Goblins Quest 3 – Dragons, barbarians and incas

By Ilmari

Last time, I had just resuscitated Blount from the brink of death, caused by a wolf bite. Blount’s love interest, Wynnona, had left him a letter, telling that she had set out to search for Fourbalus, the person who had stolen the key to the maze. She had also left Blount a potion that would make him a giant.

Very effective

My next task

If you remember my previous post, I suggested that the game was slowly becoming more and more complex, introducing me bit by bit to all its intricacies. Now, a new complication to the earlier levels occured: while earlier I was always solving one room at a time, at this point I had two rooms with interconnected puzzles (well, eventually I found a third room I could access, but that was self-contained, so I’ll leave it for later).

The first room pictured the countryside. Because Blount and Chump were giants, all the surroundings (a castle with a princess, a knight behind thorns and a dragon hidden in a big skull) were miniature in comparison. My first goal was to interact with the knight and the princess. I quickly found out how to cross the thorns: I just had to place a dolmen on top of it (as a giant, that's an easy task). This still was not the whole solution, since the knight was scared of the giant-sized Blount.

Next, the princess, who was at the roof of the castle. The roof itself was inaccessible, but from the events of the previous post I remembered one of the basic puzzle types of this game: Chump using some mechanism to catapult Blount on top of something. The evident gizmo this time was the mouse/dragon trap.

Poor Chump!

The princess told me the name of the knight (Brayar), who was then willing to help me. Brayar gave me a vial of memorium potion that I should make the dragon drink, so that it would remember that it was not evil. The dragon would not take the potion straightaway, and Blount suggested mixing it in the water basin. I followed his suggestion, but then I found no way to get the dragon to take a drink from the basin.

I did manage to proceed a little further. I could douse the cooking fire with water from the basin and then pick up a fork, with which I could take possession of the piece of meat from the big mouse/dragon trap. After that, I was stumped in this room, but luckily I could still go and check what was going on in the other room available to me.

The inn

A puzzle sequence involving two rooms –  the amount of complexity is just staggering! I should find some spices in this room, to put in the meat meant for the dragon. So, obviously, after eating the spiced meat, the dragon would go and drink from the basin, where I had poured the memorium potion. The only problem was that the jar of paprika I needed was high on the shelf. Some kind of catapulting was clearly in order, and I found a convenient spoon that, combined with a small rock, seemed perfect for the job, but something was still missing.

Are you sure you are not mixing the genders here?

With nothing else to do, I spoke a little with the captain, who happened to be the captain of the flying ship at the beginning of the game. I also chatted with the barbarian lady, who let me take a look at the magical knob (our British readers are raising an eyebrow) at the end of her sword, after I had given her a precious stone. Within the knob I could see Wynnona – this was the third room in this level, but since it was otherwise self-contained, I’ll leave describing it later in this post.

The room scrolled again to the right, where I could pick up some sugar that I could use as a weight to catapult Chump on the shelf. Soon, I had my meat spiced up and ready to make the dragon thirsty. The dragon retrieved its memory, and it wanted to thank me, so now I carried a flaming reptilian in my inventory.

There was also the small detail of covering the ear hole on the skull so that the dragon would drink from the basin and not from the river, as it does in this picture. In the future, I’ll just skip such small details, because they often concern very standard patterns of the puzzles in this game and repeating them again and again would not be that interesting, especially as the complexity of the puzzle sequences seems to be growing

So, what did I need the dragon for? Well, in the inn, I had met Othello, a mouse in a cage, who had in his house a bill belonging to the captain. The house was too small for me to search, but the dragon was of perfect size for this task. The dragon left after helping me, and I took the bill to the captain, who gave me a letter to his friend, the grocer, who knew of a transport, but before going there, I still had that third room to deal with.

 An Inca playing panpipes! I wonder if this has something to do with that other Coktel Vision game

Now I was playing as Wynnona, my task being to get to the Fourbalus, the thief who had earlier stolen the key to the important maze. The means to be used were also clear.

Explosives

So let’s gather some materials for dynamite! I easily found gunpowder in a keg nearby and I could pluck some wicks from the strange creature lying on the tree stump.

There’s definitely some self-referentialism going on, since there's a skull of a conquistador lying around and that dead monk looks a lot like the antagonist of the Inca games

There was a flint just above the head of the monk, where I could not reach it. I picked up a wand at the feet of the corpse and tried to use it to get the flint. The flint fell down to an easier position, but at the same time the skull of the monk fell also. Behind it appeared…

Ooya, a Yoda wannabe

Ooya became instantly my ally, since Fourbalus had also stolen his bag of magic spells. At first, I found nothing to do with him, and instead I concentrated my attention on finishing my dynamites. Using my newly found flint, I ripped the inca’s panpipes apart, getting myself a set of small tubes where to put my gunpowder and wicks. Flint gave the necessary spark for lighting the explosives.

I proceeded to demolish the tower where Fourbalus resided, but soon encountered a problem: the dynamites bounced back from certain parts of the tower. This problem I managed to circumvent: I separated the conquistador from his helmet with my wand and then filled the headgear with sticky birdlime from the stump. Applying it to the dynamites made them stick to the tower, but they were still too weak to do anything for the sturdier parts of the tower. Besides, my wicks had run out.

It was time to ask for help from Ooya. Firstly, I noticed that I could use my flint to make one of the tubes from the panpipes into a flute. Inca could play the flute to call a condor, which Ooya could use to fly to Fourbalus, to retrieve his back of spells. With his refound magical powers, Ooya could grow some hair on the skull of the conquistador (for new wicks) and also grow some bamboo for larger tubes that could contain more gunpowder.

Usually I don’t manage to get this far in Jenga

With no other escape route, Fourbalus used the final spell that was left to him from Ooya’s spell bag. As a result, Wynnona turned into a butterfly. I returned to Blount, who was off to the town to meet the grocer who might provide him a transport forward. We’ll see how that goes in the next post!

Session time: 3 h 15 min
Total time: 5 h 15 min