Western Mineshaft
Items in this room:
Gold Coins: 1 | Keys: 0 | Potions: 0 | Gems: 0
This room will either be tricky, or incredibly easy...but we'll get to that in a moment. First things first, enter the Healing Fountain straight ahead if you are missing any health. Once you're healed up, head toward the Save Point. Shoot the barrel on the left just before you reach it for some Gold Coins, then complete the journey to save your game. In front of you is a minecart. To the right is a floating message telling you that you can skip this next section if you experience motion sickness. Which I do...I have sacrificed much to capture footage.
Anyway, if you decide to want to ride the minecart, just hop inside. Before you embark, move the giant lever to the right. Now shoot the empty circle in the center console with your Wand to ignite an acceleration flame. As the minecart moves forward, aim your Wand at the Runic Plate above the incoming doorway to raise the gate.
I'm not going to go too in depth with strategy here. Basically you'll need to periodically raise more gates, fight off swarms of Big Mouths, and change tracks. As you travel down the tracks, there will be four splits in the track where taking the wrong path leads to death. You can alter which track you follow by moving the giant lever to the left or right. For the first two splits, you'll want to have the lever moved to the right. After passing the second split, immediately move the lever to the left to anticipate the next split. Once you pass that, move the lever back to the right. Odin will warn you as you approach each split, and you'll hear the wheels squealing as you cross the split, so you'll have plenty of audio clues to know when to move the lever. But I find it best to know which way the path splits in advance and move the lever as soon as you reach the split, that way you're prepared for the next one in case you were a little slow in defeating the Big Mouths. Few things are as depressing as getting fireballed to death by frantically trying to move the lever.
The Big Mouths are certainly a nuisance, but luckily not too much of a threat. The biggest challenge is your Shield running out of energy, so make sure you turn it off any time there's a lull in enemies. You can also duck down behind the "engine" to avoid the fireballs, but that's trickier if you play sitting like me. I've included a video here to help you out if you're having trouble (or just want to skip this section but still want to see what all the fuss is about).
Once you reach the bottom of the tracks, you're considered to be in the next room.
