THE ALDWYCH COMPLEX

Level by Chris Radford

Walkthrough by rjb


A note: Some have suggested that this is not typical of a London Underground station complex. As one who used these trains for several years, I would say that the older type of ‘Tube’ station’s passages are exactly as portrayed in Chris’s game - well, I didn’t run into any fixed machine guns, or guards who shoot first or locusts that consume people voraciously (the UK is blessed by not having any such insects), but the Aldwych signs & the tiling decor especially are extremely evocative of the location.

A few general tips:

1. There are several dark areas, but I found NO flares(!), so the only recourse is to explore with the 3 flares you start with, then reload, or use the light feature of the binoculars.

2. There are quite a number of the above-mentioned guards. You can either back off & shoot, so that you are out of their range (not possible in some of the confined spaces you’ll meet them!), or do the ‘frantic rolling & shooting technique’ when very close to said guards - tricky when two show up at once! You could also try to use the corners of walls to temporarily hide around. There is also very little ammunition to find. Fixed machine guns can only be rushed away from!

3. The two locust swarms - you have been warned! (made me jump both times) - both have water nearby, so submerging seems a better way to cope here than by running.

4. I only found one large medipack in the whole game & NO small ones, so, bearing in mind the guards, a ‘cavalier’ approach doesn’t work very well in this game!

5. Whenever something ‘alarming’ is about to happen, you’ll see this: *

The game itself: (I found no secrets, btw.)

You start in a narrow, green & white tiled passage, whose decor will become familiar. Forward & round a RH corner, you hear what you discover is a trapdoor dropping open ahead. You drop down into an absolutely tiny room, with a door to open ahead of you. (This one Lara opens in a genteel manner, using the handle; others she kicks open, oblivious to the effect on the hinges!)

Beware! * At the next door .... In fact, if you go right up to it, you’ll hear footsteps & the guard at the other side may actually show you his gun through the door (!!?!!). Then just past the door, there’s your first fixed machine gun. You can only sprint quickly past it to the door at the other side (north) - next to the tiny pool of water - so as to be out of its sight. Can’t open the door? Into the pool then for your first item, a crowbar. Make sure you stay out of range of the fixed machine gun as you emerge! Use the crowbar to ...

As Lara uses the crowbar & the door swings wide, we receive our first fly-by, where we hear ‘danger’ music & are shown a body of another guard, and significantly, some closed gates & a closed trapdoor. There is uzi ammo to pick up here & some uzi guns just ahead, in front of another door that Lara can open by herself. Do not spurn these, as they’re quite rare!

* Remember that danger music? As you open the next door & step over the threshold into the room that we were just shown with the body .... Yep, it’s locust time! Now my suggestion is to rush back to that pool you’ve just left & swim down as far as you can (I’ve found that swimming around the bottom of the tiny pool seems to help too), so as to be bitten as little as possible, but please be as innovative as you can, in order to try & shake them off.

Out into the room with the body, we cannot move this particular body because of its position against a corner of the wall. We can shoot the ‘chinese lantern’ type object but it contains nothing, so need to go up the stairs (wrought iron double gates & trapdoor remaining closed). As we reach the first corner, there is another guard to deal with (he drops nothing, as the earlier one) & we can also see a floor lever on the landing.

If we pass the lever initially, we can go up the second flight of stairs, to reach something that is not common in London Underground stations, a pool of water that catches us unawares. (Even knowing it was there, investigating for the purposes of this walkthrough, I still slid into it unintentionally!) Beyond the water is another area that we cannot reach because all around the pool are sloping edges that we cannot cross. Into the water, we discover it has a strong current taking us some distance along two water-filled passages. We can then reach the surface as the current abates, in a room with a low ceiling.


We see some
‘flash’ type grenades in one corner (the kind that stun guards for a few seconds). Should I tell you now that I never found a grenade gun to use them? Nah! Let’s enjoy the anticipation that at last we’ll have something ‘meaty’ to counter the guards. There is also another door. Ah, forgot there was another guard just the other side of this door! Again, he drops nothing.

We go through the door into a larger room, to discover a ladder up in the south-west corner. Unfortunately, the trapdoor at the top of the ladder is closed, & since we cannot return against the strong water current, we are now trapped. This means that we should really have used that floor lever we came to on the landing between flights of stairs. As we do so, we can just hear the faint, distant sound of a trapdoor being opened and if we return down the stairs, we see that the trapdoor in the room with the body is the trapdoor in question. More than that, if we go down through the trapdoor, we see that we are in the room we reached via the water current, by a different route - but now we can escape.

If we return all the way up the stairs to the pool - but resisting the urge to fall in! (some lovely wonder music as we reach it) we find that we still cannot cross it. What to do? Back into the room below the trapdoor, we find that we can open the door that adjoins the smaller ‘pool’ room from this side also. As we go into the smaller room, the guard we encountered in our ‘trapped’ excursion appears, from behind us this time. If we go into the pool of water here - or if we drop into the water at the top of the second flight of stairs and are carried by the current all the way back down - then when we return to the upper pool of water, we see that a couple of blocks have arisen around the pool that we can jump on.

This means that we can now cross the pool (carefully), to reach the room beyond, & its tantalising jumpswitch (jump & cling lever). As we reach the torch-lit room we hear some more ‘danger’ music & we see 4 more bodies, 2 of which can be moved - but there is nothing beneath them. When we pull the jumpswitch, we are shown that it opens one of the pair of iron gates that adjoin the room at the bottom of the stairs. (The subject of our first fly-by, near the beginning.) We see a darkened room beyond.

Returning down the stairs, then - or via the current in the water - we can approach these now opened gates. As we cross the threshold of this room, we are faced with 2 guards. This is an ideal opportunity to practise the ‘backing off while shooting’ approach to dealing with guards, as there is a quite large room to back off into, & it is quite possible to escape w/o any ‘damage’ here at all.

Having overcome this opposition, we can move forward into the new room - quite dark: might need one of those ‘temporary’ flares or use of the ‘light’ on the binocs. We find a closed door at the far corner & quite possibly spend some time before seeing another jumpswitch nearby that opens it. Faced with the next flight of stairs beyond, my wife (this is now her fifth game, so she has acquired some TR wisdom!) then thought: “Ah, a likely place for another guard.” How right she was: a guard right at the top of the long, narrow flight of stairs. (Sometimes these guards use grenades rather than their machine guns, which TR veterans will know don’t harm Lara, so there is no problem in dealing with such guards.)

As we continue along the passage, up a shallow flight of stairs, we come out at the ‘top’ of the room that we have just left. (More music of the wonder kind and the impressive green sky, with its rapidly moving clouds, is remarkably close up here.) We can see the one large medipack in this level on an adjacent wooden pillar (which we can easily pick up) & an opening opposite.

* Save before sliding down the passage opposite! Not only is there a fixed machine gun in the room at the bottom of this slope, but there are also 2 guards! Now is the time to use that precious uzi ammo, although you don’t have quite enough (I wonder why!) to deal with both guards. DO make sure you get quickly out of the way of the machine gun, though, & DON’T stray into its path while trying to avoid the guards! (They can be most unforgiving, those machine guns.) If you are immensely fortunate, as I was on one run, then both guards will shoot grenades at you, so the ambush becomes a great deal easier to deal with!

There is a wide wrought iron gate across the passage here (to the east) & a small pool of water, so an alternative strategy to dealing with your reception committee is to dive into the water & swim out of sight. * You’ve just dealt with quite an ambush, haven’t you? Now you’re all relaxed again! Hah! Swim through the short water channel, & as you hoist out, there comes the 2nd lot of locusts. Quickly back into the water, or you can run forward into a 2nd trench of water (or jump about if you’re really determined to be butch about it!) to try and avoid their attentions as best as possible.


Of course, if you choose to go back & go too far, & you didn’t kill the 2 guards earlier, then you might reach a section of water where they can shoot down at you! So a careful strategy at this point is advisable! In the 2nd water trench, you’ll find another closed trapdoor, but if you look up & into the passage in the centre of the wall ahead of you (east) then you might just be able to discern a lever.

Note also that a problem with the water tunnel leading back is that your Lara may get caught on the bottom of the tunnel as you try to escape the locusts in your haste. (I hesitate to use the word panic for such a seasoned player!) [You might also be needing one of your carefully conserved small medipacks by now, I imagine!] When we reach the lever & operate it, we are shown a fly-by of the room behind Lara, & that the trapdoor in the water-filled trench is now open.

We can drop into the water & swim along to a tiled area of low, square pillars, where we see some (normal) shotgun shells on the ground ahead of us. A shotgun to come, then? Alas not. More tantalising, rather. As we swim further along, between the pillars - nothing else to find - we pass a closed door at the right (very important to remember this door - hint!) and then we come to an opening where we can hoist up out of the water.

As we do so, we are given another fly-by, accompanied by ‘energetic, danger’ music, where we see a large pool of water - larger than any we have seen so far - where the water is a red colour, with several bodies of soldiers in it! As we look around the open area we have reached we see that the pool is here - we are standing on one of its sides - and we can look down into the pool to see no less than nine dead soldiers on the bottom. Go on, then: test the water. Yes, you’re right. Instant bye-bye!

If we look round carefully in the dark, we can see a door between wooden pillars at the left (east side) & a lever at the far (south) end of the pool. Can we reach the ledge by the door? Yes, a careful, angled run & jump will enable us to do so. (We have a few jumps to make here, so if you haven’t sampled the water, there is a very good opportunity for you to do so in the near future!)

As Lara kicks open the door (obviously she’s in reckless mode now!) and goes forward, a guard who’s clearly been stationed here just for such recklessness, comes round the corner of what proves to be a very small, turning passage. The guard drops nothing & we can turn right to find a second door just round the next corner. Lara kicks this open also, to reveal that we have come along the side of the pool a bit, getting close enough to the lever to perhaps be able to make another diagonal jump towards it.

Yes, we can do that. SAVE before using the lever. When we pull the lever, we are not shown what effect it has. (There is a reason for this - see in a moment.) Eventually deducing what might have happened, we discover that the door in the water tunnel that we were asked to remember has now been opened - but on a timer! If, when we pulled the lever, we were shown the door that it opened, then we would lose at least 2 or 3 seconds of our timed run that we’re about to make, before control were returned to us. This would not be good, as we have to make 2 diagonal leaps across the dangerous water, run through that short, turning passage in between, and reach and swim into the passage that lies behind the water-door. (And it is quite easy for our Lara to be caught either on the opened door frame or the tiles at the base of the passage.) You have 30 seconds - or perhaps you didn’t want to know that!

Timed run help for beginners(Experts continue at ## below)

In order: you must operate the lever, turn, estimating exactly the right angle to jump at, back to the nearer of the 2 doors, run to the left through that passage, reach the right place to jump from at the pool side of the second door, turn to the correct angle, then after the jump run along the pool side to the ‘good’ water, & drop in and swim to the open doorway, not being caught on the door or the passage floor.

In one continuous run, from standing by the lever before it is used, to swimming in the opened door, the run can be done in 18 seconds (about 5 of which are used in actually operating the lever). Alternatively, for those digitally challenged, it is possible to break the run into several discrete parts, and save after each of these parts, when a ‘good’ run ‘fragment’ has been achieved:

[a] having pulled the lever (takes 5 secs - cannot speed this up);
[b] having turned the right angle, preferably in one smooth movement (just more than a right-angle, curiously) & backed up against the end wall, ready to jump (2-3 more secs);
[c] the first jump itself (2-3 secs);

[d] the run round the passage, stopping by the 2nd door frame, not by the water’s edge (can be done in 3 secs, but a bit longer and you’ll still be well within the overall target time);

[e] the run forward to the pool’s edge, aiming for the RH corner of the available platform just outside the door, intending to jump as well, diagonally, over the dangerous water to the original end of the pool (all of which sounds involved, but which can be done in just another 3 secs);

[f] the run/sprint forward to the ‘good’ water, dropping in, swimming forward, & around through the (still open!!) door at the left (this last of which can be done in another 5-6 secs).

If you’ve achieved all that, with those timings, you could even wait a few more seconds just inside the door in the water (you did save as soon as you swam through the door?!!) and turn and watch the door close behind you, and be pleased with your achievement. For those who think this timed run is relatively easy, let it be known that my wife (only her fifth game, remember, her longest, and her first timed run) took a whole afternoon and half an evening to do this (by the incremental method) - though there were breaks for essential things like eating and watching favourite television programmes - TR is not the whole of life! Safe to say she felt “delighted” to have succeeded at last, and “amazed”!

## Having triumphed, therefore, over the timed run, swim up a long passage, then turn right at the end. Pass by many small alcoves to right and left (I found nothing in any of them, but please do check for yourselves - you have enough air if you do it fairly quickly) & then continue forward until you reach the surface. When you climb out of the water, you are greeted by the most appropriate ‘grand achievement’ music (as I call it) & can see closed iron gates at the right, but the motor-bike to delight our eyes ahead.

But the motor-bike will not open the gates. So what’s next? We soon discover that the weight of the motor-bike will crash through the floor at the left, to bring us to a brick-lined passage (can’t avoid losing some health). [My wife is right at this spot as I write this, so she’s going to overtake me, I see - but we’re not competitive, are we?!] It is best to stay on the motor-bike for a bit as there are 3 guards down here, and it is much easier to run over them than alight from the bike and shoot all 3 with your pistols! Ah, to quote someone from a certain film: “My mistake, four” (guards, that is).

You can drive around the brick pillars until the guards have stopped shooting at you (implying that you’ve dealt with all four). Then you can alight from the bike, to discover a crowbar on the ground and 3 closed doors, two brown (non-openable directly) and one wooden, blue - ‘crowbar-able’ door, if that’s a word. The crowbar on the ground is to provide the clue that that is what is needed for the blue (& nearest) door, as we have a crowbar already, of course.

When we lever open the blue door we see a swinging ‘shootable’ bauble hanging. As it is low down, we can use the pistols for this. (No revolver or laser sight as yet.) When we shoot this bauble, we hear another door opening: the brown door directly opposite, if we turn round, in the west wall. When we shoot a second bauble that we can see in the small room there, the final door, in the north wall opens.

Inside the newly opened room, there is a closed trapdoor in the floor and another jumpswitch on one wall, which opens the trapdoor. We can drop down here some distance, or go back for the bike and drop down with that (again, more health loss if we do it that way). We come to another fairly wide passage, and if we’ve taken the bike, we have the advantage of being able to run over another guard with it at the first (RH) corner we come to. (Might think of riding the bike to place it exactly over the trapdoor & then use the jumpswitch to open the trapdoor, but unfortunately the bike won’t drop down.)

We come then to the bottom of a wide flight of stairs, that turns right as we ascend. A curiosity is that halfway up, we are fired upon by a fixed machine gun (know that sound anywhere now!) that we cannot see! I think this must be because there is an adjacent room with such a machine gun in it at a certain point on the stairs & Lara just happens to pass very close to it. This is the only thing close to a bug that I can think of in this game, so I think we’ll excuse it.

At the top of the stairs, another trapdoor springs open as we arrive. We can see water below if we look down. There is also another fixed machine gun. This is quite possibly the same one that fired on Lara when she was going up the flight of stairs. We must quickly pass the machine gun & drop into the water. This is possible directly from above, or if Lara catches alight - because she is too close to the machine gun, when they launch flame rather than bullets, it seems - she can douse herself in the water. Ah, in fact, there are TWO machine guns on this intermediate landing! Definitely to be avoided, then!

In the water, we then want to swim along the turning tunnel we find there. About halfway, an ‘underwater, wibbly-wobbly’ sound begins, that accompanies our (short) underwater journey. We then come to a larger, water-filled room, which has an exit that leads to the surface, where Lara can breathe again.

When we hoist out, we find that we have reached another (smaller) pool with ‘dangerous’ red water (test it to see, by all means!) and we can also see a lever at the far end of this pool, and a revolver over to one side (south) at the end we hoist out.

We find, in fact, that the laser sight and another box of revolver rounds are with the revolver, also. It is not difficult to work out that we need to attach the laser sight to the revolver - another weapon at last! - but our target is still not clear. We see around the pool that there are 2 brown closed doors, also, and another pair of wrought iron gates. We next need to go across to the lever and SAVE before we use it.

When we do so, we see that the door that is nearest, across the pool and at right-angles to the way we’re standing, opens, but on a very short timer. When we look more closely at what is behind the door, in the brief time it is open, we see that there is another of the baubles. Clearly we must use the laser- sighted revolver to shoot the bauble, IF we can turn in time & aim accurately. (This is not a small IF!) Ah. In fact, we can shoot the bauble with the pistols, if we aim in the right direction, which is much easier than drawing the revolver, making sure we sight it correctly, possibly zoom in, etc. (Didn’t try that the first time & only just realised that the bauble might be at just the right height.)

When the bauble is broken, the other brown door (in the north wall) opens, & we can enter another room (this one torch-lit and enclosed above) with a pool with some of the dangerous red water. (Easy to rush in too far here & go into the water.) This time we do need the revolver, but the task is much easier. If we go to one of the sides of the pool, or the far end, we can see, if we look into the pool, that there is another bauble under the surface. We need to equip our revolver and target it.

When we go back outside, we find that the wrought iron gates have been opened. If we pause outside the gates, we can see only an enclosed yard, quite small, but that doesn’t matter, as when we go forward, we find that we have finished our excursions into The Aldwych Complex. The game took me 15 minutes computer time - all day to write this walkthrough as I went through it for the third time, you understand! - and I’ve just managed to overtake my wife to reach the end. (Not that this last is an important piece of information.) She has taken 1 hour 38 mins so far and I expect her to take no more than another 5 minutes, so between ¼ hour for a ‘semi-expert’ & 1¾ hours for a relative TR novice seems a good range as an estimate for the length of Chris Radford’s September 01 game.

rjb