Saturday 9 March 2019

Gobliiins - The Great Escape

By Ilmari


Where we left off last time


The dungeon may look like an easy place to escape, what with the enormous cave mouth leading outside, but it’s full of all sorts of tricks. The hole on the left wall has some monster guarding the pathway, the snake is obviously scary, the vase on the cave floor contains a nasty critter, the upper ladder is too broken for climbing, and once you get on the ledge above, the button releases rocks on you.


Lucky it doesn’t bite

One thing I could do was to spell the skeleton, which moved a bit and left a bone behind. Dwayne couldn’t do anything with the bone, but hit himself, but Hooter managed to change it into a flute, which was obviously meant for snake. Snake straightened, and BoBo used it as a rope to climb on the ledge. Now only thing I had to do was to get Hooter and Dwayne up also. I quickly found out that BoBo could push rocks down on one of the wooden boards, which suggested a simple plan.


Catapulting


Here again
 Wizard’s house was guarded by his dog, Ragnarok. This was a strange level. My first thought was to get the piece of meat and give it to the dog. And that appeared to work! Yet, at the beginning of next level I still had the meat, and as I learned later, I hadn’t got rid of the dog.


Where am I now?

It wasn’t obvious at first, but reading the manual later, it should have been evident that my target was the little bird peeking out of the treehole, because Ragnarok had taste for little birds. With no goal I just started testing things. Let’s begin with the meat I still had in my possession. What was I supposed to do with it?


Give it to this guy

My next attempt was to take the cork from the upper left corner of the screen.That attempt didn’t end well.


Could you stop doing that?

My next idea was to take the windsock and use it to capture the butterfly.


At this point I thought I’d get a ride to the top of
the tree from the butterfly, but then Dwayne fell down

Getting up was the right idea, but it had to be done differently. Hooter enchanted one of the smaller branches, which then grew longer. Then it was again time to use live ammunition.


I am seeing a pattern in these puzzles

BoBo flew Dwayne and Hooter up the tree. Hooter loosened up the cork, which Dwayne took. After a little experimentation I noticed that I could cover one of the holes with the cork. What then? Well, at this point I read the manual and got the idea that I should try to get the little bird. The trick was to let BoBo hit the bird, which tried to get outside from one of the two holes at the upper branches of the tree. One hole was covered with the cork and Dwayne was guarding the other hole with the windsock.


Perfect hunting!

Next step was obvious.


Catch the bird, boy!

Ragnarok was interested of the bird, but wasn’t still leaving. The answer was that since the dos was now distracted, Hooter could do some magic to it.


A flying dog

With Raganarok out of the way, it was simple to break the door down and enter house. I’ll stop at this point. I am slightly more negative about the game this time, since the sequence of the three last levels was a bit unclear and I often had no idea what I was trying to do. I hope the game picks up some slack now!

Session time: 1 h 15 min
Total time: 4 h 55 min

5 comments:

  1. Weird that the game can't quite figure out what to call the main characters. The title is Goblins (well, Gobliiins), but the wizard calls them gnomes, and I think later on they get called elves too. So which one is it?!?

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    Replies
    1. Good point. I guess the producers being French and not knowing the proper translation might be one reason.

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    2. It is also not unusual for games or stories to be written with one name in mind and then have it changed at a later stage and some of the original dialogue being left in. Especially with older code where you could not simply do a search through all the code.

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    3. Maybe the wizard is insulting the goblins?

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  2. The health mechanic is dumb because the animation and humor is a huge part of enjoying this game, and it discourages players from finding all the goofy ways to get injured.

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