Part 3: The mushroom forest
You start out with some easily-missed mushrooms here:
What? You don't see them? They're the tiny dots by Ariane's feet. You have to use your knife to get them, but luckily they're not important for finishing the game. You use them when Ariane examines a cup and wonder what happens if she throws something in the cup. Wait… come again?
That's right, later on she sees a cup and wonders what happens if she throws something in it. The weird thing is, the only thing that you're allowed to "throw in" is the mushrooms, so I guess her query was specifically related to fungi. I couldn't get it to work the first time I played the game, but maybe I wasn't wearing the gloves, who knows?
So, throw those suckers in BAM! and you get a vision of your pilot stumbling away ok:
Thank you magic mushrooms, for that reassuring hallucinogenic vision.
One of the more annoying parts of the mushroom forest is walking through these screens.
For some reason, these screens cover a huge distance. You seriously spend a long time just watching Ariane run; I feel like I'm watching Monty Python's Lancelot before he attacks the castle.
Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. So you go up a guard tower, and Ariane is still being stupid about the fact that she's underground, as witnessed by this conversation snippet:
"Are you from the surface?"
"I don't know what you're talking about..."
I hate how in PAC games you're always smacking your forehead over how stupid your characters are, but that seems to be pretty standard so we'll let it slide.
Next, there's a sick soldier with a broken leg in the background who you have to help. Seems pretty basic, right? You need something to splint his leg and something to ease the pain. Well, making a splint was easy enough, but for the life of me, no matter how I tried, I couldn't ease his pain.
Which was ridiculous because I had a bottle of aspirin. It seems like you'd use a painkiller to, well... kill the pain. But again, logic is spat upon by this game. Not only would he not accept it, but he wouldn't explain why he wouldn't accept it. I kept standing there, trying to shove aspirin into the soldier's hands, but to no avail.
The talk options seem to indicate that clicking on "ease the pain" should have taken care of it. I thought it was a glitch, so I played the whole game over again just to try giving the guy the splint and aspirin at the same time. But NOPE. That was not it.
So, after cheating and looking online, I figured out why I couldn't heal the guy. My flask had no water in it. I guess the soldier needed to take the aspirin with some water, but come on! Give me a hint if that's important. You'd think that army men posted in the middle of nowhere have their own supply of water, but no, Ariane has to go fetch some for the lazy, non-communicative guys.
If my leg was broken and I was in pain, I think I'd just accept the aspirin without water. The last thing I'd do would be to sit there and refuse the medicine. I especially wouldn't tell them I'm refusing medicine because they didn't have any water. (Although if some stranger was offering me pills, I'd probably refuse them altogether anyway out of distrust.)
Anyway, so how could I have possibly missed the water before? There was a whole underground lake; why, crazy player, did you not fill up your flask then? I'll let you know. I had actually tried filling it before, but the game was non-responsive, and I had just figured you waited 'till later to fill it. I went back and discovered out of all the places you see water, you can only fill your flask from this small hotspot (highlighed in blue):
That's right, just a small area right next to a walking-spot bridge. It's outrageous. You should have been able to fill it from all those different areas where there's... ya know... water.
So after you fix up the soldier, you have to fix their horn to call their pterodactyl. The first instance of you doing someone else's (paid) job for them. Clearly, you have to put this beach conch on the horn to fix it, but oh no! It's not working!
Without any hints from anyone, why don't you try burning the tip of bone with your lighter and using this on the conch first? That's clearly the most logical thing.
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Then you need to get the bellows from the abandoned crystal mine to finish up the horn. Uhhh, why didn't they have bellows to begin with? You can see that it fits in with the mechanism on the left. I can see the horn tip wearing down, but the bellows seem pretty pivotal to keeping this thing working. Where was the other pair?
After a cutscene, Ariane is so excited she saw a dinosaur that she's cleaning her sleeve.
