Game:

Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos (1993)

Duration: 5:56

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I’m finally ready to leave the castle, and head out the main gate to the outside. We’re now in the Northland Forest area, the second area of the game and the home base of Gladstone Keep. Our primary objective is to traverse through the forest and find the marina that can take us to the Southlands, but there’s no need to do that right away. It’s much better to thoroughly explore each area of the game for loot and experience, and that’s what I’m planning to do here. Our trusty map just shows Gladstone Keep at the moment, but that’ll change as we explore. I take a few steps forward, then turn to the right and start heading in that direction. There’s a location in the northwest region of the map that’s technically optional, but checking it out is going to make our lives a lot easier. As we head towards our goal, I spot a weathered dagger on the ground and make sure to pick it up. It’s not as good as our current dagger, but we’ll be able to sell it later. A few steps later, we spot a large puddle on the ground and we’re thrown into our first battle of the game. Our opponent is a wild boar who thankfully isn’t too difficult, even on Ferocious difficulty, but this does allow us a fairly smooth introduction to the game’s combat mechanic. Clicking the weapon icon next to our character’s portrait causes us to attack by taking a swing at whatever’s in front of us (if we’re carrying a melee weapon such as Michael’s current dagger), or shooting at whatever’s in front of us (if we have a ranged weapon like a bow and arrow). After an attack, the icon is grayed out for a few seconds and we have to wait to make another attack. It’s possible to miss, in which case no damage is done, but a successful hit causes our target to express pain and a number pops up showing how many points of damage we did. In this particular instance, we don’t miss any of our attacks and the boar dies on our third strike. With that done, I have Michael rest to replenish his health.

Once Michael’s back to full health, I move forward past the puddle—it’s a dead end, but we pick up a Swarm. Swarms are essentially beehives that we can use to send a horde of stinging insects at an enemy. They’re really not that useful in my opinion, but they do sell for a nice price and are worth collecting for that reason. Once we have that, I backtrack and turn into a pathway we haven’t been into yet. Here, we’re confronted by a thug, who demands that we give him our money. The game gives us three choices for dealing with him—we can give him all our money, bluff and try to give him just one coin, or fight. We’re going to fight, and the thug’s a respectable foe at this stage of the game. He’s carrying a large club that does decent damage when he hits us, although we still manage to quickly defeat him. During this fight, I show off the game’s magic system—next to our character’s portrait, under the weapon icon, is an arcane symbol icon. Clicking this opens a second panel showing Roman numerals I through IV; this determines the potency of whatever spell we’re trying to cast. Right now the only spell we have is Spark and Michael’s only able to cast it at Level 1, but it’s still strong enough to instantly kill the thug after we land a few conventional hits.

After killing the thug and resting, I backtrack and explore the eastern side of the map. We locate the Draracle’s cave—that’s currently inaccessible, although it’ll be important later—but the main focus is on finding items. I find a second Swarm item as well as a bag of 5 silver crowns (the game’s unit of currency) and a rock while exploring, and that’s good enough to head back to Gladstone Keep. My goal is to sell our new Swarms to Victor so we’ll have enough money to buy one of the weapons he has for sale (which are far better than our dagger). I make sure to remove the dagger we’re currently wielding so I can sell it, then head to Victor’s quarters. Selling both Swarms and both our daggers bumps us up to 111 crowns, and I buy the 60-crown rapier with it. Now that we have a much stronger weapon, I feel comfortable returning to where we found the thug earlier. Advancing further down his path reveals that he has two buddies around a campfire, using a cave as their hideout. I want to go in that cave, although we’ll have to get past those two thugs first. It’s possible to try to sneak past them, but I prefer the brute force approach and attack. This would have been a tough fight with our original weapon, but with the rapier it’s really pretty easy. I hit them with Spark first, then finish them off surprisingly fast. We rest to get our health and mana back, then enter the cave. We’ll uncover its secrets in the next video.

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