Your adventure begins after leaving Rinaldo Gandolfi's cottage. You'll have to make your way up the mountain, over the drawbridge and into the castle. Once inside, you can head left for a five-room tutorial that'll teach you Leon's basic maneuvers and magical powers; three marker stones can be found here as well as the svarog statue relic.

Otherwise, your main goal for the game is to light up five orbs to break the seal to the upper half of the castle; you'll have to do this by heading right upon entering the castle to where a portal room will allow you to travel to the game's five main areas--by defeating the five areas' bosses, you can light the orbs, break the seal, and later enter the upper part of the castle. From this portal area, you can later access the "Boss Rush" mode once you've completed the game under certain conditions.

The three-floored lab is the most action-packed level in the game. The whole area is built around a giant boiler system, and its many furnaces will be the primary visual. The outer rooms feature small labs with bookcases that no doubt contain knowledge of evil magic and the methodology of torturous experiments. Among its challenges: Mostly combat--there will be instances where you'll travel into a room that contains a simple item and be forced to fight your way out. Quick deaths can result.

When you come to a moving-platform room, you can find a secret door in the southeast end of the room that leads to an elemental boss. Eventually, in a giant-telescope room, you'll want to whip a horse-head statue to make blocks emerge from the wall so you can reach the top and find an "e" tablet. In the boss room on the second floor, you can insert the tablet into the missing space to complete the word "meth," which will bring the boss to life. Items you can find here include the white and orange orbs, wolf's foot, and the yellow dragon key.

The garden is the most straightforward area, broken into two sections, with a second floor that only exists for two instances of secret rooms in the second half of the area; you can access the second floor in any room where you find man-eating plants, which you can break open to use as platforms. The garden is where the castle's evil plant-life is festered, and it's early rooms are always bombarded by large rays of light. For now, you'll find yourself restricted by locked three-holed doors. Stage-wide, in small, mostly hidden rooms, you'll find six maiden statues that can knocked back by whip strokes and embedded onto switches that will light up the holes in the locked doors. When three are lit on a given door, it will become unlocked.

If you've found the correct maiden rooms to unlock the regular path, instead of the three that open a secret room, you'll be able to move on. The second part of the garden is more neglected than the first and home to its tougher foes, like mist, evil stabbers, poison lizards and skeleton flowers. When you find the aforementioned man-eating plants, whip the one you find to locate a path to the area's secret boss. If you stay on the normal path, after a few squabbles in the rose garden rooms, you'll come to this area's guardian. Before leaving here, you can find the purple orb, saisei incense, and the red phoenix key.

This castle's two-floor chapel area features destroyed church-like rooms with alters, organs, statues and other religious artifacts. There are also many library areas on either side of the area, which are home to item-filled balconies and other secrets. This, overall, is another area that's blocked off by those hole-filled doors that can be opened by activating switches that light up the holes. These switches can be found anywhere and must be activated using Leon's weight.

Later, there are rooms with circular openings on the ground that serve as means for walls of moving spikes; timing is needed no matter whether you're running from them or attempting to jump over them as they come forward. All of this leads to the dungeon-themed basement, where the more dangerous enemies, like executioners and astral fighters, lurk. If you've found the correct switches to open the basement's hole-filled door, you can reach the boss. Items of note in this area include the black bishop, the blue orb and the white tiger key.

The castle's underground waterway and drainage system has multiple corridors that branch out in different directions. It's easy to become lost and confused within these similar-looking pathways. The fishmen and merman that crowd these corridors will not make anything easier. In one of these pathways, if you can make any of the creatures barrel into a stone wall that has a doorway carved into it, it'll break open, and you can find a secret boss in an ice-filled cave that's not far off.

For now, you're trying to stay as far right as possible to find a room with a lever that'll change the water's flow; now you'll be able to work past a door that was originally blocked by a waterfall. On the lower basement level, you can battle the Doppelganger, and you can find another lever that'll lower a bridge on the upper basement level that leads to the boss. From this point forward, if you come back here later, it's best to travel between floors using the tunnel rides found on each floor--these are accessed by the skull openings, near the secret boss on the basement floor and in the lever room in the lower basement. Items of note here include meditative incense, little hammer and the green orb.

The theater has two floors, but most of the action takes place on the first. The theater contains a collection of elegantly decorated living rooms with an upper-class presentation--sofas, red carpets, and curtains surrounding most every room. It's also the most trap-filled of the areas: There are rooms loaded with petrified bone pillars that spit out lasers that stop only when you face them; in the rooms with two or more bone pillars, you'll have to trek carefully.

There are rooms where cannons mounted on the ceilings fire stones toward you; you must make the cannons aim toward and destroy all the rooms' sculptures before they'll stop and release the seals on the doors. Finally, there are rooms filled with crushing spike beds, where there only a few safe spaces littered about for you to race to safety between their drops. On the second floor, you'll find similar dangers, but, more importantly, you'll find the Curtain Time Bell. After returning to the stage room (until now, an empty boss room), you can use the bell to summon the boss. Other items found here include the yellow orb, Lucifer's sword and the black turtle key.

In a secret room in the Pagoda of the Misty Moon, you'll find an item called the "Unlock Jewel." Back in the Castle Entrance's portal room, there's a door that leads downstairs to a basement; once you've retrieved it, you can use the jewel to unlock the door. This area will quickly become infamous for its long spiral staircases.

Once in the basement, you can save your game before braving another long spiral staircase that leads to the actual prison. By now, you'll be hearing the moaning, bubbling and clanging that signifies that something terrible is waiting down here. Once through the next door, you'll find out what it is. While coming here is not essential to your quest, the defeat of its boss creature will earn you the black orb.

After defeating the five guardians and lighting the orbs in the castle hall, the seal will break on the doorway that leads to here, the two-floor Pagoda, the castle's upper half. The first floor is all no-nonsense action, featuring all of the game's trickiest and most deadly lesser enemies. You'll be greeted shortly thereafter by a sudden boss battle with the resilient Doppelganger.

When you enter onto the second floor, you'll find a locked door with a dragon crest carved into it. To find the crest, you'll have to find a the "VI" tablet and take it to the room that has the symbol-reversing machine to turn it into an "IV" tablet; now, in one of the northern parts of the second floor, it can be inserted into into the missing space of a six-number column as the fourth tablet--this will open a door to a room that holds the Dragon Crest. Now you can gain access to the castle keep where Walter is waiting for you. Two relics, the crystal skull and the invincible jar, can be found on the first floor as rare drops by the mirage skeletons and phantoms.