Chapter 4

Chapter 4-1

Have Ashley climb through the window here to grab the loot. And no peeking.

Now that you have Ashley with you, you'll finally be able to get through the door on the north side of the room here. Before you do, though, it's time to backtrack a bit; if you remember the room with the garrador and the cage (it's to the west of where you are), return there, then exit through the south to reach the exterior area you passed through before heading to the garden. If you do so, then you'll be able to access the treasure room by the fountain; use Ashley to piggyback your way up to the open window nearby. Inside is an Elegant Perfume Bottle, a Red Herb, and the awesome Broken Butterfly Magnum.

NOTE: The Broken Butterfly is going to make the fight with the boss at the end of chapter four much, much easier. If you have the cash, try to spend a bit of it every now and again upgrading its power and capacity; you'll have a semi-difficult fight waiting for you if you don't. You're never going to find much ammo for it, as a note, so try not to use it until you reach the end of chapter 4-4. Consider yourself warned!

After returning to the room where Ashley was restrained, head north to find a save point. There's a tram here that'll lead back to one of the first interior rooms that you came across, but you can't do anything there for now. Instead, head further north, riding the machine across the lava, to reach the castle's foundry.

Lava Bad

Don't get your knickers bunched, here; there's no way to fall into the lava, although you will have to avoid some flame damage. As you proceed along the path, you'll notice a cultist appear in a large, flame-spewing horse…thing off to one side. Before it reaches you and starts roasting you - and not in a pleasant, celebrity-roast-with-Shaquille-O'Neal kind of way - pop out your rifle or pistol and shoot the guy. It only takes one shot to off him.

After you maneuver through the jumping puzzle, you're going to have to take out a number of cultists as well as another horse-riding flamethrower. We preferred to deal with the cultists first, and there are a number of ways to do so: you can hide beneath the little doorway they come out of and shoot them as they arrive, if you have plenty of ammo; you can run around and hope that one of the flamethrowers kills them as they follow you; or you can hide near where the two remaining flamethrower's paths overlap, then get headshots and attempt to kick them into a place where they'll be roasted. Regardless, the flow of enemies will stop after the eighth cultist or so, so it's a relatively easy matter to dispense with them.

You'll have to shoot the drivers of these flaming steeds to crash them into the lava.

The two remaining flamethrowers will require a bit of running to take out. One traverses the length of the little pathway that you're on, but it moves relatively slowly, allowing you to run from one end to the other, then turn around and snipe out the driver as he's attempting to follow you. The other has a more circumscribed arc of travel, but you have plenty of protection from him thanks to the large walls on either side of the path leading up to his mouth. Try to run to one corner of the little platform, so that he has to tilt to one side to fire at you, then run to the other while he's blasting to get a shot off at him while he adjusts.

After you've dispatched the last horse, you'll obtain the Lion Ornament. You should still have the Goat Ornament and the Serpent Ornament, so bring them back to Ashley's position and ride the tram back to the room where you first encountered Salazar. You'll be able to place all of the ornaments in the large mural here to open the passage leading on. Before heading through the door to the north, check the dead end to the right; you can find some cash behind a picture of Saddler, as well as an item in the vase across from it.

A Toast To Our Royal Majesty

In order to reach Salazar's little sanctum sanctorum, you'll have to maneuver through two separate side wings and obtain some more keys. Before doing so, though, locate the merchant on your map and buy/sell/upgrade before saving your game. There's another shooting range nearby, if you wish to try your hand at it again.

It's awfully nice of the designers of this deathtrap to give it such an easily-accessed override.

To begin finding the keys, head through the western exit first. There are a few easy puzzles to solve here. In the first room, push the knight statues onto two of the pressure plates, then trigger the other two with Ashley (on wait mode) and Leon. In the next room, Salazar will again just kind of selectively ignore Saddler's wish to have the girl alive and instead trap both of you underneath a ceiling that will slowly crush you to death; shoot the four red targets to disable the trap. Lastly, Ashley will be trapped in a long hallway as a mine machine comes out of nowhere in an attempt to crush her; you'll have to shoot the two drivers, which somehow manages to trigger the door here (it's probably tied to machinery that constantly monitors their heartbeats, or something), allowing Ashley to reach you again before she's pulped. Grab the goodies from the storeroom, including the Queen's Grail and the Elegant Chessboard in the cupboard, before moving back to the central area and heading east.

These guys won't notice you until you attack, so use your rifle or another powerful weapon to get their attention.

The eastern abattoir will pit you against a number of knights. The first two are of the dodge-the-attack-with-your-buttons variety, but after you grab the King's Grail from the pedestal in the inner chamber, you'll have to contend with knights of the mobile variety, complete with tentacle heads and their immunity to stunning. These guys are pretty tough, but they still move fairly slowly, allowing you to run from one side of the area to the other, flip and use your shotgun (aim for the head, even if they don't respond to it), and repeat this action numerous times until they finally expose their tentacles. The tentacles are the weak spot, so blast them until the knights crumble to dust. Try to stow Ashley in one corner of the room during all this; the knights won't attack her. You'll have to deal with two waves of knights before you can finally escape from the pit.

Now, before you can use the Grails in their respective holders, you'll have to fight your way through six opponents in the northern hallway. This is an ideal fight in which to use a mine thrower or a rifle, since the cultists won't be able to spot you until you get relatively close to them. Regardless of how you do it, kill them all, then place the grails in their slots and head through the door.