Goblins Quest 3 – Up the nostril and into the ear

By Ilmari

So there I was flying…

What was that?

Oh fu…

Despite the fall, Blount was not reduced to a puddle of guts. No, it was time to begin a new level.

 Blount calls them islands, but since we are still above clouds, they are more likely mountain tops

Checking my surroundings, I found a meteorologist (the frog) and Ooya, the old magician we met when playing as Wynnona. Ooya had been flown here in the meteorologist’s hot air balloon, but unfortunately, the tide had risen (I’ll leave it to the readers to explain what this means in an aerial setting) and stranded Ooya to a tiny island.

My first task was to set Ooya free. The meteorologist had an inflator, which I could use to blow up small balloons. Ooya could travel by means of the balloons to another island, but not yet to all of them. Luckily, I had a giant to help me.

You can see the giant’s tuft of hair in an earlier picture

The giant had cold feet and pricking the cloud above the big head made the giant sneeze. If Ooya was hanging from the balloon at the right moment and if the goat at the front was incapacitated with a ballast dropped on it, the sneeze would blow Ooya to the rock formations on the right.

I'm just floating around, over the ground, wondering where I will drip

Next thing in my bucket list was to free Bizoo, a frozen bug in the icy island. The trick was to get Ooya to Bizoo, where magic was enough for freeing the bug. The first step was pretty easy, since manipulating the geysers made Bizoo float to the island with the meteorologist. There Ooya could access the hot air balloon, the position of which could be manipulated by Blount removing or adding ballasts.

Thankful Bizoo added itself to my inventory for a while. With nothing more to do here at the moment, I moved to the next room in the level.

At last, I had arrived at the land of Foliander, where Blount had been travelling since the beginning of the game. I also found out what had happened to Blount’s ship during the intro. Apparently queen Xina, one of the monarchs ruling Foliander, had instructed her henchman, Colossus, to catapult rocks to any approaching vessel. Colossus was lying on a hammock, and he had already captured Fourbalus, the thief who had stolen the keys to the labyrinth in Foliander.

My first task was to get Colossus to take off his helmet. Checking the telescope at the right side made Blount check and see a ship flying, which made Colossus activate the catapult on the left that then threw a rock toward the ship. Now, I could twiddle the settings of the machinery, making it change the position of the catapult. With a little bit of experimenting, I was able to make the rock, launched by Colossus, hit the man himself. This was enough to remove the helmet from his head. Colossus now being bareheaded, I could put my newly found insectoid friend to use.

See that hair sticking in his nose?

Yes, you can pull it.

I don’t know what your stance on making fun of the grossness of the human (or goblin) body is, but here’s a room full of just that kind of humour. The grossest is by far the beard, which is occupied by a whole family of bugs that you have to hit with a toothpick found within the teeth.

My first task as Bizoo was to pick up a grain of sand in the left eye of Colossus (ouch!). I could access his eyes from his ear (don’t try this at home), but the left eye (the right eye from our perspective) was closed, so I had to first keep it up with the toothpick (a classic cartoon joke). With the grain removed, I still had to get it to Blount. When I pulled the nose hair, Colossus shed a tear that could be used to slide the grain down to his neck, where Bizoo could just kick the grain to the ground.

The grain of sand was now lying under the hammock of Colossus, who was not letting me anywhere near him. It was time for another plan. I had earlier found a fishing cane in the cloudy area and I tried to scoop the grain with it, but to no avail. I eventually did manage to find a worm in the room so perhaps I was meant to fish somewhere? The cloud room had a suspicious hole in the clouds, and indeed, I could catch a sawfish from it (I'll leave it undecided whether the fishing line was just so long that it reached some body of water on the ground or whether the sawfish was flying).

Knowing that this was a game relishing in cartoon logic, I was sure I had to use the sawfish to literally saw something. The obvious choice was the column holding the hammock up. Unfortunately, Colossus didn’t like the idea and pushed a button that dropped a cage on Blount. With not many options, I tried using Ooya to release Blount with his magic. He didn’t do exactly that.

He just released Blount’s shadow

“I’m staggered”, Blount said. “Okay, I’m bowing”, the shadow answered. This sounded like a joke, but about what? Was it perhaps a really bad pun on Mick Jagger and David Bowie, famous for their satellite-enabled duet across continents? Or an equally obscure reference to staggered bowing, a special technique for string bowing? Whatever the case, shadow-Blount was more than capable of picking the grain of sand without Colossus noting.

Putting the grain in the rock throwing machine and turning it on made the whole thing break down. I could now pick a gear from the machine, which I could insert in the robot at the top of the screen. After that, the robot managed to do nothing else, but to open its mouth a little, but that was enough for getting a piece of pollen within it. I knew Colossus was allergic, so all I had to do was let Bizoo insert a piece of pollen in his nostril (through his ear, because why not). The result was a big sneeze.

Although it looks more like a yawn here

The sneeze was so huge that it blew the whole Colossus away. With him no longer guarding the way, Blount was free to travel to his next destination, Queen Xina’s castle. But that’s a story for the next time.

Session time: 1 h 50 min

Total time: 9 h 35 min