Game:

Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos (1993)

Duration: 10:29

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The thugs’ hideout is the first of many dungeon-type areas within the game, and serves as an introduction of sorts to exploring them. In dungeons, we’ll commonly encounter puzzles, traps, and various obstacles to getting from Point A to Point B that go beyond enemy creatures. Such is the case in this cave. It’s unoccupied, but still tricky because we need solve a puzzle to find what we need. To begin with, I simply head through the cave until reaching what looks like a dead end, picking up a rock and some coins along the way. Upon reaching the “dead end”, I pull up the map and discover that there’s a switch on the wall nearby. These are pretty common in the game’s dungeons, and when I head back to push this one a wall section disappears to reveal a passage deeper into the cave. Moving down this new passage, we find an excellent item that’ll serve us well throughout the game: a lantern. It’ll provide light in dark environments such as this one provided the oil doesn’t run out, and the cave instantly lights up. From there, I explore the rest of the cave and find some more coins, but to get what we’re looking for we’ll need to solve a puzzle. That’s the next item on the agenda.

First I head to a switch that’s been uncovered on the map; pressing it opens a small niche in the wall where we pick up the “thug’s key”. That’s nice, but for the key to be of any use we’ll have to find a locked chest, and to do that we’ll need to solve a puzzle involving two pressure plates. One of them has rocks on it pressing it down, while the other is untouched. What the game wants us to do is move the rocks to the other pressure plate so it’s weighted down while the other is untouched; doing this opens another hidden passage that I go through. It appears to dead-end, but pushing a series of switches on the wall ultimately leads us to a chest that the thug’s key works on. It has some great items, most notably a lockpick. With this we’ll be able to try to unlock chests and doors even without keys. There’s also some money and healing items. With the chest looted, our work in the cave is done and we head out. I still want to explore every nook and cranny of the map, though, so I continue to explore and uncover things. The main thing we find is another Swarm, which I’ll be able to sell to Victor. We also uncover Lake Dread, another location on the map that’ll be important later but we can ignore for now.

Just as the map is nearly uncovered, we’re greeted by a beautiful young woman who claims she has business in Gladstone Keep and needs to get inside. Michael declines to help her, and the woman—who, it should be noted, had yellow eyes like Scotia’s—suddenly turns into a bird and flies away! Scotia’s already trying to sneak her way into the castle in disguise, and while we foiled this attempt it surely won’t be her last. I head back to the castle at this point to sell our items to Victor, and once we reach him he advises us to warn Geron about what we’ve seen. That’s a good idea, but first we’ll sell our items. I sell the Swarm, a weathered dagger, and a torn shirt, but once all that’s sold we’re only at 101 crowns. I want enough money to buy Victor’s long sword for 125 crowns, so I decide to sell back the rapier we bought earlier. That gives us more than enough to buy the long sword, and I happily equip it. It’s the most expensive weapon he had for sale but also the best one, so it should serve us well. With our new sword, it’s time to head to Geron’s office to warn him about Scotia. Unfortunately, he won’t listen to our warning. He’s angry to see us back so soon, and when we tell him about Scotia he accuses us of telling stories. Disturbingly, a bird that looks exactly like the one Scotia turned into is sitting right on his windowsill. It’s painfully obvious that she’s here and working her way in, but there’s little we can do. We ultimately have no choice but to leave and continue with our original plan, so I leave the castle and head to the Marina, somewhat past where Scotia greeted us. We give our writ to the rather rude clerk and set sail for the Southlands.

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