The Mountain
Level 3 — lakes, storms, stone trolls and the way into the deep
Bare earth beneath your feet, then stone. Ahead the ground tilts up and up — a mountain, vast and grey, its shoulders wrapped in mist. The Mountain is the level where the game stops being an escape and becomes a journey. Four of its five stages happen entirely outdoors, climbing from waterlogged lowlands to snow, and the fifth turns the whole thing on its head by pushing you underground.
Climbing the level
The lower stages are wet and open: a lake, marshland, wide fields, an old bridge. Higher up the terrain narrows into ridges and cliffs, an abandoned camp with the fire long dead, and storms that arrive with lightning and then snow.
The high stages are where the level's inhabitants appear. A Dahu — a chamois-like animal whose legs on one side are shorter than the other, so it stands level on a slope — watches you from the rocks. A war band of orcs crosses somewhere below. Trolls stand petrified in a stand of trees, caught by daylight. A giant bird's nest sits on a ledge above a drop that makes no sense to look down.
The final stage abandons the sky altogether: a cave mouth, then a dwarven gate carved with runes, and the first branching choices made in the dark. It is a deliberate handover to the next level.
Sound and style
The Mountain's soundtrack is the first real break in the score: the Castle's medieval strings give way to something colder and more percussive, built on stone and wind. It is the moment the game signals that the world is bigger than a single building.
Visually the level keeps the same pixel resolution as the earlier ones but uses far more sky, distance and weather, which makes it the most spacious set of artworks in the first half of the game.
Reaching 100%
The Mountain has more rooms than either earlier level, so full completion takes longer. Every room discovered plus the three objects unlocks the Mountain's bonus artwork.
The three objects of the Mountain
A worn grey cap
Faded almost colourless, with a small embroidered diamond emblem on the front. Skate-shop rather than medieval: another object that does not belong to this world.
A painted miniature
A tabletop-wargame figurine of an insectoid alien monster, hand-painted, chipped and slightly broken. Somebody spent hours on it, once.
A silver nutcracker
An old nutcracker cast in the shape of a walnut shell — a very specific, very domestic object to find on a mountainside.