The Stack

OK, I’ll admit it: I’ve been using hints. Steam has an excellent walkthrough for this game, by user GratefulDead94, that’s organized into short sections, each devoted to a single puzzle. Here’s the thing: I’ve really been finding that I don’t need help with the puzzles. The puzzles are pretty clear. When I get stuck, it’s invariably because I missed some small, difficult-to-notice object. Using the walkthrough is basically equivalent to the feature some adventure games have where you can press a button to highlight clickables. This is in contrast to my recent experiences with The Watchmaker, which had both hard-to-notice objects and unclear puzzles.

Actually, in some ways I wish this game were a little more like The Watchmaker. The ability to zoom into first-person mode would be welcome in some places, store shelves and the like where there are lots of little things in a small area. And in one respect, the game becomes a lot more like The Watchmaker in Chapter 3, where you rescue the captive damsel I mentioned in the previous post and she joins you as a second playable character. But already I’m liking what Ankh is doing with two-person puzzles better than anything The Watchmaker did. It quickly finds a way to separate the two of them, but keep them in different parts of the same environment, where their actions can affect each other. It reminds me a lot of the sections involving Farah and the Prince working together in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.

In fact, now that I’m thinking about it, I’m noticing that the female lead has a lot in common with Farah. For starters, her name is Thara, which is pretty blatant. Both are members of important families from lands to the east: Farah is a princess from India, Thara is the daughter of an ambassador from Arabia. Both are captives, yet both are strong-willed and argumentative and willing to insult the hero to his face. Both, against their will, wear skimpy red outfits — Farah because it’s what her captors gave her, Thara because it’s all that Assil could find to replace her prison clothes. It seems likely that Thara is not just a deliberate homage to Farah, but that this was supposed to be obvious to the player. PoP:TSoT was just two years old when Ankh was originally released, so it would have been fairly fresh in people’s minds. It only took me as long as it did to notice the similarity because it’s been so long since I’ve played it.

And what of their male counterparts? I suppose there’s some similarity of personality: Assil and the Prince are both a little self-centered and annoying to people around them. Also, over the course of PoP:TSoT, the Prince gradually loses pieces of clothing, ultimately ending up shirtless. Assil is already shirtless. But Assil doesn’t have the Prince’s acrobatic ability to back up his arrogance. He’s basically Egyptian Guybrush, his successes based more on a willingness to embrace absurdity than on any kind of skill or virtue. (Indeed, multiple puzzles have emphasized his lack of skills: he can’t swim, can’t play the flute, is no good at handicrafts.) Now, when Guybrush first meets Elaine in Secret of Monkey Island, she’s instantly and bafflingly attracted to him for no apparent reason. This is an accurate depiction of how romantic relationships seem from the male perspective, but it clashes with everything else that’s established about Elaine’s personality so much as to be jarring, as if Guybrush is unwittingly exerting some kind of creepy voodoo mind control or something. Farah, meanwhile, despite a definite and believable undercurrent of sexual tension, sees the Prince first and foremost as the source of her misfortunes, and never completely comes to trust him. So what do you get when Guybrush meets Farah? I’ll be returning to this vital question later.

So everything I speculated about in my previous post has turned out to be true. Fixing the camel wash was in fact just a matter of finding a hard-to-notice useable — hard to notice in part because it was part of a tree, rather than a discrete object in itself. This didn’t lead to cleaning the statue in the way I thought it would, but it did lead to cleaning the statue. I’ve seen the Pharaoh, who’s depicted as a comical despot along the same lines as Kuzco in The Emperor’s New Groove (a film that precedes Ankh, but not the game it’s based on, so who knows if there’s influence there). He didn’t fix my curse, though. He just sent me through a trap door into Chapter 2 (out of goodness knows how many) without even hearing me plead my case. I have another lead now, to go see the priests at the temple of Osiris instead, which is going to require tricking my way past another guard. This game sure likes its guards.

Somewhere along the way, the task “ID_TODO_05b” got added to my task list. Whatever that was, I seem to have accomplished it.

My one big complaint about this game at this point, apart from the exoticizing premise, is that there’s so much walking around. This is really my main complaint about point-and-click adventures in general, and the reason I so seldom have the patience for them any more, but it’s made even worse when some of the rooms are on the other side of an expanse of desert. You can’t even run! The game does provide one shortcut: from within the desert, there’s a button that takes you back to the ferry dock. So once you’ve taken the time to trudge out to Giza, you can get back to Cairo pretty quickly. But it does provide an incentive to not leave Cairo. I know I have one more task out there on my list, but I have no reason to believe that I have the means to do it yet.

Back in Cairo, I do at least have some ideas: I need to get past that guard; conversation with the guard leads me to believe that I can trick my way past him if I can provide some music for him to dance to; I have a flute. Unfortunately, I cannot play the flute. Maybe I need some NPC help? This chapter also introduces a captive damsel, possibly the Elaine Marley of the story given her feisty attitude, which is what got her locked up in the first place. Strangely, her rescue isn’t on my task list, but it’s clearly something I’m supposed to at least believe I’m supposed to do. Much of my opinion of this game as a Monkey Island imitation will depend on how that turns out.

Not a lot of progress to report. I have some clear goals, and even some speculative ideas about how to accomplish them, but I think I’m at a point where everything is contingent on finding some useable object that I haven’t found yet. So all I can do is wander through all the rooms again, waving my cursor around and hoping.

So let’s talk about those goals. The main one is delivered in the opening cinematic, in which Assil, a young man in a white shendyt, receives a death curse from a mummy as a result of a minor accident. Assil is the player character. The only person who can lift the curse is the Pharaoh, so you have to gain access to his palace. The palace guards won’t let you through, but they’re terrified of crocodiles due to the recent incident with the pirates, so your obvious recourse is to either instigate or fake a new crocodile attack. And I’ve managed to obtain a few things that seem like they could be used as components of an ersatz crocodile, but Assil refuses to put them together. So I suppose I’m just left expanding where I can explore until I have the rest of the necessary resources, possibly including a taxidermist.

One of Assil’s friends tells him about a treasure map, which seems like a useful thing to pursue, but in order to buy it, he’ll need “a lot of gold”. I have a piece of old statuary that Assil thinks is probably gold underneath all the dirt, but I’ll need to clean it to find out. The waters of the Nile itself are inadequate for this purpose — that’s where I found the thing in the first place. I figure I probably have to use the camel wash station over in Giza, a mechanical device similar to a car wash, but it’s missing a crank. So, I need to find or make a crank. This is the kind of thing I’m talking about. Very clear goals, but after a few steps, they depend on things that I don’t know how to do.

One thing that’s been a great help: Pressing the tab key brings up a list of your current tasks, which can clarify things enormously. For example, at one point I tricked a tailor into giving me a pair of scissors by telling him it was my job to sharpen them. When I did this, my only thought was “Alright! I have a pair of scissors now! That’s bound to come in handy.” But when I later checked my task list, I saw that I was actually expected to sharpen the scissors and bring them back to the tailor. Once I knew that, I knew exactly what to do — sharpening the scissors is a minor puzzle in itself, but I had seen the place to do it, and only hadn’t done it yet because it hadn’t occurred to me that the whole business was anything more than a ruse.

Perhaps the task list was specifically a result of playtesting. Perhaps the reason that “sharpen the scissors for the tailor” is on the list is because other people, testing the game, had the same reaction as me. If so, it’s a good reaction for the developers to have, at the stage of development when reworking the puzzle will be too costly due to all the animation and voice acting being locked-in. The task list is just text. Text is cheap.

Ankh, a 2005 comedic point-and-click adventure set in ancient Egypt, got onto the Stack in a roundabout way. It has two sequels, which somehow wound up in my Steam library, probably through some kind of adventure game bundle. I naturally wanted to play the first game before trying either of those, but strangely, it wasn’t on Steam, so I went and found a copy on disc, probably from ebay. Some time later, before I got around to even removing the shrink wrap, it got put on Steam anyway, as an “Anniversary Edition”. And that’s what I’ve started playing now. The disc remains untouched.

I hadn’t heard of the Ankh series before it got steamed, but it was a hit in Germany, according to Wikipedia. Also from there I learn that the 2005 version is a remake of a 1998 game for the Acorn Archimedes. I have found essentially no other information about the original version, and how the 2005 version changes it. I assume that the graphics, at least, were completely redone. They’re completely 3D-modeled, something that the Archimedes could hardly support.

Its aim is fairly transparent: it wants to be Monkey Island But In Egypt. So everything is kind of cartoony and stylized, with rampant anachronisms and no attempt at historical accuracy. Egypt, it seems to me, is more prone to this than most places; the popular imagination in the West tends to compress literally thousands of years into a single concept of “ancient times”, as if the building of the great pyramids, the reign of Cleopatra, and the historically dubious exodus of the Jews all happened simultaneously. And once ancient times are over, it’s as if history somehow just stops happening to the place. That is the milieu of this game: Egypt Without Research.

It does a pretty good job of aping Monkey Island, though — possibly a better job than some of the later Monkey Island games — at least in terms of tone and rhythm. One thing struck me as particularly Monkey Island-ish: the use of multiple NPCs to deliver semi-contradictory fragments of backstory that mesh into a complete picture. In Monkey Island, this was how you learned about LeChuck. In Ankh, there’s this whole deal with a recent failed attack by pirates (just in case you hadn’t made the Monkey Island connection yet) inadvertently driving crocodiles into the palace grounds.

So I had this notion that once I was finished with The Watchmaker, I’d try streaming again. My bandwidth circumstances have changed somewhat since my last attempt, and there’s a good chance that I could put together a stream with a decent framerate now.

But Twitch is owned by Amazon, and as luck would have it, there’s a pretty major Amazon strike/boycott going on right now. So my return to streaming is postponed.

Rather than clutter up this blog with more announcements, I suggest that anyone interested in seeing me stream subscribe to my Twitch channel, https://www.twitch.tv/muckenhoupt, and/or my Twitter feed, @CarlMuckenhoupt.

The ending to The Watchmaker is a bit like the ending to Raiders of the Lost Ark: the heroes completely fail to stop the bad guys, and just wind up sort of being present while the bad guys destroy themselves. Except here it’s more like two factions of bad guys destroying each other. We’re given reason to believe that the watchmaker himself was a good man, and created his cabal of immortals with noble intent, but he’s been out of the picture for some time, ever since his followers rebelled against him. It’s all quite biblical, really.

There’s still a little bit of a mystery left: Krenn, who founded the Knights of the Apocalypse, mentions in his diary a suspicion he has that his discovery of the watchmaker’s writings was more than just fortuitous, that they had been deliberately left where he would find them. Who, then, did this? I’m guessing one of the other immortals. Not the watchmaker himself, because he’d been dead for decades at that point, but someone loyal to him and unseen in the game. But that’s fodder for sequels that will never be made.

So anyway, the whole ending sequence is full of enemies who mean you harm. This is a pretty major shift. I think there are one or two opportunities to get a “Game Over” in earlier sections, but this is the first place where it’s easy. There’s a few stealth/action sequences, even. And I can’t say I like it. Action sequences in adventure games are just a bad idea, and forcing the player to replay from a recent save adds nothing good to the experience. (And I say this having implemented quite a few such sequences myself!) “But”, you may object, “without action sequences that potentially result in Game Over, how do you convey a sense of physical danger?” My advice is: Don’t use adventure games to tell stories that rely on a sense of physical danger. Use action games for that.

One peculiar thing about the endgame: When Darrel descends into the (rather small) labyrinth that leads to the pendulum chamber, he gives all his inventory to Victoria. This kind of makes sense from a gameplay perspective, as a way of simplifying things, getting rid of the cruft you’ve accumulated over hours of play and making you start over fresh in a new environment. But it really makes no sense at all in the story: “I may not be able to get back out, so I’d better get rid of any tools that might be useful down there.” And even considered as a gameplay thing, it’s followed by Darrel getting captured and Victoria going in to rescue him, with all the inventory Darrel gave her.

The very last puzzle of note in the game is one where I needed the walkthrough — not even for the conceptually-obscure part of the puzzle, which was within the realm of things I had been trying, but to find out that “candle” was a separate clickable from “candlestick”. A fitting end for a game of lousy puzzles. And yet, I have to admit that in these last few sessions, I was really enjoying it, and looking forward to it between sessions. Perhaps enjoyment of interaction is a lower bar than we give it credit for, much like how food doesn’t have to be high cuisine to be filling. Certainly the game became a lot more enjoyable the moment I learned how to control it properly. Also, by the end I was really inhabiting the castle, feeling it as a place. Its layout is irregular, with its curving tower walls, and entire floors you can only reach indirectly, making it confusing enough that even the player characters comment on it. This makes it all the more gratifying when it becomes familiar enough that you can navigate it easily. It’s been suggested that the real fun in games comes from mastering complex systems, and the geography here may qualify.

One last tangential note: There is a game on Steam called The Watchmaker, which I actually picked up in the recently-passed summer sale, but it’s completely unrelated. It’s a 3D platformer set in a world of enormous gears. It does, however, have some notions in common with the game I just played. Both games have a notion of clockwork mechanisms not just measuring time but controlling it, and of halting or reversing the aging process — in the platformer, you’re aging at an unnaturally rapid rate, and have to continually find resources to rejuvenate yourself to avoid aging to death. It’s fun to imagine that the games are in fact linked, that the platformer is the purgatory experienced by the watchmaker from the adventure game after his death or something. That his responsibility to repair the mechanisms that compose his world is his punishment for interfering with the natural flow of time back in the mundane world.

I’ve reached the endgame. Darrel descends into the labyrinth underneath the castle where the pendulum device is stored, while Victoria keeps watch outside. I mentioned before that the game really regards Darrel as the hero, but this is the first part where it really forces the issue. There have been other tasks that only one character or the other could perform, but not entire areas that only one character could enter.

I said before that the single-character tasks seemed to be gender-linked more than profession-linked — Darrel’s superior upper-body strength, Victoria’s ability to get the shy maid talking — but this hasn’t continued to be the case. Victoria can read Latin and make convincing legal threats. Darrel can talk to people about the occult. (For the most part, he doesn’t actually say anything about the occult that Victoria couldn’t, but the mere fact that he’s available keeps Victoria from trying.) There was one bit where the difference in capabilities struck me as nonsensical, and caused me to get stuck: I was clearly supposed to sprinkle some blood on a rose to fake an omen that the superstitious Jude had been reading about, but only Darrel could do this. I knew exactly what to do, but had no idea why Victoria was refusing to do it. I had to hit the walkthrough to resolve that one, and also consult the manual to find out how to transfer items between characters, something I had previously done only inadvertently. It turns out you can shuttle items between them even when they’re in different rooms, as if by radio. A welcome if unrealistic convenience.

So yes, the walkthrough continues to be an important part of playing this game, and I don’t recommend playing without one. I was, however, pleased to find that in my latest flurry of activity, I was able to solve unaided several puzzles of the sort that I probably would have called unfair if I hadn’t been able to solve them. It’s as if I have enough data by now to be able to guess what the author is thinking, at least some of the time.

One thing that the walkthrough really makes me notice is the way that time substitutes for score. Time only advances in response to player actions, and the amount it advances varies from action to action, so the walkthrough notes this with both the amount and a running total, like “(5:45, +15 mins)”, exactly as if the minutes were points. I guess it’s appropriate for a game so clock-themed, but it also runs a little counter to expectation. This is a game with a deadline. The world ends at midnight unless you succeed in your mission, supposedly. I’m still suspicious about this, mind — now that I’ve had a second look at the backstory, the Knights of the Apocalypse really seem to think that their little ritual will just end the reign of the immortals, not the world. Regardless, time advancing means time running out. It should be experienced as a bad thing. But it’s instead experienced as a good thing because it means you’re making progress, kind of like how the player came to look forward to the destruction of the crystals you were supposed to be protecting in Final Fantasy V and similar.

Okay, my replay is just about caught up to where I left off. Since I don’t have any new discoveries to discuss, I’d like to address something that imposes itself on my attention in every session: the UI.

In the main game view, you can do the following: Walk around by clicking or pressing the arrow keys (not WASD); switch to first-person view by pressing space; wave the cursor around to find things that pop up a name, indicating that they’re interactable; left-click on those things to examine them; right-click on them to perform another action, which is often just another examine; or press the tab key to bring up the rest of the UI, which mainly consists of a list of inventory items, but also includes a button to summon the other player character to your current location if you can currently do that. Note that summoning the other character doesn’t switch control to them. To do that, you have to use the “Telephone” in your inventory, which is clearly a PDA rather than a telephone. When I summon Darrel, it’s nearly always because I want to do something as Darrel, so it’s something of a UI fail that it doesn’t make that the default.

Note that you cannot play the game entirely from mouse, or entirely from keyboard. Both are necessary, which makes the lack of WASD support irksome, as it means your right hand has to repeatedly switch places.

Partly because I failed to discover first-person view, it took me a long time to get any inventory items beyond the “telephone”, and I thought there might not even be any physical inventory, like in The Blackwell Legacy. This turned out to be false. Inventory shows up in a nice tall list, where you can left-click items to bring up a rotatable 3D image, or right-click to select them for using on environmental objects or other inventory items. All fairly standard, except I think it must have left-click and right-click swapped from what I expect, because I keep doing the wrong one.

The “telephone”, though, is special. When you left-click on its 3D image, you get a close-up of its in-game UI, which consists of two items, displayed as graphical images, with equal prominence: the tone sequencer and the log. The tone sequencer is, as far as I can tell, used in exactly one puzzle, where you have to recover a number from a recording of telephone button presses — and even then, you don’t actually access it through this interface. The log is a lot more useful than that. It’s where the player characters record important information, so it’s a good way to find out what the author considers to be important. I really should consult the log more often, now that I know this. There are hints there that I’ve only noticed after hitting the walkthrough to solve their puzzles.

When you click on an inventory item to view it, the resulting UI also contains the button for switching control between Victoria and Darrel, and, even weirder, all the system-level functionality. This is where the save/load menu lives, and also the settings menu, and the option to quit the game — all the things you’d normally expect to access by pressing the esc key, which, in this game, does nothing. Now, I’ve known other games to mix their system menu and inventory menu together in various ways. But it feels very strange to me to have to make the system menu contingent on the inventory in this exact way. At first, I thought it was a property of the “telephone” item specifically, because that would at least have a connection to the way that some games dress up their system menus as in-game PDAs or HUDs or whatever. That would still be weird, but it would at least be a somewhat familiar weird. It was only after first writing this post that I realized that this was not the case, and I’ve rewritten things somewhat as a result.

So, there was this crystal. There are crystals like it in some of the more secret parts of the castle, attached to the walls and glowing. This one wasn’t glowing and it was in my inventory, but it was clearly the same sort. And then at some point it wasn’t in my inventory any more. Possibly this happened when I tried using it on the mouth of a lion statue, a thing that clearly had to have some sort of item put into it, because it was a separate useable from the rest of the statue. And I think the crystal was probably the right thing, because it produced an animation rather than a generic failure line ¹UPDATE: Now that I’ve got to the point of having the crystal again, I tried putting it in the lion’s mouth, but it just produced a generic failure line. So I think I was mistaken about this. Still, this was the last thing I remember trying with the crystal., but it didn’t open up the obvious secret passage, possibly because the crystal wasn’t glowing. I probably need to energize it with a ley line or something. But I can’t do that if it’s gone. So I’ve started the game over.

Starting over from scratch when it was such a slog to get this far isn’t ideal, but it could be worse. At least it’s an adventure game. That means I can recover my progress relatively quickly. Most of my time so far has been spent wandering around not knowing what to do, and now I know what to do for about half the game. Plus, this is an opportunity to re-examine the earlier parts of the game with greater understanding.

It’s always a difficult thing, at the beginning of a game, to know what kind of approach it requires, and which details you need to keep track of. A game like this one poses the additional burden of tonal inconsistency. The castle has contrived adventure-game puzzles, including old artworks containing clues to operating machinery that opens secret passages. There is nothing realistic about that. And yet, to follow the plot, and to some extent to solve the puzzles, I have to take the castle somewhat seriously, and treat it as having a comprehensible history.

I’m keeping a closer eye on that history, this time around. To correct my last post: Anna lived and died more than two hundred years after the pendulum device was built, so her death is not linked to its completion. Also, I’m starting to suspect that the elderly caretaker, who’s spent his whole life in the castle and has been around longer than anyone, is one of the twenty-four immortals, left behind to guard the device.

As The Watchmaker progresses, it becomes less about the public face of the castle, with its cast of characters, and more about its secret, abandoned, and forbidden spaces: the old wing, the sealed clock tower, the tunnels under the cistern. The hidden chambers and compartments accessible within these places, opened by puzzle-mechanisms. This is a much easier place for an adventure game to reside, and more the sort of thing I was expecting when I purchased a game titled “The Watchmaker”.

As a result, it’s also becoming more about the past, and about time, and about clocks. I’m learning more about the history of the device I’m looking for. Its creator, the watchmaker of the title, didn’t build it for the purpose of ending the world. Rather, it’s somehow capable of stopping time for people at a cellular level, rendering them immortal. A select group of twenty-four people had their souls bound to this clock a century or two back, and cannot die until its pendulum is made to start swinging again. Apparently they’re more or less ruling the world in secret now. I’m starting to consider the possibility that I’ve been lied to, that the Knights of the Apocalypse aren’t trying to end the world, but rather, to end the reign of this illuminati. But then, I have to remind myself that this isn’t Metal Gear.

Now, that mausoleum with the chessboard in it was built for a girl named Anna, who died in her teens. It’s been clear for some time that Anna was going to become relevant to the backstory. I was anticipating some sort of tale of grief-driven madness: “The world has taken away my beloved daughter, and so I will build a device to destroy the world!” But that doesn’t jibe with what I’ve learned. I’ve found a note written by Anna’s father, who complained that she was spending far too much time around the watchmaker. And yet, the watchmaker’s own diary doesn’t mention her at all. Where is this story going? Perhaps constructing the device required a human sacrifice.