The left passage takes you to the captain's deck where you get this amazing picture of a bug-eyed captain screaming after your hit the boat's self-destruct button.
With the self-destruct activated, the only place left to explore is the lifeboat area. The gate is locked, but can be kicked down. If the ship isn't about to explode the game prevents the player from boarding.
Way to go.
You might expect by now for the lifeboat to be your ticket back to the map screen, but lifeboats aren't nearly as cool as helicopters and spaceships. Instead the player is taken to another island with an inflatable raft for them to take with them.
Moving along to the next room leads to another boss fight against the Wacko Man. He's not really any different from the natives fought earlier.
Upon defeating him, the player receives the key to the spaceship that happens to be parked here.
And the usual hijinx ensue.
The next area is the underground caves. Time to put those torches from the very beginning of the game to good use.
The caves bring back the landmines as seen in Africa. This time, the game does check for the mine detector and reveals them all if you have one. Of course I still had no idea the item even existed when I was going through the caves which made them pretty frustrating.
The northern path has this interesting puzzle that involves boulders, sliders, and blink walls.
It's very easy to get yourself pinned by a blink wall and killed instantly. I wasn't sure if the ability to just barely squeeze past a blink wall without being hit was part of the intended solution or not, so I decided I'd return to the puzzle later.
The game drops hints that something scary was sealed in these caves and that you just wandered into its lair.
Following the path through the cave a bit, (and avoiding still more landmines), eventually a room full of seemingly invincible dragons is found.
There are a few of these weird things in the dragon room. I thought it was supposed to be your standard shattered giant test tube at first.
It turns out that they're crushers! You're supposed to repeatedly kick the dragons into them to defeat them. Be nice to dragons.
Up ahead is this boulder which is an object and can't be moved. There was the earlier path with the skeleton that I still hadn't explored, so I backtracked and headed on in.
And this was the point in which I realized just how absolutely amazing The Lost Monkeys is. This is probably the strangest looking thing I've ever seen in ZZT.
Moving all the way back to the puzzle board, this time I manage to solve it. The puzzle's not actually that tough. I also noticed you get a green key for completing it, which matches the green key that was in the pawn shop in Woof Town. There's no way to buy that key but it might have been a cool alternative way around the puzzle.
Not knowing what else to do, I decided to leave the caves and head to the still unexplored Banana Island.
My hunch that the monkeys were on Banana Island was correct. The game makes sure that you don't just go right to the final island without being fully prepared.
Way back on the starting boat the player is given a banana and some rope. The green key was just found in the caves. The raft was found on the beach before fighting the Wacko man, and the B B Gun was found in Woof Town. The only thing still missing is the dynamite, which no doubt is located in the rest of the cave that's yet to be explored, but there hasn't been any way to progress...
