King's Quest: Mask of Eternity, Episode 5: In the Halls of the Gnome King
100:00 Starting Soon ("Ataraxia" by Aaron Hodges-Boyle)
06:09 Beginning
11:55 Connor Lumbers Forth in the Underground Realm of the Gnomes
1:59:00 The Barren Region
4:11:58 Glimpsing the Frozen Reaches
Connor's quest is like Connor himself: it takes a bit to start picking up momentum, but there's no stopping it once it gets going!
In this session, we resume in the Underground Realm of the Gnomes, where Connor must find a way to escape the mines, which have been sealed off after a great "tremblor." This culminates in a new way for Connor to travel between regions: after the portal from Daventry to the Dimension of Death, the great gateway from the Dimension of Death to the Swamp, and the Snail King's whirlpool down to the Underground, Connor's next journey sees him *hacking the magic map* to get it to allow him to teleport directly to a region he hadn't reached yet!
There, in the Barren Region, we see a landscape that makes you feel like Hidetaka Miyazaki must've played this game at some point: a blasted, lava-scarred landscape with some ancient architecture, including a grand ziggurat! The puzzle-solving continues to be a mix of environmental interactions, self-contained logic puzzles, and very simple "find item X and use on place/person Y" adventure game inventory puzzles, and the enemies continue to have enough personality and behavioural distinctions to support a much more developed combat engine.
As I'd kind of expected, the areas seems to be getting smaller as the quest progresses, and the Barren Region, like the Underground, only takes a couple of hours. At the end of it, we *take an elevator* all the way up through the mountains and into the Frozen Reaches, where we meet an Ice Queen who, for some reason, isn't the same Ice Queen from King's Quest V! Next time, Connor sets out to make piece between the ice people and the bird people up in the icy mountain peaks of Daventry!
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*Intro Song*: "Ataraxia" by Aaron Hodges-Boyle. Aaron has an extensive catalog of "video game music to study or fall asleep to" on his Bandcamp page: https://aaronhodges-boyle.bandcamp.com/
This playthrough was originally broadcast live on Twitch, beginning April 6, 2024, at https://www.twitch.tv/58dreamstreet
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