Spellbreaker: Megafauna

Following my impasse with the magic carpet, I reloaded an earlier save, to one just before I was forced to choose between saving a scroll in a bottle and the magic cube needed to get me there, and used a bit of fish to distract the hungry grouper so that I could collect both. Then I retraced the rest of my steps up until I had the magic carpet again.

Now then - what can we do with this flying carpet? I already know that using it outdoors just gets me lost in the wilderness, and that removing its tag prevents it from working entirely. I thought that the oubliette, accessible from the cube I just rescued, might be a good place to fly, but the carpet doesn't fly in there.

But I discovered something else here. An outflow pipe here can be entered  - secure the spellbook first! - after shrinking yourself with magic. This leads back to cube 1's Ruins Room, and another cube is picked up along the way. Continuing to go down the outflow past the Ruins Room will be your immediate death.

The water can also be frozen with magic, but I don't see what purpose it serves. The flow continues regardless.

This fifth cube can be Blorpled into a phase-shifting hub leading to a room containing an ornate, and magical compass rose, and another room with an inset in the wall. Inserting the compass into it causes the north arm to change color and opens up a passage to an octagonal room with no way out.

I think I know what I'm meant to do here, but I'm unsure how to communicate it to the parser! Moving, rotating, or pushing the compass, its arms, or its knobs just produces the unhelpful message "nothing happens."

I turned to a walkthrough - turns out I missed something! The trap door at the top of the oubliette can't be reached by magic carpet, but it can be opened with Rezrov. And freezing the water does serve a purpose - one freeze does nothing, but a second freeze blocks the outflow, flooding the hole. A third cast - you've got to memorize three casts ahead of time and then secure the spellbook - solidifies the pool surface and lets you climb out.

The dungeon has yet another cube on the floor, but also a moldy, disintegrating book, found inside a cabinet in one of its cells. It can be magically repaired, and inside, a lone spell 'Snavig' - shape change - is found and transcribable with Gnusto. There is also a guard tower overwatching, but nothing useful seems to be within, and when you stick around, the roc swoops down and snatches you.

 

This sixth cube takes us to the boneyard where death would normally deposit you. A north exit goes back to Belwit square, and a west exit is sealed. But I couldn't find anything to do here, so I went around the world again to see if Snavig could be useful anywhere.

Snavig doesn't work on the roc, but it does work on the grouper - and you'll want to leave everything behind before doing this. Which means you've got to memorize it, plus a Blorple before you step through the ocean portal, and if the spell randomly fails, you've got to Blorple back and retry.

As a grouper, you can dive to the bottom of the ocean floor, where a seventh cube sits! Whatever you brought with you will also sit here, which is why you want to bring nothing. You can't pick it up as a grouper, and eating it produces a humorous (but very undesirable!) result, but you can just wait for the spell to wear off - you've got enough oxygen to retrieve both it and the cube that brought you here, surface, and use your Blorple to return to safety.

 

This new cube leads to a brightly lit hub whose only functioning exit is a volcano, where a lava fragment can be found and collected if magically cooled first. But I couldn't see what to do with it, or find anything else to do, so I turned to the walkthrough again.

Finally, I learned what do do with the magic carpet. You take it to the guard tower and ride it before the roc gets you, which I had actually tried doing, but did not realize that in this place, and this place only, you can take off, land in the place it takes you, and survive. From above, the wilderness surrounding the guard tower is completely indistinguishable from any other wilderness area, but if you go west toward the jagged mountains, you'll reach the roc's nest, where you can get the cube before the mother returns (or the baby hatches).

This eight cube goes to a "string hub" with one valid path - south, to an enchanter's retreat, where Belboz meditates, and will quickly kill you if you attempt any hostility. He will submit to a magic mind probe, but this reveals nothing suspicious.

I'm now 340 points in, out of a maximum of 600. This is a pretty long game! I've only seen 47 rooms, which is probably the majority, but there's very little padding here. Almost all of them have at least one functional purpose.

I have three unsolved problems:

• How do I enter the sealed rooms in the hubs?
• What do I do with Belboz?
• How do I manipulate the Octagonal Room?
  

 

I suspect the first two problems don't get solved until I'm near the end, and the third is just a matter of finding the right verbiage. We will see.

My Trizbort map (so far):