch book to deliberately bind Thomas's spirit.



Can you tell that I'm really unimpressed with this portion of the game? I know it's supposed to be exciting payoff time, but man, this place is just so tonally different to the rest of the game.

Okay, well, it's almost done though! We're almost there! The Agers are out of our way and we just have a puzzle in the floor which looks suspiciously like it belongs to those discs we've been finding.



Yep



The goal of this puzzle is to insert the four discs I found, then rotate them so the symbols in each touching quadrant "match." Look at where the top-left and centre discs touch- it has to match like that on all four touch-points. The catch is that rotating one of them will rotate whatever other one touches it. So if I rotate an outside one, it will rotate the centre. If I rotate the centre, it will rotate all four.

This is another puzzle which is stupidly easy, like the others in this structure. I actually appreciated that very much, because I didn't have the patience to deal with these after an otherwise entertaining and contextually-sensible series of puzzles throughout the rest of the game. After you put the four discs in, you click each outside disc once, and then click the lower-left one more time. If you go clicking all over the place you'll mess it up. Anyway who cares about that because we solved it yaaaaaaaaay!



Whoa. We were standing on that pixel-thin floor!



Okay I REALLY HATE THIS SCREENGRAB because I really hate deep dark holes. You know what that reminds me of? Those spilloff things in dams. Do you really want to go down there, Nigel?

Well, he doesn't have to jump because an ancient elevator comes up, like a big stone peg from below.



The elevator takes him down.... while he descends what must be fifty or sixty feet, we can hear Nanny Noah speaking over the sound of the grinding stone.

(In an echoey, remembering way) You may change it all, time will tell. The pale moon, pale gold lady has come amongst us. Not all is as it seems.




Geez look at this place! Those deep horn notes are playing down here, it's very solemn.. as Nigel walks through the columned approach, we can hear what sound like electricity zaps and see flashes of light.



Geez!

JACKPOT!

Okay, so what there's a spinning vortex of energy that emits flashes of light and electricity-zaps? That's a tomb there, and Nigel is gonna raid it. That treasure is so his.



c'mon baby... wait, is it.... empty???

What if we just.... look closer....



AAAAH!



Ganwulf appears and says something serious-sounding in Anglo-Saxon.... surely he's congratulating Nigel on his stick-to-it-iveness and how glad he is to have his crown stolen from his hidden underground Kingdom. You know, the crown which the storybook tale says and most of the locals seem to believe is the only thing fending off dark times and doom in the town of Saxton. Surely no harm will come to Nigel and everyone will be really happy when we bring it back and tell everybody that we found it and took it right off that old dead chump's naked skull!

But first, we have to get back....

.... wasn't there something in that hedge witchcraft book about the evil spirit exorcisms only being temporary?