Game:

Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos (1993)

Duration: 10:43

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1

The room we’re in is notable for having a niche containing the Noir Key, which we’ll need later. It’s also notable for the door only opening if something’s in the niche—if we take the key out and then try to open the door, the button won’t work. As such, I make a point of opening the door back up before heading over to get the Noir Key. After killing a Mantha that came inside, I leave the room and start to backtrack. There’s a path a bit further back that we haven’t explored yet, and we’ll be going that way next. Once I reach the fork in the road, I head down this new path, and after getting hit with a Fireball trap we come to what looks like a dead end. As usual, though, the map gives away that it’s not a real dead end. There are two switches here, one in the south wall right in front of us and another in the west wall to our right. It’s VERY important that we not press the southern switch—doing so opens a pit right underneath us and sends us to the dungeon level! I make sure to avoid that and press only the switch on the west; doing so causes a wall section to disappear, allowing us to continue forward and revealing a door with an ornate lock. This is the room where King Richard’s body is being held, but in order to get in we have to unlock the door first. Unfortunately, we don’t have the key yet.

To get the key, I head to a pair of switches very close to the door. One of them, with tragedy mask faces near it, can be pressed to cause another wall section to disappear, taking us to another door. The Carrion Key that’ll unlock Richard’s room is in here, and I go in while closing the door behind us to avoid any enemies surprising us. From here, we need to solve a puzzle. There’s a pit blocking our way to the niche containing the Carrion Key in the back of the room. We have to go around the pit, and to do so it’s necessary to throw an item at a switch on the other side of the pit. I throw the Dragon Figurine, and it causes a teleporter to appear in a cul-de-sac next to us. There’s seemingly a pit blocking the way to the teleporter, but it’s an illusion; we can go to the teleporter without a problem. It transports us to the back of the room, where we can head to the niche and claim the Carrion Key. That still leaves the problem of getting past the pit, as we can’t go out the way we got in. The secret is to put another item into the niche we got the Carrion Key from; doing so causes the pit to disappear. I put a Bannon’s Reserve into the niche and duly head out of the room. We go to King Richard’s room and unlock the door to find his body still in the protective shroud. Unfortunately, there’s a new problem—it’s been tainted by a dark shadow of some kind. We need to dispel the shadow before we can remove the shroud itself, and to do that we need all four figurines. We only have three, so our only choice is to go upstairs to the third floor to find the fourth one. Once we do, we’ll have to come back down here to cure Richard.

I head out and begin to backtrack down the corridor to the two locked doors we didn’t open earlier. Now that we have the Noir and Adder Keys, we can open those and head up to the third floor. Unfortunately, to get to those doors we have to make our way through a lot of Manthas. Manthas never stop spawning, so even though we cleared our way through earlier we now have to fight through the nasty creatures all over again. Still, we make it to the first of the two locked doors without much trouble and I open it with the Adder Key. A Death Disk comes out to fight us, and after defeating him I go inside to find a chest. This particular chest has some great loot, but unfortunately it requires a very high Rogue level to unlock and Michael can’t get it open. Disappointed, I leave the chest and move towards the remaining door. There are a lot of Manthas blocking the way, though, and inconveniently we run out of Fireball Wands at this point. We still have the Death Wand, though, and I start using that instead. I pause to rest once the coast is clear, and then open the door with the Noir Key. A switch inside transports us to a separate part of Floor 2, and after defeating two Manthas and two Death Disks we finally find a staircase that takes us up to Floor 3. I head up, and we get a sudden surprise—the staircase is blocked off by Scotia in an effort to trap us. That’s okay, though—there are pits that we can use to get back downstairs. In the meantime, I want to explore Floor 3 as much as possible, so I re-equip the breastplates and start looking around. It’s a wide-open area, and we can explore more or less in peace. It’s not completely harmless, though—when I press one of the switches up here, we’re confronted by a Toadulus monster! This giant frog-like creature has lots of health and can cause tremors much like the Knowles, but fortunately it doesn’t inflict much damage. We defeat him, but we’ll have to watch out for other traps on this floor.

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