By Ilmari
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| What the… |
Goblins-series has had some rather trippy sections, and the third game doesn’t fail in this regard. Just check the current level. Blount was divided into two mirror images and surrounded with such bizarre objects as the mirror of time, thinning and fattening mirrors and the old devil that sleeps in each of us. The ultimate end of the whole level was to escape through the mirrors of beauty and ugliness – Blount through the first and his reflection through the second. Before they could do that, they had to become beautiful and ugly themselves.
Getting on with the problem solving, there were very few items to pick up in this maze of mirrors. Well, there was one: an egg. But I could do a lot with just this one egg. I could pass it between Blount and his mirror images through holes connecting the regular with the mirror world. I could put it in the mirror of time, changing between three forms of egg, chick and chicken. I could put the chick or the chicken in the fattening mirror, to make it fat, or to its mirror image, the thinning mirror, to make it thinner.
I could also put a correct-sized chick in the machinery of the clock in the picture. When I had done that both in the normal and in the mirrored perspective, an alarm sounded and the old devil awakened. When Blount checked the old devil, he called the devil ugly. Was this something I could use to my advantage at the ugliness mirror?
Since I found nothing new to do here, I moved to the other room of this level.
Now this was a true maze! Or was it Blount’s brain? At least there were interesting objects, like the puddle of dreams, the window of memory, the vehicle of nervous impulse, the lake of vision and the box of hidden beauty. I wonder if that will help me in passing through the mirror of beauty? Too bad it was placed behind a protective fence of modesty. Also, for the first time in this game, Blount and the were-Blount were present in the same room at the same time.
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| The window of memory revealed a tidbit of information: Blount is the Prince Buffoon from the previous game |
This room is a perfect example, why writing about the game is so much less satisfying than actually playing it. You see, a lot of the puzzles here involved just getting to places you couldn’t otherwise access by using the mechanisms of the setting to your advantage. Because the setting is so absurd, all of the actions seem incomprehensible, although they are quite consistent with the game world.
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| Take this puzzle for an example. The vehicle of the nervous impulse – the cart track at the top – has three settings that the wolf can activate with the lever (the lever is too heavy for Blount). Depending on the setting, the cart and the person driving it will fly in different directions |
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| Here, wolf has used the cart to fly near the lake of vision |
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| Jumping in that lake makes eyeballs appear (it is a lake of vision) |
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| Dropping a sandcorn – oh wait, where do you get a sandcorn? Well, there’s a picture of Colossus in the window of memory, and it is possible to extract from it the memory of the sandcorn he had in his eye. Then dropping the sandcorn in a lake of vision with the eyeballs makes a teardrop appear and float. Within the tear is a sailfish, and you can use the cart again to pop the tear and release the fish |
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| By quickly changing the settings of the cart and using it, it is possible to grab hold of the sailfish and let it deliver you to a place you couldn’t otherwise access. Pure genius! |
The aim of that long puzzle sequence was to get my hands on a dragon decoy, which was obviously used for calling the help of the dragon from an earlier level. Dragon helped Blount to fly into places he couldn’t otherwise access, but also to get rid of that fence of modesty guarding the box of the hidden beauty.
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Burn baby burn!
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The box was locked, but I soon found a key for it. You see, the maze contained also a puddle of dreams. Asking the dragon to provide some heat dried it up, leaving only the key to be picked up. Within the box, I found an ointment of beauty
The one remaining puzzle in this room was a suspicious pile of grains. The obvious thing to deal with that problem was the egg/chick/chicken from the other room – I just had to first set it in the right age and shape (I’ll order one old, fat chicken). When the chicken had shuffled the grain, only a grain of folly was left (no grain of wit here).
With nothing else to do, I went to the mirror room and tried giving the folly grain to the old demon. The grain extracted all the ugliness from the demon. With the ointment of beauty and the extract of ugliness I could finally try my luck with getting out of here.
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| A tricky puzzle, not because it was particularly difficult to understand what I had to do, but because it required exact timing: you had to apply the ointment and the extract to regular and mirror Blount so that they would be precisely same time showing themselves to the wolves in the mirrors |
I originally thought of ending the post here, but it turned out that the final level was relatively short, so I might as well go through it now.
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Fulbert finds a mate
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The trippy nature of the end game continued. At the middle of the room was the divinity of the land, which had two poles: positive and negative. The hatred between the two kingdoms had put the two poles in a disharmony, so that the angel and the demon, that used to play in sync, were now left in destitute. Under the feet of the divinity had formed a spring of bitterness from the tears of the separated poles.
The first task was to find some scores for the angel and the devil to play. The positive side of the divinity was holding a paper that seemed promising, but I couldn’t reach it. Testing what I could do, I noticed that I could smash the wooden fence and the brick wall at the far ends of the room. After that, pressing doorbells at both sides summoned two hands, who for a while drew the chain that pulled the plug from the spring of bitterness.
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| Like this |
When the hands were doing that, I could make the wolf jump on the chain, where he then bounced upwards to grab the score from the divinity. I could also make the wolf jump in the now empty basin, where the other score was to be found.
Giving the scores to the angel and the devil, I could make them play some notes.
I could then tie the notes together with a yarn of time I had found, but the bond was still not strong enough.
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| So let’s call the hands to help me |
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| Is it working? |
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| Yes, it’s now all a one note! |
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| Jamming together |
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| This has repercussions in the mundane world |
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| Callback to Blount’s childhood |
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| Everyone finds love |
Well, wasn’t that a cute ending. Next time we’ll see how well the game fairs under the scrutiny of the PISSED rating.
Session time: 2 h
Total time: 13 h 55 min
my thoughts as always:
ReplyDeleteThe maze screen is probably the best in the finale. I remember solving the grow tonic puzzle on the plant on first attempt (30 years ago) and was quite proud of it, since it's one of those items that you had forever in your inventory and never used it since the screen it appeared (the town around mid game)
The timing on the mirrors room, that's probably one of the worst in the whole game. I remember trying and trying, even checking walkthroughs and still failing. No idea why they did it that tight. The best way to do it, I think, is to have one of the characters far from the mirror, so in the time he walks to it to solve its part, you can manipulate the other one and be on sync.
The final screen always reminds me of the previous games. There's something about it, the way it's designed, or presented, that looks like something from Gobliins 2, or even 1. A little bit of a downer since it comes out of nowhere and they rush the ending with the king and queen just marrying because of the lulz.
Also, the ending has that super weird song in CD audio (again, much better than the adlib and midis) where there's actual singing in goblinish, a very peculiar song.
That final screen showing the dinner, is of course from the intro of Gobliiins (1), the exact same one. They tied up all 3 games, with this late plot twist, which doesnt really change anything, but at least its nice that they thought of some continuity.
It's a great game, french adventure games tend to be unique and sometimes unforgiving, or just weird and obscure. But this one, it's probably one of the best. We'll see how it scores now
One moment you're playing a fantasy game and then suddenly you're in what looks like a sci-fi space station :) With an annoying timing puzzle :(
ReplyDeleteI really liked the ending. The last screen was bit of a victory lap and felt really satisfying, and everyone gets a happy end. It also made the game feel a little bit less than a random collection of independent puzzle rooms and more like a grand journey.
The game also had fewer levels than I remember, but that's probably because I spent so much time figuring some of them out that it appeared so much longer back in the day. Given the criticism that Gobliins 2 was too long, I think they got the right amount here.
DeleteCongratulations! From your entries it sounded like you had fun with the game. And based on them, this seems like a nice example of this type of adventure/puzzle game, especially if one enjoys the quirky graphics/style.
ReplyDelete[In the last sentence, I think that might be "fares" instead. You can delete this comment afterwards.]
ReplyDeleteIn Infocom's HHGTTG you also have to enter your brain, but in that game you only need to remove your common sense. Here you apparently do a more comprehensive reconfiguration.
ReplyDeleteBetween two images there is a paragraph with a lone "C" as its content. Was there meant to be more text at that point?
No, that was just a typo I missed. Thanks!
DeleteGobliins 6 just released btw
ReplyDeleteAs I mentioned in the previous post, I think the chess room was the highlight of the game for me - I was all pumped for the maze being the crescendo but found it to be a bit of a let down… I was expecting something a little more like the Mage’s Maze in Hero’s Quest combined with Yorick’s Room (I.e. with bizarre, fantastical pathways), but it was a series of pretty straight-forward puzzles in a quasi-maze like setting. Serviceable, sure, but I can’t help but feel the energy was running out - both of the developers at the time, and mine :)
ReplyDeleteI didn’t have much of an issue timing the mirror entry - I think I got it on the second go, but I had also been re-playing Gobliins 2 which is rife with timing based, multi-character puzzles so I was acutely “multi-Goblin fit” if you like. I did run into a frustrating bug in the last screen though - the left hand doorbell ceased to be active/clickable which happens from time to time in the game once an item has served its purpose, so I was mucking around for an hour trying to work out how I was meant to tie the notes together without the help of the left hand… I finally convinced myself it had to be a bug, so resorted to a Joker to indeed confirm the left doorbell was still required.
All in all, the game was charming, memorable and fun. I can’t recall any strict moon logic… bizarre logic, indeed, but made sense in the context of the world that had been built. The whole newspaper reporter thing didn’t work for me though - it felt like an afterthought to potentially address concerns that the game was too confusing, because in no way did Blount behave like a reporter when you weren’t reading the newspaper.
I said in the Intro post I felt that Gobliins 2 was the better game and not withstanding the fact that I only realised later I hadn’t played more than a couple of screens of this before (oops), I still agree with that assessment. Gobliins 2 is very good at what it is, and doesn’t try to be any more. This is a good game, an enjoyable game, but feel it just missed the mark on what it was trying to evolve to.
Will be really interested to see the PISSED!