Trespasser Walkthrough From 1997! – Part Ten – Ascent

Ascent

Now Anne is certain that her only hope of escaping this island is to get to the backup transmitter on the top of Mt. Watson. Leaving the lab, the last real outpost of civilization between her and the summit, she strikes out into the most difficult terrain she has encountered yet. After struggling up the ridge beyond the lab, she can see there are several steep hills and their deep valleys which still remain between her and the bottom of the mountain. The vegetation is scraggly jungle here – the steep hills and slightly higher altitudes have provided for less-fertile growth than the southern part of the island.

*Hill slide

The first ridge looks down into a small valley bordered on three sides by ridges. There are no easy paths around the tops of the ridges. Anne knows she needs to get to the mountain, visible ahead of her, but the only way forward seems to be down into this valley. There is only one seemingly possible route, a bare rocky ramp between the tall cliffs. Anne can’t walk down it, however, and will end up sliding to the bottom of the valley, at which point she will be immediately set upon by raptors.

*Raptors in the valley.

The floor of the valley here is very, very rough. Anne will often need to make jumps to get across ditches and tiny gorges, or just to make it up a sudden change in elevation, all the while fending off the raptors. The terrain should also work to her advantage, however, and careless raptors will fall in holes and incapacitate themselves.

*Getting out

Now that she is at the bottom of the valley, Anne is faced with the challenge of getting back out. All the ridges around her are too steep to climb, but if she heads along the edge of the eastern ridge, towards the sea, the land will eventually level out, and she can head back towards the mountain.

*The Mayan City

Once Anne rounds the ridge and starts to head back south towards Mt. Watson, the land slopes steeply upward into a foothill. The land is rocky and difficult to follow as usual in this part of the island, but there is a relatively smooth winding trail which Anne should find convenient to follow. A relatively flat area is nestled between the base of the mountain and another highpoint, and the path which Anne is following conceals the plateau from her vision until suddenly she crests a hill and sees a wondrous sight: a sprawling, ruined Mayan city! The buildings are fitted right into the contours of the land, and a large step pyramid dominates the scene. At the entrance to the city is a hastily-assembled fence of felled trees, with a hand-painted sign on the front which says: “Danger! Off limits! InGen Survey Team”.

Anne has no other way to go than forward, however – the surrounding hills are too steep to be climbed.

The Mayan city was a religious site, and as such it is littered with traps to keep out the wrong people. After losing a member, Hammond’s Survey Team decided it was best left alone, and proclaimed it off limits.

The first traps Anne will encounter will be well-concealed pits. These pits are covered over with stones which are very loosely held together. In the tens of hundreds of years since the city was abandoned, a very thin layer of soil has mostly covered all the pit tops. Anne will be alerted to the presence of the pits by a partially collapsed one, probably triggered by the survey team. She can spot all the other pits by looking for squarish areas of slightly discolored grass. If she falls in a pit, she will be able to use the very blocks which fell in with her to make steps back out, but she will take some damage from the fall.

Second, the town’s two biggest and still-roofed buildings have deadfall traps inside. These are triggered by specially marked stones on the floor of the building. One building has a large ceiling block from a deadfall already on its floor. This block is turned on its side. The patterned bottom, which used to sit flush with the ceiling above, is stained darkly with old but not ancient (read: last few years) blood. This is the trap which killed the InGen surveyor. Inside this building, in a dark corner, is the rifle the surveyor was carrying, which was knocked flying. Getting to it will be dangerous if Anne isn’t paying enough attention to the floor, but it is a powerful and fully loaded weapon. The other building is empty, but Anne could lure a raptor in there and get it to trigger a deadfall trap.

The temple is the most heavily trapped building. There are stairs up each of the sides, and there are dark steps placed at random intervals. The dark steps are hinged along their top rear edges and rotate away when stepped on – more of an annoyance than a life threatening trap. There are four rooms on the lower level, and one large room on the next level up, as well as a small altar room with pillars but no roof on the top level. The rear of the altar is a very large stone head (about 2m tall by 1.5m wide by 1.5m deep), propped on the The lower rooms have dart traps, which function exactly like in Indiana Jones, and a weapon and corpse is hidden away in one of them. The second floor has a deadfall immediately inside the door. If Anne wants to get in or out safely, she will have to jump across the trigger tile. The altar room has a floor which falls away if she stands exactly in front of the altar, sending her down through a chute into the middle room, in the midst of its traps, with heavy damage. The biggest trap of all, however, is triggered by the middle step of the rear stairs of the temple – this step is dark, and also carved with a likeness of the huge head. When Anne steps on this step, it sinks a little bit, and the platform on which the large head rests begins to slowly tip towards her, until the head becomes unbalanced enough that it falls over, and tumbles down the stairs. The platform tilts so slowly, however, that Anne has plenty of time to get out of the way if she clues in to what is going on. Perhaps, if necessary (see below), the platform begins to return to its original position when Anne gets off the step.

Why would Anne want to mess around on the pyramid at all, given how dangerous it is? Well, as soon as she proceeds a few meters down the central avenue of the city, she will hear the roar of a T-Rex. It will come stalking slowly into the city (it has fallen in some traps itself, and is taking care). It comes down an avenue free of traps, anyway – only the central avenue which Anne has to walk down to get into the town has pit traps on it. This Rex will basically herd Anne towards the temple, as best as it can give our AI. Most of the other buildings in town are roofless anyway, and aren’t of any use to hide from the beast.

This sequence should involve Anne scrambling around the outside and inside of the pyramid, inadvertantly triggering traps, until finally she winds up on the head-triggering step halfway up the back of the pyramid. The Rex should be scripted to move quickly into position and repeatedly snap (but miss) at Anne when she steps on the the trigger, and all she has to do is jump out of the way as the head begins to roll down, and the Rex, distracted by her movement, won’t get out of the way in time to avoid a fatal crushing.

*Mayan trail

Beyond the temple, once the Rex has been disposed of, Anne spots a trail leading up the mountain, away from the village – it should have, at least at its beginning, a low stone wall along it as in the WALL.TGA photoreference (I’ve been acheing to get that in!).

For some reason lost to history, the inhabitants of the village built this trail partway up the side of the mountain. Anne can follow it for about one quarter the circumference of Mt. Watson. It becomes more and more ruined the further from the city she gets.

*Bridge Ambush

A gap in the trail is bridged by a recentl
y fallen tree. When Anne is about halfway across it, raptors come at her from both ends of the bridge. A fall means certain death for Anne, and she will have to get off the bridge before it is blocked at both ends or fight the raptors very efficiently. A cool thing which might very well not work would be to set it up so that when both raptors are close to Anne, on either side, the one in her view will leap at her, to which the player’s instinctive reaction ought hopefull to be to duck, and the raptor, having jumped too hard anyway, will go flying over her head, colliding with the other one, sending them both into the chasm.

*Falling ledges

The trail has become very narrow, and its outer edges fall away as Anne inches along as close to the wall as possible. It will always remain wide enough for her to sidestep, so as long as the player doesn’t throw caution to the wind and just walk boldly along the center of the trail, she will be ok.

*Tram construction

Not too much further from the ledges area, Anne comes across the course the tram was going to run. The lower portion of the railway drops off at a washout or cliff which InGen hadn’t bridged yet, so she can’t use it as an easy way down off the mountain into an area we don’t want her getting to, but she can follow its course upwards. The railway is a very complicated series of platforms and stagings around half-built bridges in an attempt to keep the grade of the railway down to a reasonable level. It is all falling apart, but it is the only way Anne can get up the mountain.

*Leaning platform

A chasm (maybe about twice Anne’s maximum jump) blocks forward progress. However, a central platform on the top of some staging which once stood between the two ends has tilted over towards Anne’s side. If she stands on it and grabs a long pole, she can push against the side of the chasm, right the staging, and then tilt it over towards the other side to cross.

*Scaffolding fight

A fairly long gap is bridged by some multi-level scaffolding, which sways gently with each step, indicating its relative fragility. Raptors will attack Anne while she is crossing this scaffolding. If Anne and a raptor both stand on the same scaffolding plank, it will come free, and send them down to the next level of the scaffolding (Where the boards are stronger so that they don’t break through again). Anne will then need to get rid of the raptor in the confined space midst of the scaffolding supports on the lower level until she can climb back up the ramp made when the upper piece collapsed down. After enough fighting here, the area will probably be a confusing maze of ramps between the levels and gaps where the planks fell through.

*Scaffolding construction

Anne needs to mount a substantial cliff, and there are no handy boxes around to make a ramp. Instead, there are scaffolding pieces (in as many parts as we think we can break them without overloading physics). Anne will need to build two separate sections of scaffolding (one two pieces high, the other only one piece high, and then use the planks as ramps to make her way to the top. Finding a way to make ramps on the higher stages of the scaffolding will be an interesting challenge – Anne will need to realize that she has to put down one horizontal board to rest the lower ends of the ramp on. We can make this even more challenging by severely limiting her pieces of plank such that she always has to pick up the ramps she just climbed and place them again to get to the next level.

*Albertosaur below (?)

An optional puzzle – Anne is crossing another gap, but this time an albertosaur comes at her from the ground at the bottom of the gap – fifteen meters or so below her feet. It can see her on top, and it very intelligently and methodically begins to butt the lower supports of the makeshit bridge she is standing on. She will want to get off very quickly, or fall to her certain death.

*Raptor Kong (?)

Another optional or maybe impossible puzzle – in this area, preferably the last one before the ledge with the elevator at the beginning of the Summit, there are a series of increasingly narrow scaffolding stages connected by steps at their ends and occasionally in their mid points (What I’m describing here are the Donkey Kong platforms, ok?). A very, very smart raptor is at the top of the platforms, methodically pushing smallish rocks and tree stumps down from the cliff edge, which bounce off the platforms towards Anne, and possibly even occasionally roll down the incline on the platforms themselves… Anne may very well want to jump these rolling obstacles which could knock her off the platform or at least do severe damage, and she will need to take extra care not to get hit when she is climbing the steps up to the next level. When she gets to the top, the raptor won’t just grab the princess and run up to the next level, though. Anne will have to dispose of it.

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