Inca II: Won

The spot Eldorado was taken to is some kind of crater. A remote crater divided into three screens, this one has a "stele" and three pillars...

...This one has some scepters and one part (that I didn't get) that needs a keystone. The first part of this puzzle I just stumbled upon without realizing it, just by mousing over stuff, proving that having words pop up over interactable items isn't always good design. The two scepters can be picked up to open a door to an interior area with a casabash, which I get by cutting it in half. Just by messing around I figure the scepters go into the pillars, and the split casabash should go into the keystone, but I can't do the latter yet.

And it turns out that the other half of the casabash goes on the pillar. Okay. This allows me to deposit the first power. We are teleported back to the native, who tells Eldorado to not worry about the Mangroove demon, the crocodile settled his dispute with him, before laughing ominously. Off to the next place.

A third there, with Eldorado hoping the other two are easier. Another space section, this one hardly worth putting in. Guess he was right. Afterwards, Eldorado gets a message from Kelt, one of Aguirre's squadrons is going after the in-construction Boomerang flotilla, could you kindly take it out so we don't have to? Maybe I haven't been hard enough on Kelt, after all, there must have been a reason why Ataluapha got on the council. I get the choice, and frankly I'm starting to wonder if the final battle is against the asteroid and these side-trips are increasing its strength.

Still, I go for it. 5 bombers with 20 fighters serving as an escort. Wow, they sent a lot here, didn't they? How am I going to deal with this one, you ask? Same as always, luck, half-remembered stuff from other, better games, and now I know that you can speed up and down with the + and - keys. In the end, it's just luck with the nukes weapons, killing enough before they branch out to be able to reasonably deal with. The game suggests you use the Tumi's superior speed to swoop in, which is horrible advice, you can't really swoop in on enemies.

Back to the goal of placing Eldorado's power in various places. It's a desert with a purple atmosphere, where we're here to travel to the something or another of the three dreams in the most remote corner of the empire. Here I find someone who looks like he should be playing a German SS soldier, apparently under rubble. It's another find your way to the dream world thing. This leads to a series of screens which just involve clicking once and then climbing something.

Now we're here at a...puzzle in which I have to remove this big rock. I think. There's a big rock here and a small rock under it, holding it in place. There's also above, which has a tree branch/root sticking out. What the game wants me to do is not clear, I can use the ballasted thread on the tree branch, then use the rope on that when I look back down. Then I just get lucky and find out that the peg is used in a hole in the rock, at which point I hammer it in, then attach the end of the rope to it. Not entirely unreasonable, but with this game you never know what you're going to get.

Then we get this hilarious guy, who seems to be invoking a Buddhist monk. He'll take Eldorado to his destination, but first we need to pray for the gods help. Yeah...I don't think this guy is the type to do that.

"Find the best prayers to win the trust of the gods!" Remember when I said this was more mundane? At first glance, this is not just confusing, but outright non-sensical. There are ten scrolls which shoot out energy which disappears after a few moments, you can click on all ten without incident. There is nothing else and no indication that any particular scroll is special. Some turn to the left, others to the right. Well, it turns out that this is the way to solve the puzzle, hitting the ones that turn in one direction but not the other. This gets me...a conch. "Keep it Eldorado, the gods never give useless presents."

He takes me to a "sacred place", which is...uh...this place. This is another one of those "why did you bother" puzzle rooms which seem so confusing. So, here there's an opening, with a chain, a point and a grindstone. The answer is to use the chain on the point, which attracts a lightning strike, which somehow creates a shield which I can use a crowbar to free.

We're closer now, and many things are hidden beneath the ice. This is another non-puzzle puzzle screen, in that you have no choice but to guess what item the game wants you to use, since you can only interact with the "Lama". I use the conch which turns the Lama solid and then creates two new items, a log and snow. From here, I just sort of stumble onto using the log on the snow, then the strap and finally the shield, making a gong. This, and the Lama playing the conch, shatters the ice, revealing a temple.

This puzzle at least makes some sense. We have icicles, a ray of sunlight, a waterskin, along with a crystal egg I have to breech and a bowl I can pour things in. Hammer, icicles, then melt them in the sun and pour them into the waterskin. Using this on the bowl, the egg freezes and shatters, allowing Eldorado to place the second power.

Off for the final power, and that means more space sections. No news from Kelt, and we're surrounded by Aguirre's armies again. We even get a shot of Aguirre himself in the flesh. Anyway, just three fighters. This isn't very difficult. The game then gives another cutscene of the horde of Aguirre, but then the Boomerangs arrive to drive them off. Glad I spent the time earlier. Kelt says that the whole thing is a trap, that there's a mole in Eldorado's forces. He says Angelina left and kidnapped Eldorado's wife, which leaves little doubt as to who it was.

Kelt has a plan to distract Aguirre's forces so Eldorado can charge in and save his wife, but it doesn't entirely work. Another space section. This one doesn't go so well. It doesn't matter that I have speed now, because I can never get enemies off my back, worse yet, luck in this case is going to be non-existant because the game isn't giving me more than one nuke. Honestly, I think the AI might honestly be too damn good for even a game that had a competent design for its space sections. I just can't shake off enemy planes.

There's probably some trick to this, but I also start to not care. The flight model frustrates me more and more I learn about it, you seem to move in strange ways if you go up or down and after a few tries I decide to cheat. Just giving myself infinite nukes via Game Conqueror. I do better upon starting this. I also realize the problem on my first try, these guys are turning on a dime! No wonder I can't seem to win when they gang up on me! Still, I don't even need to cheat to win...somehow I manage to win just by shooting most down, not even using the nuke.

Midway through the fight Eldorado contacts Kelt, inquiring about the rest of the battle. Chaotic, basically. After winning, there's silence, before Eldorado does an approach on the asteroid. Aguirre can't believe it. He seems to have the same voice as some other character, but I can't figure it out off-hand.

Another adventure sequence. We've got a hatch and a guard who is unconscious through some method. The puzzle here is one of those, yeah, might as well do that kinds of puzzles. Click on the guard, use a knife to break his necklace and steal the symbols on him, then use the crowbar on the hatch to reveal holes you can put the symbols in. You have to hammer these in, and inside is a weird puzzle where you press buttons to light up parts of a key. Which seems to be more complex than it really is, the problem is that what it solves is on the other part of the screen, creating another opening. It eventually closes again. The solution is to use an item to prop it up, then take the three pieces from the other section.

This reveals Eldorado's wife, who tells him that Aguirre knows of his plan and has placed an army there. Instead, he should place his power inside the asteroid, this should destroy it. The next section's save? Maze. Yippee. This is weird, because you're going down endless tunnels with no indication that anything is happening until it does.

The first room I find is filled with Maoi heads, who in turn, are filled with diamonds. Well, that was something.

Secondly, I find a room full of paintings of the game's characters. This is uhm...something. Eldorado says that objects brought in from the real world have become virtual or something. That's an assumption I don't quite get where it's coming from. At this point I get lost and end up at the statues twice, so I look up a map.

With a map from the hint book, I find my way to a room of mirrors. This more or less causes things to fall into place. With the diamond, I can cut the mirror to get a piece of glass. With that, I can cut a picture of Atahualpa in the painting room. Why the shard of glass and not the diamond? Dunno, but it gets me a music box. Back to the statue room, getting very lost along the way, I put the music box on one of the statues for some reason, which creates a ball called a rock of light.

This brings me...uh...here, in an endless void of flowers. I can move forward, which just brings me to another flower. This game is feeling very Japanese in this last third, minus the space sections, just by how it seems to be missing anything resembling logic. At least the original had an internal logic to it, this just seems like a fever dream. I can click on a flower to open it, where I can use the rock on the pedals to turn them blue, or take the pollen and use it on the flower to cause it to regrow.

After some wandering around some, I discover that not every flower turns blue or uniformly blue. Sometimes they don't turn, sometimes they turn yellow, and sometimes not all pedals turn. If I walk away it turns back to red, so what I'm trying to do is beyond me. And then I win by accident, discovering that it was a mix of pedals I wanted, because using the pollen on a yellow flower created a tricolor flower.

We get a cutscene of Eldorado putting down his last power. Then, we get this, explaining that Wiracocha came back and the game ends. What the hell was that ending? I don't understand why that happened at all. I don't understand a thing. Why did the ending cause something to happen that wasn't even implied before the game ended? What happened to the asteroid and Aguirre? I'm not getting any answers. The funny thing is, this was added in the CD release, the floppy release had none of this, and the branching story I mentioned? Not really that important, it seems.

This Session: 3 hours 00 minutes

Final Time: 5 hours 20 minutes