From TES issue 35 (September 2005)

Series 2/3. Level 1.
THE FIRE CAVE
This challenge was set in a blue-lit cave, which contained a monstrous face hewn into the rock between two doors at the back. From each door a narrow path led towards the front of the cave, where the two paths were joined by another rocky path. This formed a pit in the centre of the cavern, into which the monstrous face breathed fire every few seconds. This fire flared up through two narrow holes that spanned the two paths leading to the doors, creating a fiery obstacle that had to be avoided.

This was quite nasty for a level one challenge, as very careful precision guidance was required in order to avoid the flames. The dungeoneer would either appear in the room through the left-hand door, and have to pass both the fiery obstacles in order to go around in a full circle and reach the exit door on the right, or they would arrive at the front end of the cave on the rocky path that linked the two walkways, in which case only one dash past the flames was required.

It was, of course, much harder for those teams who had to guide their dungeoneer through two infernos instead of one, because this made the challenge twice as hard and twice as dangerous. Having said that, the only dungeoneer actually to get scorched was Julian, the second winner from series 2, and he only had to go through one fire obstacle. This caused the loss of one life force grade. Still, things picked up from there, fortunately.

Dungeoneers Chris, Stuart and Steven passed through this challenge unscathed during the course of series 2. Their advisors sometimes started to argue about whether the dungeoneer should run or jump across the fire-hole, and when it was safe to do so, making it clear that this was a tricky challenge, despite its lack of actual scorches.

The challenge was made even harder in series 3, as Leo had to avoid a pesky skull ghost that kept blocking the paths, and Martin had some bones to trip over between the pathways. Still, they both made it through intact.

Difficulty: 6 Careful guidance was always required.
Killer Instinct: 4 Gave Julian a fairly nasty burn.
Gore Factor: 7 A reasonably impressive display.
Fairness: 6 Quite difficult for level one.

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