Below the Root: Won!

 

The Erdlings' cavern is a dark, claustrophobic maze, and before you can even enter you'll need some wissenberries and a spare token to bribe the guards. And then you'll need a lamp to even see where you're going.

I went in with one, and found a spare at the first junction.

I explored, mapping things out as I went.

Pensing from a distance clues me to stay that way.

More ladders. Are we in Spelunker?

A lot of spiders crawl around, but they can't do much except tear your shuba.

Three tokens and an elixir, nice!

The spirit bell alerts me to a door I can already see.

Beyond a door, Vatar gave me a vision, and another spirit boost, bringing me to 37 points.

Soon after, my last lamp expired, and I was trapped in the dark! I had no choice but to "renew" and teleport back home.

Thankfully, I had found seven tokens while exploring, which I took to the lamp store in Broad Grund, collecting another bunch of wissenberries along the way. I bought four lamps - all I could carry - then continued east to the Star Grund shops and bought a vine rope, first dropping my last ration of bread which had been so much dead weight ever since I learned healing magic.

Wrapping around yet again, I rested up and re-entered. Naturally, the guards had to be bribed again.

Four lamps got me pretty deep into the cavern, even as I mapped out uncharted territory.

This time it alerts me to a door I can't see.

The spirit rises, even here.

Raamo lives!

I kiniported up, and spoke to brother Raamo, who feared falling (come on, I fell a hundred or so times just getting here!), so I offered him my shuba.

And that's the end of the game, though I hadn't found a way to get the temple key and explore Temple Grunds properly.

 

I couldn't be satisfied without accomplishing this, so I looked at an FAQ for the first time. Here I learned the magic wand's unrelated purpose - it serves as an unbreakable bramble-cutter, replacing the trencher. It can also be used to kill animals, or even people, but this permanently affects your spirit level! So never do that.

But as for getting the temple key, to get the key, you need permission. And to get permission, you have to enter the temple! So how do you do that?

Climb to the highest branch on the neighboring Star Grund. Lengthen the branch with magic as far as it will go. Then jump and glide on right over the gate!

Stealing keys = bad, but jumping a locked gate = good?

One screen upward, D'ol Falla could be found inside a building called Vine Palace, and told me to find her lost key, and the lost chamber.

 

An attached building had more sealed gates, impassable by kiniporting.

Before going to seek the key, I explored the grunds. Up in the trees, I found one more elixir, as well as an assortment of the usual ropes and berries.

More interestingly, a knothole led way to a temple key. A different one from the key stashed further below, apparently.

 

I entered the temple with this key.

Though you could just kiniport inside.

Inside the inner cloister, I met Raamo's mother, for a clue and more spirit boost.

Now she tells me. All those regular lamps wasted for nothing!

You can probably predict the rest. I hopped off a branch from the Temple Grunds to descend to the floor, collected D'ol Falla's key, and returned, using the temple key to re-enter.

D'ol Falla's key opened the lost chamber.

Inside, I collected the spirit lamp.

And with that, I was pretty sure I'd seen everything, or at least enough of it that exploring more would not likely be worthwhile.

GAB rating: Good

I like platform adventures. We've seen a bunch of them in the 1984 phase of Data Driven Gamer, and this is the best one yet, thanks to its big open world and satisfying exploration.

It isn't perfect; controls can be needlessly frustrating at times, bad stuff like exhaustion, getting kidnapped, or having stuff break on you can happen through little fault of your own, terrain can often be difficult to "read" which leads to a lot of missed jumps, and the world is honestly too big compared to the amount of stuff to do in it. The visuals and sounds are kind of basic for a Commodore 64 game. The plot, offered as an epilogue to Snyder's Green Sky trilogy, seems a bit lame too - spiritual leader and hero Raamo went missing, and then we found him underground, apparently.

But perfection isn't required for a harpoon - being better than other games in the "good" category is. And Below the Root, which continually compelled me to seek out hidden areas, uncover secrets, and locate Green Sky's animals and spiritual leaders to advance the plot and learn new magic powers, accomplished that. I give it a general recommendation, a harpoon, and a place in the ivory deck.

My final map: