Palace Midas
The Palace Midas is a complex of palacial buildings that lie underneath St Francis' Folly and are accessed from an old Colosseum. The level is the seventh in Tomb Raider.
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Original Version
The palace is accessed by an underwater tunnel that runs from the Colosseum into a pool decorated with dolphins also seen in the palace of Knossos on the Greek island of Crete.
The pool is sited in a main atrium from which there are three other entrances. One goes to a large room with a large podium upon which are various levers and switches marked with the Greek symbols of omega and upsilon. This room also contains various sub-rooms that are seen in Anniversary - the unstable column room, the fire-burner room and the spike-trap room - as well as the eventual exit to the Cistern.
The other two ground floor entrances from the central atrium lead to an aqueduct within the palace and to the palace gardens, wherein is the infamous Midas Statue. On a colonnaded peristyle above there is another entrance leading to a small temple-like structure.
The main objective of the level is to find three lead bars that can, with the use of the Midas Statue, be turned into gold. These are then placed in receptacles to continue to the next level.
Anniversary Version
In Anniversary the level is considerably cut down. Lara arrives at the central atrium not by an underwater passage but by an ordinary corridor, and finds an intact statue of King Midas. There are three gated rooms branching off from the atrium - on the ground floor to the right and left are the spike-trap room and unstable column room respectively, while another door opening onto a peristyle behind the statue leads to the fire-burner room. All these rooms have been significantly extended and gameplay has been improved.
The most dramatically changed room is the fire-burner room. Far from being the rectangular room with several burners placed in a pool of water, the room now occupies a position as a sort of temple dedicated to the worship of fire. Half cavern, half sanctuary, it is filled with strange mechanisms that seem far in advance of the science of pyrotechnics of the time.
Because there is no need to find the statue itself, the level merely becomes concerned with finding the lead bars that are necessary to proceed. This results in a more logical, if less exploration-based gameplay than in the original.
It is clear, as with the Colosseum, that some areas of the Palace would be accessible from ground level, owing to the various light traps seen in the atrium and the unstable column room.
Links
Notes
The major arguement for the location of the Folly and the various buildings that surround and are buried beneath it lies in this level. Midas was the king of the ancient land of Phrygia, which was located in west-central Turkey, now the province of Anatolia. Greek influence was prevalent in Turkey and throughout the Middle East before the Common Era, partly due to the expansions of Alexander the Great. As well as the location of Troy, a key feature of Homer's Iliad, important Greek cities in Turkey included Pergamum and Ephesus.
With the rise of the Byzantine Empire, Orthodox Christianity spread throughout the Balkans, Anatolia and much of the Near East. So for the early medieval period at least, the Folly could have been inhabited by Orthodox monks. It was only the invasion of the Seljuk and then Ottoman Turks that caused the Empire to collapse in the middle of the 15th century - but by that time Orthodox Christianity was well established.
A key theme of this level is the practice of alchemy. For centuries before the invention of proper scientific procedure just before the Italian Renaissance, ancient and medieval alchemists alike were obsessed by the idea of turning common metals, such as lead, into gold. For more information on alchemy, see entries under Pieter Van Eckhardt and the Philosopher's Stone.
Enemies
- Crocodiles
- Gorillas
- Lions
- Rats (Tomb Raider only)
- Bats
