Thank you, Josh! I've really enjoyed your work over the years, and, obviously, Sierra games are a really important part of my life. I also appreciate you working with me on that Owl's Quest video a few years ago. When it comes to Dagger of Amon Ra, were there any fun behind-the-scenes stories you could share? Or insight into any of the game's design decisions?
I've really enjoyed your work, too! But this one was exceptional, at least for me, which I guess is not surprising, as close as I am to this one. When I think back to the development, I mostly remember what a good time Bruce, Lorelei, and I had writing it. Bruce did the lion's share, of course, but Lorelei and I sat in an office with him for some months, working on the text, dialogue, and the documents in the box. When Bruce wasn't writing the design, or writing text and dialogue, he was researching, mostly museums. I think we all had to do research to get those box documents authentic (in information, if not in tone). His goals for the game were very lofty, and as a lot of folks have observed, he ran up against a lot of stumbling blocks. The capabilities of SCI were one limiting factor (as you saw with the memory issue in Act 2). So was the amount of time allotted to testing, which I think was shortened partway through the project, I don't remember why -- and I'm actually not sure this is the project whose testing time got...abbreviated. I was pleased to see Tubby (there, our list of stereotypes is complete) get so much love! I wrote his dialogue and voiced him, and it's not in the credits, and I'm thinking it might be because I did a lot of voices in the game, Bruce or I could've thought, "Five credits is more than enough," or something like that. But he was very satisfying to write, I was being snide about a number of friends I had when I was a kid. I wish I could speak more to Bruce's experiences working with Roberta, but I wasn't privy to them. He carried so much in his head with that game, it was kind of insane, and that's probably why so many holes and contradictions fell through the cracks. By the way, a lot of people don't realize that Bruce, before he went to Sierra, designed the game "Neuromancer" for Interplay. This made Bruce kind of unique among all the designers, both contract and salaried: he had actually designed computer games professionally at another company before he got to Sierra. I don't think anyone else can say that, with the exception of Dave and Barry Murry, who co-designed the Manhunter games (with Dee Dee Murry). They had created "The Ancient Art of War" for Broderbund before Manhunter. The art was a true point of pride for Bruce and the artists. I don't think there was a single other Sierra game, before or since, where they found an individual artist's art style and adapted it faithfully. I remember books of Leyendecker's art all over the place. He was the perfect inspiration, and the Sierra team did a really outstanding job of adapting it and mimicking it. I *love* the backgrounds with a lot of black. Very bold, very different, and yes, kind of polarizing.
Wow, what a treat! It's worth appreciating that the Internet still allows us opportunities like this to hear from the people who made our favorite games. That, and the fact that we have people making huge deep dive videos on them as well!
"Eh, you ONLY solved a series of murders. Get back to me when you do that AND correctly answer two questions about a dagger, and maybe then I'll be impressed."
To be fair, her job was specifically to investigate the dagger theft. Maybe if she'd wasted less time trying to solve murders and avoid getting killed by the murderer, she'd have written the story she was assigned to! Good luck convincing Sam Augustini that you actually needed to grab the wire cutters and Rosetta stone bits to survive the night.
@timothymclean As a newsman Augustini should be pretty happy over a big lurid story like multiple murders. Isn't it OK to quietly drop the dagger story in favor of that? Then again, the game is silly enough to give that explanation and there does need to be some way to withhold reward from the player for not solving everything...although that would make much more sense if finding the dagger was not mandatory. I have to suspect at some point in development it wasn't.
@timothymclean That's not a bad question; the "Laura Bow Solves Dagger Theft! (and museum murders)" headling does make it seem like someone else is writing it.
Honestly i like the mechanic of having to look both ways before crossing the street bc its really funny to me that if you dont, a car will appear and immediately turn you into a pancake
The fact that the absurdly uncomfortable scene about the guy having tattoos on the soles of his feet and the other character wanting to see them was plot relevant kills me
Sounds like when you try to give the dagger to O'Reilley, he was supposed to keep it and it was supposed to disappear from your inventory. That would explain how you could finish the game without the Dagger of Amon Ra and explain the endings in which you do not find it as it explicitly states in some that you gave the dagger away.
It sort of makes it seem like there were meant to be *even more* endings possible - where you recover it but don't know who stole it, where you lost it completely, maybe even more than that. But that they did some last-minute shuffling around and had to push out the game. It makes me wonder if there were some issues with the game near the end of development.
@Introbulus Honestly I'd say it seems like the game was never quite finished, considering among many, many other things how important that inaccessible dialogue about the pocket watch is.
My prediction is that the killer is Tubby. He could easily get away with it as he wouldn't be able to reveal information during interrogation or a trial as he cannot speak about anyone or anything.
there’s something about the silliness of these type of point and click adventure games which i find very charming. having to actually look both ways before crossing the street or a car will run you over is hilarious.
@fireflocs It is, but it is a bit silly to remember about in a game. Especially since those adventure games do so many other things in very roundabout ways, where you just don't expect them to suddenly need you to do such an action.
Nah, I get it, I just gotta be a stick in the mud and remind people to take road safety seriously. Funfact though: Leisure Suit Larry 1 does the exact same thing. If you don't type 'look both ways' and step into the street, Larry _immediately_ gets flattened by an oncoming truck.
My favorite is laura just immediately getting robbed in new york and that just not mattering at all. It just comes off as cartoony when the scene with her boss sets her up as an underdog perfectly fine. Also the hole-ier than thou joke was funny.
It's this wonderful contrast between LucasArts and Sierra. Sierra games would come up with the most contrived ways to kill you. (e.g. hit by an off-screen car because you didn't specify to look both ways) Lucas games would not let you die and sometimes come up with contrived explanations for why you survived things (e.g. Monkey Island rubber tree) Games by most smaller studios were somewhere in the middle (e.g. Broken Sword has more fatal traps later in the game)
The best ending's outcomes for the dead people are legitimately insane, four of them end up as exhibit pieces and Carter receives the ultimate archaeologist disrespect and was returned to Egypt.
The "you've already proven you know as much about egyptology as I do" line is hilarious without the quiz as basically it would mean, "hey, you know how to pronounce the word. That's as much as I got." I used to work at museums, and sometimes people would ask specific questions I didn't know the answer to, and that's about the answer I would give them.
Makes the "I bow to your superior knowledge" line come off as pretty sarcastic. I don't know if the vocal performance really conveys it, but I think the dialogue as written does imply he's a little resentful of Laura.
I wouldn't have ever guessed the reason (almost) no one solves this game isn't obscure puzzles and hard mechanics, but that a key scene is just... missing.
I love that the mysteries of the game are near-impenetrable and make no sense... unless you talked to the countess twice who gave huge plot dumps with next to no prodding, basically solving the game for you. And they managed to miss one of those key scenes.
I remember reading an issue of PC Gamer that included a page detailing horrible game endings, and it specifically called this one out as being horrible because "no matter what you do, the ending will ask you questions you don't know the answers to".
Act 3 spoiler: My only guess as to why Carter was found inside the suit of armor is that Sierra rewrote his murder scene and forgot to change this hotspot.
I think it's because O'Reilley moved it, maybe to hide evidence? He mentioned the coroner being there, but we didn't see or talk to any coroners. Same with Ziggy's head being in the life mask room. I think he was hoping to throw people off. I wouldn't be surprised if he was the one leaving other pieces of hints or evidence in an attempt to throw us off the case either, since he IS a cop. He'd have seen it all.
I can honestly say I'm very rarely impressed by a fictional character's time and people management skills, but my girl Yvette deserves a shout out because damn consider me really impressed
@youtube-kit9450 Exactly what I thought when the Yvette-Ernie intrusion came up and he was wondering where the Yes/No option was for the spicier one. I thought, "I guess the joke is Yvette is showing everyone her Eiffel Tower except Laura."
most ferrets I've ever met or kept would be very happy to hunt cobras. I don't know that they'd be any good at it, but boy howdy would they love to do it
Idk about ferrets specifically but they are closely related, Mongoose actively hunt cobra. Its their main thing. Just piss off cobras and eat them. Feral lil sh!ts haha
@Dukedogdogactually, mongoose and ferrets are not as closely related as you think! In fact, the mongoose is more related to hyenas as mongoose are feliform carnivorans, as opposed to caniform, which is what all mustelids/weasels belong to.
I feel like you really undersold the critical importance of the pocketwatch conversation. Hearing that conversation singlehandedly solves the entire game. It straight-up tells you who Carrington actually is, which in turn tells you that the Countess is not responsible for any murders AND explains why Carter thought Carrington looked different. The first clue points you to something beginning with C.P. you missed which doesn't solve the pixel hunt but does at least tell you that it has nothing to do with anything you've experienced in the game, and the second one gives a motive for Little's death and links O'Reilly to Little through the Countess. And you can't hear the conversation in the game. Oh, Sierra...
@520_metal he starts talking about the pocketwatch stuff at 3:16:32 and the hugely important dialog that isn't accessible in the game is played at 3:17:38
@kateliza8922 it’s a god damned 3+ hour video, watching it a second time to try and catch one specific thing is unreasonable. Have you considered being less cranky? Because your answer is absolutely not taking into account other people besides you are humans with feelings.
You joke but back in the day, playing for the first time I didn't find the Crime and Punishment pixel, I mean book in Carrington's office, so I had no idea what the letters "CP" written in blood meant. I assumed they were the initials of his killer, but the only possible candidate was "Carter, Pippin ??? Did he fake his death and is the actual killer???" That only made finding the real killer even more confusing.
What I find odd about the ending is that both Laura AND Steve directly witness the murderer's face when they apprehend him, yet this seems to never be brought up again. I get the game hiding the face because they wanted you to solve the case, and simply showing you the face at the end would ruin that (though this does also make the idea of Laura giving the wrong answers very silly in-universe). But also even if you correctly identify the killer, Steve and Laura being able to give direct testimony to the killer's identity isn't brought up from what I remember. It makes Act 5 even more jarring and weird in that the whole chase is barely even acknowledged afterwards.
To be fair if they couldn't connect him to the other murders and he failed to kill them, the worst they could get him on is attempted murder, and considering he's a cop with connections, he surely ain't going away for that.
Especially weird since the game brings up Dr. Tut Smith as a surprise eye witness (where was he hiding when the murder happend?) yet it completly fails to mention that Laura and Steve apprehended the killer. Together with the unused and inaccessable dialogue it makes me think that the game got some serious rewrites before release and that the writers themselves kind of forgot what they had included from the various drafts of the story.
@shinyagumon7015 That would explain enough of the jank that I'm also inclined to think it's true, to some extent. Cutting back an over-ambitious initial draft and assembling a story from the leftover pieces is a common game dev story. Sometimes it's even a successful one!
The entire chase sequence does feel a bit shoehorned in at the last proverbial minute what with all the weird item placements that can softlock the game and how did Steve even end up in that pile of coal? Sure there looks to be a coal shute above it but would he actually fit through that and why would someone shove him in there rather than just kill him outright? Also why would the murderer dress up in that costume when they could just walk up to Laura and take her out before she realizes she's in danger? The killer clearly has a gun so why don't they just shoot Laura the moment they see her rather than slowly trudge over with the mace?
The wire cutters! I got to Act 5 without knowing those wire cutters existed. Died so many times in that chase. Eventually my parents helped me write a letter to the Sierra Help Line and like a month later I got a letter with instructions on how to beat that chase.
That is awesome. Another unfair puzzle is that if you don't give Steve Dorian his boots in time he breaks his foot ending your playthrough unless you had back up saves before that puzzle.
Writing a letter to ask for help in game puzzle is so wild to think about today when you could just google the answer. By beat the chase do you mean that they told you how to get through the entire sequence?
I like how as the game progresses Laura reacts less and less to finding dead bodies. To the point where by the final one she's just got an annoyed "It's a DEAD BODY." As if she were looking at a car.
The flavor text that goes from describing a tree in the most detailed manner possible to just saying "it's a car" really reminds me of disco elysium down to the prose
Laura Bow is from the countryside. She knows all about trees and had plenty of time to read books to study history. But it's the mid-20s and cars are very new.
I'd say the clear winner here is Olympia because: +She survives +Loves death and witnesses several murders + Doesn't die in any of the endings + Either falls in love and lives happily ever after or teaches in a university in the endings Pretty good wouldn't you agree?
I love how regardless of the ending, Olympia is just living her best life. In the worst ending where everyone else is dead or dying she discovers a whole new species of dinosaur! And it's named after her! That's arguably the coolest ending for any of the characters
Also I love the editing at 1:12:17. The changing poses of Laura synced to the music followed by all the glitchy shenanigans and deaths had me in stitches haha, I rewound a couple of times just to enjoy it fully
Having just played both Colonel's Bequest and this game: Laura's bisexual too. I swear to god that woman has vibes, especially with Lillian from Colonel's Bequest, but she was also deeply unfazed when Yvette asked her to join her and the guy screwing her in her office. Laura Bow is like the most passive bi rep of all time but she's sooooo cool
Absolutely insane of the endings to be like "oh yeah there's like four different people who were murdered at this museum and their bodies turned wholesale into exhibits at the museum". Especially Ernie, they took the guy who was drowned in an embalming vat and cut him up into smaller embalming vats? Insane. Well, at least it probably got visitors in the doors!
Ernie at least had it in his will that he wanted to be preserved and displayed at the museum. Carrington, Ziggy, & Yvette are still insane to think about, though (and it implies they would've still done it to Ernie even if it wasn't in his will).
I actually think the overall story is pretty solid, it’s just a shame that there’s missing dialogues and a lack of logical solutions to some of the literally ESSENTIAL items needed. If i worked for a gaming company i would totally have a remaster of this gem :))
I disagree that the story is solid. Even with the missing dialogues filled in by OneShortEye, the entire crime spree makes no sense and is pretty much physically impossible to pull off. It's the worst type of mystery, where you have no chance of solving it yourself, and when you hear the solution it doesn't even make any sense. SPOILERS Take for example ziggy's death. How did the killer cut off a head, run it all the way to the mask room and nail it there without themselves getting covered in blood and without leaving huge trails of blood? Why did they bother doing such a thing that exponentially increases their chance of getting caught? How did they use a paper cutter to cut through the spine? Or look at yvette's death. There's 0 explanation as to how the killer got access to a human being's worth of quick dry plaster. And why did he do that after murdering her but not think to get rid of the hair in her hand she ripped out during her struggle against the killer? Why did they put a bifocal in her hands to frame the countess with their fingerprints on it? Especially since they were planning to murder the countess in a very obvious way (tied up and bitten by cobra), so why try to frame someone who is clearly a murder victim? (It'd be one thing if they framed her and made it look like she died by accident or suicide, but they hogtied her before having the snake bite her) It's just such a god awful piece of garbage as a mystery that I don't think those missing dialogues pointed out in the video saves it.
Yknow with all the dialogue of people being convinced the real dagger is a giftshop copy, I wonder if Smith's fate at the end was supposed to be done with the real dagger, mistaken for a fake, but like in the first instance, nobody thinks its the real one. And its just that the game's so messy that the joke doesn't land.
The dialogue where Laura gives away the dagger to the Countess or O’Riley (but doesn’t really) seems like cut content to me. Like she actually does give it to them and that’s why the lost dagger endings still mention it.
3:30:16 Wild that Wolf Heimlich got to keep his job in the good ending considering 5 murders happened under his watch. And that's not even addressing the rampant art theft or the Egyptian cult that hosts regular meetings in the museum's basement.
I reckon they have the worst workflow lol. Basic plot logic in a game that’s essentially a giant list of if checks get easily lost during development, but if they just had some kind of consistently updated outline it should be fine. Making technical achievements is easy because it is way more linear than adding to a massive ever complex net of red string.
They had the money and expertise to really squeeze out good graphics and audio. But they were also 80-90s developers that were used to making things from scratch and adding on as much as they could in a few months. Games had a
The Laura Bow games really feel like the devs were biting off more with their engines than they could chew, if it got so complicated that vital clues and conversations could be just _missed_ like that in testing. EDIT: Damn, a lot of deaths come from those gift shop daggers. Boy, safety standards for consumer goods were really lax in 1926.
The clunkiest thing is that you never know when an inconsistency is a clue that helps you frame a culprit, or just the game engine tripping over itself and playing the wrong dialogue. This kind of bugs wouldn't be too bad in a regular adventure game like Quest for Glory, but in a detective story it can break the pacing and reasoning of the player.
Games of that era were tailored to sell hintbooks. I don't think there is much depth regarding the engine or the plot or the design; game is pretty bug free for being what it is, but seems cumbersomely engineered to waste your time and pick on your curiosity so that you feel pressed to spend more money on getting to the solution. Then even the Hintbook looks haphazardly made, probably product of shaky game direction and / or them being developed in parallel with the game and thus inconsistent with the actual limitations of the engine that had to be patched, such as the clock conversation being impossible to get to.
When I played this casually for the first time, I thought the Countess walking through the sky was a clue that pointed to a way to access the catwalks for the pterodactyl murder.
6:26 That stupid joke got me. I thought it was a "She's being belittled!" until I found out she was BEING little. The image of her head barely peeking over the desk, peak comedy already and we're not even 10 minutes in
2:56:39 love how not only laura falls into the furnace for no foreseeable reason but steve ALSO follows her down there. no thoughts head empty just (sizzle)
@KipchickieV.1It is. The comment is saying that it was a red hair ring, as in a red 'herring'. Basically it's saying it was meant to make the player think Steve was suspicious instead of O'Reilly.
THE DAGGER WASN'T SWAPPED FOR ONE IN THE GIFT SHOP? WHY WAS THERE ONE THAT WASN'T STAMPED?????? i spent the whole video waiting for that to come back up!!
Yvette delacroix is supposed to be french and is not willing to talk shit about her boss ? That's suspicious, talking shit and complaining about work is half what we french do of our days
Isn't it part of your contracts? 2 months vacation and the right to publicly talk shit about your boss/company? (Sayin "I hate my job" on social media can and has gotten many people fired here in Canada)
@cherrytree2165technically it's forbidden to badmouth your employer here too... But something as trivial as the law hasn't ever prevented a french person from complaining
Yvette ISN'T French. If you look at the diploma in her office it says Yvette Delacroix received an advanced degree in French from Ball State University. Combined with her and Ziggy having a past, it seems she was putting on a fake persona like the countess (who when angry, shifts to an angry cockney accent before remembering she's supposed to be upper class).
Maybe the ending when you solve the murders but dont find the dagger was meant to happen when you "give away" the dagger to O'Rilley (Which you cannot really do in the final game), That's why Laura says "After you gave it away"
Initially I was sad that I made the decision to watch the video and learn whodunnit, but after seeing all the pixel hunting, the missable cutscenes, the dead ends, dead man walking situations, missing dialogue, and absolutely misleading puzzles that can make you never complete the game, I think I'm glad I chose to not play it.
Thanks for summarizing why I shouldn't play the game for me, I was gonna watch the video anyway but it's nice to know ahead of time I have no reason to feel like I missed out on something.
i truly can't believe what a trainwreck this game is. it has such a charming art style and fun writing but holy hell the ball was dropped somewhere along the way and never recovered
A favourite thing about Dagger is that Laura never drinks the water or empties it out, so, through the whole night, she is splishing water each time she listens at a door.
It's possible Ernie Leech saw where the dagger was hidden, tried to get it, died, and was put in another location so no one would realise where the dagger was.
The reason I think laura is behind Steve in the t rex shot is because she went to press the button while he was still standing there and when she went back over,she is behind him.
Worth noting for the timeline, at 35:28 she’s talking about how she thinks 1926 is going to be a great year, weird thing to say in September of that year.
*Looks at the date.* Greenday 2004, Album released September. 'Wake me up when September ends'. 2026/1926 = 26. Perhaps lets keep a eye this year around fall time. Numerology don't lie. 🙏🔺👁🌈😉
The line "that you gave away" makes me strongly suspect the game is SUPPOSED to have a Dead Man Walking possibility when you show the Dagger to O'Riley. Since he IS the thief and the killer, then absolutely, if he gets the dagger it'll just disappear.
For all the stereotypes, the 1920's British archaeologist immediately wanting to throw hands at an Egyptologist for suggesting they keep the Egyptian artefacts in an Egyptian museum is very on brand
@hornetisvoldHuh. You'd think the pyramids are older than most Abrahamic religons. Also ask the Coptics about their dead language. It's quite similar to what the AE referred to their land as the 'Black Land'. And Islam is only 1415 years old.
I think the reference to giving away the dagger in the endings is tied to that broken dialog with o'riley when you attempt to show him the dagger, and it says you give him it, but it stays in your inventory, maybe that was the intended way to get the ending at a stage in development before the quiz was used
@patcat8950 Well, you have all the dialog about the Countess and O'Riley taking the dagger, as well as everything the Coroner says, and everything on the ending slides about you giving the dagger away. In the scripts, the game checks to see if you have the dagger for the best ending, then doesn't check for the dagger in the second ending, which is a pretty strong indicator to me. if they didn't intend for you to be able to miss or lose the dagger, there'd be no need to check for it.
@OneShortEye This is an assumption but I think this started off more like giving the evidence to the police. The dagger's disappearance would seem even more bewildering to anyone who didn't solve the mysteries than what is in the final ending and possibly serve as a massive low effort hint. The conversation was then changed to reference it as a gift shop dagger before they dropped the whole thing. It would explain how he gets his small fortune if the game's story thinks he got the dagger back and knew it was real.
Speaking of inconsistencies, why does it say in the 3rd and 4th endings that Crodfoller found the murderer but that O'Riley retired? Didn't I pay enough attention? Or didn't the developers?
I don't know why on literally every RUclips video you have to scroll past two or three comments that are exactly like this one before you get to the real comments. That's also not what the word "timestamp" means.
I love this game so very much, but there was one play through I did where I forgot to collect a shoe. Just one shoe. I had everything else. And I FAILED AND GOT KILLED. BECAUSE OF A SHOE.
Oh, I didn't see this comment in the morning. I'm glad I came back to rest through the comments. It took me a while to realize that I knew this game from your playthrough.
2:54:30 I actually disagree here, when Laura earlier said that she ran out of snake oil, I instantly thought "uh oh, he fucked up" because I remembered that one lady mention she'd let snakes loose in the basement. And there's no way that would've been mentioned unless it came into play later. So there was SOME indication that something was wrong for later HOWEVER, I still don't think it's a good enough indication (especially since using the snake oil the first few times IS needed), way too easy to have forgotten about the other snakes, and the fact that you have to go SO out of the way to refill the bottle is ridiculous.
3:40:17 Wait, it makes no sense. They don't want to reveal the murderer, so they use a generic text... but the fact that they are supposed to be caught WHILE having none of the stories of the others being about them in prison makes no sense right?
I'm actually betrayed and disgusted by the fact that you made me, a regular enjoyer of detective media, consider the complex and interwoven plot of the game only to reveal that everything was O'Rielly's fault. Congratulations, you've perfectly captured the essence of the game in this video. I completely understand the feelings that anyone who played this game must have had, going through ALL OF THAT, only for it to be all explained away by one specific clue hidden by a pixelhunt. I don't usually subscribe off of one video, but that's just TOO well done. EDIT: I wonder if "the captain did it" from Return of the Obra Dinn had anything to do with this ending.
@LaukkuPaukku That is... not a spoiler. "The captain did it" is an achievememt where you play the game incorrectly by saying that the captain killed everyone and then leaving early.
This is how I feel about a lot of point and click games lol I'll play some of them, but once it gets to the older and/or more cryptic ones I just watch videos about em. I absolutely adore the genre, so channels like this that cover them makes me so happy lol
Regarding Ptahsheptut Smith's bizarre epilogue in the "Dagger unfound" endings: Maybe Tut's relentless efforts to have the Dagger sent back to Egypt weren't _actually_ (or weren't _entirely)_ motivated by Egyptian patriotism and national pride? Maybe his _cult_ saw the "theft" of the Dagger by Carter as a legitimate _blasphemy_ against Amun-Ra, and assigned Tut (as the highest-ranking priest with the best public archaeological connections) to get it back? Then after years of fruitlessly hounding Carter and Carrington the cult is starting to lose its patience with Tut, and the events of the game occur and Laura (as far as anyone knows) _fails_ to recover the dagger. _Now,_ not only has the theft of a _sacred relic_ gone unpunished, but the man they sent to make things right has bungled things _so severely_ that it's been _stolen from the thieves_ by an unknown third party; now, not only is their sacred relic not in _the Right Place,_ it's not even in _a particularly safe or honorable Wrong Place_ anymore! They no longer have _any clue_ where it is or what is being done with or to it. Thus, their patience runs out, and if Ptahsheptut is to have _any_ hope at all of ever reaching the Field of Reeds... his penance must be _severe..._
I haven't gotten very far into the video but I refuse to believe that P name isn't you fat thumbing your keyboard. That is not a real name someone really tried their best on making sound Egyptian and really gave to their Egyptian character, then also gave them the last name of Smith. No.
2:40:09 the voice actor may have been saying all the lines to himself to keep the tone of conversation going if they couldn't have Laura and him record together, and the sound editor somehow messed up cutting the lines. That'd be my guess tbh because everyone involved is a native English speaker, and it'd be weird for no one to point out Riley answers his own question.
I don't think this is a likely scenario. It's pretty rare to have voice actors in video games (or any project, really) record their lines together to begin with. Moreover, the voice actors often don't even get a full script, just a list of their own lines to read out loud, with limited knowledge of how they connect to each other or other characters' dialogue. On a side note, this is part of the reason why certain line deliveries in particularly older and lower budget games can be so bizarre; it's not necessarily (just) due to the voice actors being unskilled or inexperienced, they could be reading a bunch of lines out of context without proper direction. Also it is not the voice actor's job to spot and point out potential inconsistencies like this, they're just there to read the lines they're asked to read. I think the line being handed to the wrong VA is the simplest and most likely explanation for this goof-up.
@liquid_pig What you laid out is exactly what I said, except you came to a different conclusion. The voice actor for O'Reilly is pretty good, and in order to keep his lines from sounding wooden and unnatural he may have read Laura's lines out loud while recording. Think what live actors do, but recorded. No it's not the voice actors _job_ to point out inconsistencies, but that's doubly so about editing their recorded lines. It's highly likely that within hundreds of recorded lines, an editor forgot to cut something from a VA's recording session, but it also wasn't fixed but those lines would never be heard anyway. It's highly _unlikely_ that a professional studio that wanted good voice acting would throw out lines with no context to their VA's. It's also highly _unlikely_ that a native English voice actor, working with a professional and friendly native English studio, would _not_ ask about what seems to be an incorrect line given to them, if only to understand why their character is saying it. This game clearly had a voice director because most of the voice acting is pretty good, for a goofy little adventure game, and yeah you can get wooden acting from not having other actors in the room but voice actors as a profession rarely get to record with other VA's, even today...not just in video games. It's not a deal breaker. A voice director is there to work around that issue, and the biggest cause for awful voice acting is no direction or poor direction. And one of the work arounds that likely would have been given to the issue of no one to bounce a convo off of would be to have the VA read all the lines aloud... ...but like even setting aside the VA pointing it out, there's an entire team dealing with the recordings. Not just the editor, but the scriptwriters who may have mislabeled it, the voice director, the game director, the programmers inserting the recordings...that's my point about them all being native English speakers. If the line was accidentally given to O'Reilly, it is beyond belief that not a single person pointed that out.
@PointsofData Sorry, I guess I misunderstood your first point. I thought you were implying that under normal circumstances Laura and O'Reilly's actors would have read their lines together, but in this case Laura wasn't available so O'Reilly read her lines too to keep the flow going. My train of thought was that reading out your partner's lines sounds like something you'd do if you were used to working with a partner, but if you're usually recording alone anyway (as most VAs do) you'd probably have a different approach to making things sound natural. You know? But I misinterpreted what you meant. I still don't entirely agree that it's "beyond belief" that nobody would notice a voice actor being given the wrong line. Stuff happens when there are lots of moving parts. There's a bit in Oblivion for instance where a voice actor abruptly switches character voices mid-conversation, which to me suggests that while the line was given to the correct actor, he got the wrong direction regarding which voice he was supposed to be doing. Which would also imply that the lines weren't recorded in order. Or, if they were, nobody present cared or noticed he was doing a different voice. Of course Oblivion is much larger in scope but it's just the first example that came to my head, and that game was made by a professional studio too. But of course it could also be an editing mishap -- the aforementioned Oblivion has those too.
@PointsofDataNot to mention, he delivers the line in a bit of a throwaway manner, like he's briefly reading something he's responding to. To me, it feels like you're right on the money here.
I will say I’m personally happy with the accents and stutter being written out in text as some of my friends are Deaf and wouldn’t know that he had a stutter unless the used their cochlears.
I think Synthetic Plastics we’re still super uncommon and expensive in 1926. Still they could’ve easily been wood replicas. But they are manufactured in Pittsburgh, a city well known for its steel industry which seems like a oddly deliberate detail. Maybe it was just really cheap steel.
This is an EXCELLENT demonstration of obsessing over a game, and as you learn more and more about it you become keenly aware of all of its little (or in this case, very large) flaws. This game had a ton of charm, but as the video went on it became more and more clear that the highly intricate plot was little more than smoke and mirrors.
What's fascinating to me (and I think it's easy to lose sight of this by the end of the video) is how well the game still _feels_ like it works when playing it, despite all of this. Because you generally don't see just how much of it is smoke and mirrors from the inside without several playthroughs, and definitely not without looking behind the curtain to know for sure. Even with all of these flaws and fake parts, playing through the game seems like a coherent mystery with a strong sense of atmosphere, and the holes are easily assumed to be things the player missed. I don't think that's ideal, but it's interesting how well it works anyway!
34:03 that’s actually pretty historically accurate! During prohibition the police were stretched incredibly thin going after minor drinking cases and also figuring out who of their fellow officers was taking bribes (all of them basically). The justice system was having issues as well, due to being clogged with minor drinking offenses as the system raised from fines to multiple years of prison time which obviously got taken to court. There was a lot of pressure to catch everyone in the city who dared to touch some homemade beer, which was basically everyone. He’s probably very overtaxed by this so him not worrying about the theft is pretty reasonable
39:30: After checking Hemmingway's bibliography, remembering his was rather prolific during this period, I have a proposal: Laura was NOT asking about "The Sun Also Rises" but about Hemingway's novella "The Torrents of Spring", which had come out in May 1926. Ziggy referenced "Sun" as it was the one HE most recently read and he thought it had already come out. It certainly would have been accepted for publication by September 1926, and exact publication dates can slip a bit. Of course that draws the question of why Laura wouldn't correct him on what she was talking about, but at that point I think we have to fall back on the MST3K mantra: It's just a game, we should really just relax.
Doesn’t seem odd to let something like that slide- she’s a woman in 1926, saving her energy and opportunity to correct a man for something that actually Matters makes sense
What I like about this is it indicates that, despite the fact he seems like the type to lie about knowing famous people, Ziggy IS in fact telling the truth and he's friends with Ernest Hemingway, which might be the funniest possible thing here.
42:49 Lo Phat being fake Chinese makes the banner behind him funnier. It looks like jiberish characters similar to other fake Chinese I've seen from the time like he didn't know how to write it.
his 'advisor' told him it translates to "Strength Through Peace; Peace Through Strength"... ...but GoogleTranslate says 'This Shop Is Owned By A Sucker'...
@feitmeBeing born in China and illiterate in Chinese, which would be written the same regardless of dialect, was common. Chinese was/is so difficult to be literate in, the Koreans invented hangul. So, coming off as illiterate would be uncharacteristically authentic!
I didn't mention it because I wanted to save the reveal for later. But if you examine the symbols, the narrator says: "They're not really Chinese characters. Lo Fat displays them to give himself an aura of authenticity... since he was actually born in Newark, New Jersey."
@nonamenoname1133 thats even funnier 🤣 its easy to forget how fortunate we are to live in an era where literacy is widely available. Time for a deep-dive on how illiteracy affected the cultural preservation of people who moved outside of their mother countries.
I feel like this game deserves a proper remake thst keeps its artstyle but cleans up all its issues. This is such an interesting game and its such a shame that theres so many issues
@Fronzel41 while that kind of action should be lauded, id like to see a remake specifically of *this game* as I think it has so much more potential wasted over so many gaps and pitfalls
I agree! Though, they would have to remove all the racial stereotyping (LOOKING AT YOU, LO FAT) or at least refine them so they aren't nearly as distasteful. This I don't inherently have a problem with, but I know there will be old fans of this game who think that the stereotypes are PIVOTAL to the game.
@joshuawiener5003 exactly! Keep the pixel style remove the stereotyping, add some more detail and clean up the mechanics and this would be a delightful mystery thriller. Though the adjustments needed to the plot might throw people off.
The crazy roller coaster of requirements and scenes in this game makes me think a lot of this game was cut or re-worked and they where running out of time to ship the game so they just stitched what they had together
This has to be it, along with something I have much experience with: a huge chalkboard with many smudgy erase marks, and a notebook so worn the pages are falling out. So many people must have worked on this, it's no wonder all the details didn't add up. "Wait where can we slot in finding the pocketwatch?" "Yeah O'Riley takes the dagger so..." It's an ambitious and enormously complicated game. Feels like only a couple people had all the details and the larger team got conflicting pieces to work on.
The virgin Ryan O'Riley: -Is completely lax about doing his job and would rather eat and drink on duty. -His stereotype has no actual importance to the story. -Takes bribes. -Murders Yvette out of jealousy that she sleeps with other people (seriously, her body count is higher than his). -Kills a ton of people just to get away with a dagger so unimportant almost nobody even recognizes it in front of them. -His best ending has him get caught by Crodfoller anyway after barely getting to retire. -Is a cop. The chad Wolf Heimlich: -Takes his job seriously despite a mixed track record, to the point he'd rather die than accept failure. -His stereotype has actual backstory (in one random conversation he'll reveal his mother's an artist whose paintings were stolen from another museum, implying his overly-serious demeanor and burning hatred of thieves stem from a desire to prevent it from happening again). -Would NEVER take a bribe. -Doesn't care who Olympia sees in her spare time, remains loyal to her, and even indulges her gore/death fetish to make her happy. -Never actually hurts anyone despite his many threats, and would only do so to keep the museum and its artifacts safe. -His best ending has him keep his job and start a happy family with the woman of his dreams. -Is not a cop, just chief of security.
ehhh, yikess, I know it's a joke but he technically murders Yvette because she was constantly cheating, wasn't she? Girl lied and called everyone her lover. She already knew what O'Riley was and continued her affairs.
Is no one questioning the ethics of displaying so many of the murder victims in the museum during one of the endings??? I feel like no one is reacting to that lol I mean, it was the 20s but STILL
It is weird, but I think it's a mix of the game being macabre with its humor and also having a dig at the 1920s and how cavalier some things could be (at least, in the same way a lot of the stereotypes are in the game).
As something of a corned beef aficionado, I can also confirm that advertising the leanest corned beef in the city is legitimately insane behavior. "This corned beef is-a cracker dry, lady."
"You've cracked the case" is absolutely bananas. That had people in the room while I'm watching this bust up laughing with only the barest knowledge of what's going on. 11/10 work Sierra.
3:21:47 two things: 1) I thought "fencing meeting" was code for Big Al calling a hit, and 2) barring that, my brain went to the sport of fencing rather than fence installation
Steve is such a funny fucking love interest. He is entirely empty headed. No thoughts. Constantly dragged around by women, a damsel in distress that dies if he stubs his toe. Big fan of cheese. Aggressively deep and monotone voice, completely lacking in emotion or passion, despite proclaiming his love for our protagonist.
This is a fantastic video, and you did a completely unparalleled job of picking this game apart!
Thank you, Josh! I've really enjoyed your work over the years, and, obviously, Sierra games are a really important part of my life. I also appreciate you working with me on that Owl's Quest video a few years ago.
When it comes to Dagger of Amon Ra, were there any fun behind-the-scenes stories you could share? Or insight into any of the game's design decisions?
I've really enjoyed your work, too! But this one was exceptional, at least for me, which I guess is not surprising, as close as I am to this one.
When I think back to the development, I mostly remember what a good time Bruce, Lorelei, and I had writing it. Bruce did the lion's share, of course, but Lorelei and I sat in an office with him for some months, working on the text, dialogue, and the documents in the box. When Bruce wasn't writing the design, or writing text and dialogue, he was researching, mostly museums. I think we all had to do research to get those box documents authentic (in information, if not in tone).
His goals for the game were very lofty, and as a lot of folks have observed, he ran up against a lot of stumbling blocks. The capabilities of SCI were one limiting factor (as you saw with the memory issue in Act 2). So was the amount of time allotted to testing, which I think was shortened partway through the project, I don't remember why -- and I'm actually not sure this is the project whose testing time got...abbreviated.
I was pleased to see Tubby (there, our list of stereotypes is complete) get so much love! I wrote his dialogue and voiced him, and it's not in the credits, and I'm thinking it might be because I did a lot of voices in the game, Bruce or I could've thought, "Five credits is more than enough," or something like that. But he was very satisfying to write, I was being snide about a number of friends I had when I was a kid.
I wish I could speak more to Bruce's experiences working with Roberta, but I wasn't privy to them. He carried so much in his head with that game, it was kind of insane, and that's probably why so many holes and contradictions fell through the cracks. By the way, a lot of people don't realize that Bruce, before he went to Sierra, designed the game "Neuromancer" for Interplay. This made Bruce kind of unique among all the designers, both contract and salaried: he had actually designed computer games professionally at another company before he got to Sierra. I don't think anyone else can say that, with the exception of Dave and Barry Murry, who co-designed the Manhunter games (with Dee Dee Murry). They had created "The Ancient Art of War" for Broderbund before Manhunter.
The art was a true point of pride for Bruce and the artists. I don't think there was a single other Sierra game, before or since, where they found an individual artist's art style and adapted it faithfully. I remember books of Leyendecker's art all over the place. He was the perfect inspiration, and the Sierra team did a really outstanding job of adapting it and mimicking it. I *love* the backgrounds with a lot of black. Very bold, very different, and yes, kind of polarizing.
Wow, what a treat!
It's worth appreciating that the Internet still allows us opportunities like this to hear from the people who made our favorite games. That, and the fact that we have people making huge deep dive videos on them as well!
@bertramusb8162 I think they call that a "win-win"! 😀
@MrJoshMandelgreat to hear from you, King Graham! Hard to express how much fun I had with the Sierra games growing up
"Eh, you ONLY solved a series of murders. Get back to me when you do that AND correctly answer two questions about a dagger, and maybe then I'll be impressed."
She was solving murders in college. Kid's stuff!
To be fair, her job was specifically to investigate the dagger theft. Maybe if she'd wasted less time trying to solve murders and avoid getting killed by the murderer, she'd have written the story she was assigned to! Good luck convincing Sam Augustini that you actually needed to grab the wire cutters and Rosetta stone bits to survive the night.
@timothymclean As a newsman Augustini should be pretty happy over a big lurid story like multiple murders. Isn't it OK to quietly drop the dagger story in favor of that? Then again, the game is silly enough to give that explanation and there does need to be some way to withhold reward from the player for not solving everything...although that would make much more sense if finding the dagger was not mandatory. I have to suspect at some point in development it wasn't.
@Fronzel41...did Laura actually have time to _write_ the murder story? Her interrogation couldn't have been quick...
@timothymclean That's not a bad question; the "Laura Bow Solves Dagger Theft! (and museum murders)" headling does make it seem like someone else is writing it.
The time "inconsistencies" can actually be accounted for if we consider the first act canonically takes 30 years
Lmao
Would it explain how Carrington traveled on the Andrea Doria, a real ship that launched in 1951?
@EmissaryofWind If it launched at the start of the year yes, if later then we can correct the time to 26 years or so
@LeDingueDeJeuxVideos She was launched June 16th, but only entered service in January 1953
@EmissaryofWind Ok I corrected my comment with some room to breathe, thanks for pointing that out
Honestly i like the mechanic of having to look both ways before crossing the street bc its really funny to me that if you dont, a car will appear and immediately turn you into a pancake
2:38:50 (roughly) "we've got a building full of suspects!" And at least half of them are dead right now LOL
The fact that the absurdly uncomfortable scene about the guy having tattoos on the soles of his feet and the other character wanting to see them was plot relevant kills me
The fact that’s plot relevant and the lesbian flapper isn’t is insane to me
@eldritchcupcakes3195its kinda relevant, it ties into Olivia only marrying the president for his money. But not directly relevant.
wait, how so? If you remember after all this time
@d@dorianlambin2651 the tattoos were foreshadowing the dude was in the cult of aman ra,
essentially.
"And you're kinda... small"
that cutaway LMAO
(Angry small reporter noises)
I LAUGHED SO HARD
She's 5'*1* thank you very much
I just watched the whole video, in what time stamp or part was that, I wanna hear it again 😭
@Aleiluliluthe first chapter, at the newspaper building
Sounds like when you try to give the dagger to O'Reilley, he was supposed to keep it and it was supposed to disappear from your inventory. That would explain how you could finish the game without the Dagger of Amon Ra and explain the endings in which you do not find it as it explicitly states in some that you gave the dagger away.
Thank you i kept looking for someone to mention this and could only find your comment. It was driving me crazy that he didnt remember that detail
It sort of makes it seem like there were meant to be *even more* endings possible - where you recover it but don't know who stole it, where you lost it completely, maybe even more than that. But that they did some last-minute shuffling around and had to push out the game.
It makes me wonder if there were some issues with the game near the end of development.
Alternatively you could originally complete the game without finding the dagger but this was changed for some reason.
@Introbulus Honestly I'd say it seems like the game was never quite finished, considering among many, many other things how important that inaccessible dialogue about the pocket watch is.
My prediction is that the killer is Tubby. He could easily get away with it as he wouldn't be able to reveal information during interrogation or a trial as he cannot speak about anyone or anything.
My guess is the French woman who was trying to bone every archeologist
My parents said I'm not allowed to confess to any murders
Those strict parents are hiding something and they don't want their kid to rat!
"Johnny Tight-Lips, who did this to ya?"
"I didn't see nothin'!"
notice how he never said his parents said he cant murder people
there’s something about the silliness of these type of point and click adventure games which i find very charming. having to actually look both ways before crossing the street or a car will run you over is hilarious.
That one's true to life.
@fireflocs It is, but it is a bit silly to remember about in a game. Especially since those adventure games do so many other things in very roundabout ways, where you just don't expect them to suddenly need you to do such an action.
Nah, I get it, I just gotta be a stick in the mud and remind people to take road safety seriously.
Funfact though: Leisure Suit Larry 1 does the exact same thing. If you don't type 'look both ways' and step into the street, Larry _immediately_ gets flattened by an oncoming truck.
My favorite is laura just immediately getting robbed in new york and that just not mattering at all.
It just comes off as cartoony when the scene with her boss sets her up as an underdog perfectly fine.
Also the hole-ier than thou joke was funny.
It's this wonderful contrast between LucasArts and Sierra.
Sierra games would come up with the most contrived ways to kill you. (e.g. hit by an off-screen car because you didn't specify to look both ways)
Lucas games would not let you die and sometimes come up with contrived explanations for why you survived things (e.g. Monkey Island rubber tree)
Games by most smaller studios were somewhere in the middle (e.g. Broken Sword has more fatal traps later in the game)
The best ending's outcomes for the dead people are legitimately insane, four of them end up as exhibit pieces and Carter receives the ultimate archaeologist disrespect and was returned to Egypt.
Literally had my mouth open for the ending, like Jesus that seems horrible 😭
The "you've already proven you know as much about egyptology as I do" line is hilarious without the quiz as basically it would mean, "hey, you know how to pronounce the word. That's as much as I got." I used to work at museums, and sometimes people would ask specific questions I didn't know the answer to, and that's about the answer I would give them.
Makes the "I bow to your superior knowledge" line come off as pretty sarcastic. I don't know if the vocal performance really conveys it, but I think the dialogue as written does imply he's a little resentful of Laura.
@Fronzel41I interpret it as being sincere but Crodfaller is just a little salty about the reassignment still.
I love the ending voice acting.
_"OH, STEVE~!!"_
*"Oh, Laura."*
Next week on Lords and Ladies...
The oh steve lines give Resident evil code veronica wibes everytime Claire says steve.
This is insane to me bc my name is Laura and my husband's name is Steve
@lauratanner6493😂😂
@FrumpyMcDumpsterAh a fellow Finnish Gun-Fu game enjoyer.
I wouldn't have ever guessed the reason (almost) no one solves this game isn't obscure puzzles and hard mechanics, but that a key scene is just... missing.
I love that the mysteries of the game are near-impenetrable and make no sense... unless you talked to the countess twice who gave huge plot dumps with next to no prodding, basically solving the game for you. And they managed to miss one of those key scenes.
“Sorry, lady, my parents said I’m not supposed to talk about burglaries I wasn’t involved in”
"Sorry lady, my parents said I'm not supposed to talk about any crimes I was involved in"
Sounds like the start of a riddle where you find out he was the robber because its the only robbery he'll actually talk to you about
This implies he’s allowed to talk about burglaries he was involved in lol
I remember reading an issue of PC Gamer that included a page detailing horrible game endings, and it specifically called this one out as being horrible because "no matter what you do, the ending will ask you questions you don't know the answers to".
😭
Game journalists be like that
Ah finally a game journalist that actually knows what they are talking about!
Act 3 spoiler:
My only guess as to why Carter was found inside the suit of armor is that Sierra rewrote his murder scene and forgot to change this hotspot.
Maybe you were originally going to be able to find the corpses in different spots, like in the first game.
I think it's because O'Reilley moved it, maybe to hide evidence? He mentioned the coroner being there, but we didn't see or talk to any coroners. Same with Ziggy's head being in the life mask room. I think he was hoping to throw people off. I wouldn't be surprised if he was the one leaving other pieces of hints or evidence in an attempt to throw us off the case either, since he IS a cop. He'd have seen it all.
Honestly credit to Yvette. The girl is handling so many separate things that she would a four-armed juggler a run for their money
I can honestly say I'm very rarely impressed by a fictional character's time and people management skills, but my girl Yvette deserves a shout out because damn consider me really impressed
Yeah, I'm halfway through the video and this girl's schedule is PACKED. The only one she doesn't have something going on is the MC lol
@youtube-kit9450 Exactly what I thought when the Yvette-Ernie intrusion came up and he was wondering where the Yes/No option was for the spicier one. I thought, "I guess the joke is Yvette is showing everyone her Eiffel Tower except Laura."
So... ferrets are one of the natural hunters of snakes... is daisy down there HUNTING COBRAS that were accidentally released weeks before?
most ferrets I've ever met or kept would be very happy to hunt cobras. I don't know that they'd be any good at it, but boy howdy would they love to do it
Idk about ferrets specifically but they are closely related, Mongoose actively hunt cobra. Its their main thing. Just piss off cobras and eat them. Feral lil sh!ts haha
@Dukedogdogactually, mongoose and ferrets are not as closely related as you think! In fact, the mongoose is more related to hyenas as mongoose are feliform carnivorans, as opposed to caniform, which is what all mustelids/weasels belong to.
@leafytaffy7291 wait really! Damn science got me again 😂❤
It would make sense that she's constantly sneaking into the basement, if you think about it like that.
I feel like you really undersold the critical importance of the pocketwatch conversation. Hearing that conversation singlehandedly solves the entire game. It straight-up tells you who Carrington actually is, which in turn tells you that the Countess is not responsible for any murders AND explains why Carter thought Carrington looked different. The first clue points you to something beginning with C.P. you missed which doesn't solve the pixel hunt but does at least tell you that it has nothing to do with anything you've experienced in the game, and the second one gives a motive for Little's death and links O'Reilly to Little through the Countess.
And you can't hear the conversation in the game.
Oh, Sierra...
timestamp?
@520_metaljust watch the damn video
@kateliza8922 you sound normal
@520_metal he starts talking about the pocketwatch stuff at 3:16:32 and the hugely important dialog that isn't accessible in the game is played at 3:17:38
@kateliza8922 it’s a god damned 3+ hour video, watching it a second time to try and catch one specific thing is unreasonable. Have you considered being less cranky? Because your answer is absolutely not taking into account other people besides you are humans with feelings.
I've got it! It was Dr. Pippin Carter all along! He killed himself with the dagger and started killing people as a ghost!
Damn, how did you guess?
@OneShortEye Easy, Heimlich spells it out for you that it was a ghost, you just need to pay attention.
You joke but back in the day, playing for the first time I didn't find the Crime and Punishment pixel, I mean book in Carrington's office, so I had no idea what the letters "CP" written in blood meant. I assumed they were the initials of his killer, but the only possible candidate was "Carter, Pippin ??? Did he fake his death and is the actual killer???" That only made finding the real killer even more confusing.
@Mantis47 Yeah, never played this but the video makes it clear that bit of pixel hunting is ridiculous
Makes as much sense as the real explanation i guess.
What I find odd about the ending is that both Laura AND Steve directly witness the murderer's face when they apprehend him, yet this seems to never be brought up again. I get the game hiding the face because they wanted you to solve the case, and simply showing you the face at the end would ruin that (though this does also make the idea of Laura giving the wrong answers very silly in-universe). But also even if you correctly identify the killer, Steve and Laura being able to give direct testimony to the killer's identity isn't brought up from what I remember. It makes Act 5 even more jarring and weird in that the whole chase is barely even acknowledged afterwards.
To be fair if they couldn't connect him to the other murders and he failed to kill them, the worst they could get him on is attempted murder, and considering he's a cop with connections, he surely ain't going away for that.
Especially weird since the game brings up Dr. Tut Smith as a surprise eye witness (where was he hiding when the murder happend?) yet it completly fails to mention that Laura and Steve apprehended the killer.
Together with the unused and inaccessable dialogue it makes me think that the game got some serious rewrites before release and that the writers themselves kind of forgot what they had included from the various drafts of the story.
@shinyagumon7015 That would explain enough of the jank that I'm also inclined to think it's true, to some extent. Cutting back an over-ambitious initial draft and assembling a story from the leftover pieces is a common game dev story. Sometimes it's even a successful one!
Well the person chasing you didn't necessarily kill everyone in the museum. They only tried to kill you.
The entire chase sequence does feel a bit shoehorned in at the last proverbial minute what with all the weird item placements that can softlock the game and how did Steve even end up in that pile of coal? Sure there looks to be a coal shute above it but would he actually fit through that and why would someone shove him in there rather than just kill him outright? Also why would the murderer dress up in that costume when they could just walk up to Laura and take her out before she realizes she's in danger? The killer clearly has a gun so why don't they just shoot Laura the moment they see her rather than slowly trudge over with the mace?
"OoH Steve!"
"oh laura." 😐
"OH Steve!"
The wire cutters! I got to Act 5 without knowing those wire cutters existed. Died so many times in that chase. Eventually my parents helped me write a letter to the Sierra Help Line and like a month later I got a letter with instructions on how to beat that chase.
Soulful
That is awesome. Another unfair puzzle is that if you don't give Steve Dorian his boots in time he breaks his foot ending your playthrough unless you had back up saves before that puzzle.
Writing a letter to ask for help in game puzzle is so wild to think about today when you could just google the answer. By beat the chase do you mean that they told you how to get through the entire sequence?
@agatha6999yeah I think the answer was how to survive the whole chase sequence. Wish I still had it…
your parents helping you write the letter is so wholesome omg
I like how as the game progresses Laura reacts less and less to finding dead bodies. To the point where by the final one she's just got an annoyed "It's a DEAD BODY." As if she were looking at a car.
After her experience at the colonel's estate, it's a wonder she isn't hard boiled at this point
It's a car.
It's a car. 😠
It’s. A. CAH’.
@heroman2372It's a cah.
The flavor text that goes from describing a tree in the most detailed manner possible to just saying "it's a car" really reminds me of disco elysium down to the prose
The armor room is the point where players begin to regret their investment into the encyclopedia stat.
it's so on point i immediately imagined those in reptile brain's voice
Oh my god now that you mention it
@djdexcatSounds like free EXP to me.
Laura Bow is from the countryside. She knows all about trees and had plenty of time to read books to study history.
But it's the mid-20s and cars are very new.
I'd say the clear winner here is Olympia because:
+She survives
+Loves death and witnesses several murders
+ Doesn't die in any of the endings
+ Either falls in love and lives happily ever after or teaches in a university in the endings
Pretty good wouldn't you agree?
Also apparently has a side relationship with the Mae West flapper? She's really living it up.
I love how regardless of the ending, Olympia is just living her best life. In the worst ending where everyone else is dead or dying she discovers a whole new species of dinosaur! And it's named after her! That's arguably the coolest ending for any of the characters
Also I love the editing at 1:12:17. The changing poses of Laura synced to the music followed by all the glitchy shenanigans and deaths had me in stitches haha, I rewound a couple of times just to enjoy it fully
A true bicon, that lady.
We support a lady and her death obsession
Low-key good for her
@Sammy-rk4cl fr tho
the casual "yvette bisexual" reveal took me out... Yvette's Men -> Yvette's People
tbh
she sounds more pansexual
after all it doesnt seem like she cares much about the gender of her sexual partners
Having just played both Colonel's Bequest and this game: Laura's bisexual too. I swear to god that woman has vibes, especially with Lillian from Colonel's Bequest, but she was also deeply unfazed when Yvette asked her to join her and the guy screwing her in her office. Laura Bow is like the most passive bi rep of all time but she's sooooo cool
That poly bisexual whhhoooorrrrreeeee (sorry if I should not be calling her that, I will delete the comment if it is an issue)
@THEMINDCASTLE I was hoping Laura would get added to the list, but then our girl died
i literally threw my hands up in the "ABSOLUTE CINEMA" pose. I was alone in my room. It just felt right
Judging by the Countess ceiling glitch, this shows how they snuck the paintings out without Wolf noticing.
She has to sing "Girl in the Tower" every time she does that.
@Introbulus Oh, sweet Horus. Her voice is a trial as it is. I do not need to hear her sing. 😂
Absolutely insane of the endings to be like "oh yeah there's like four different people who were murdered at this museum and their bodies turned wholesale into exhibits at the museum". Especially Ernie, they took the guy who was drowned in an embalming vat and cut him up into smaller embalming vats? Insane. Well, at least it probably got visitors in the doors!
Well, he was already embalmed...
Ernie at least had it in his will that he wanted to be preserved and displayed at the museum. Carrington, Ziggy, & Yvette are still insane to think about, though (and it implies they would've still done it to Ernie even if it wasn't in his will).
Wait if the directors are dead and the Countess bit the dust too then who ran the muse-
OLYMPIAAAAAAAAAA...
@massgunner4152 ok that explains it
I’m sorry, you’re telling me someone carried a baby for 9 months, went through the pains of labour, looked at it and said, “Crodfoller”?
I actually think the overall story is pretty solid, it’s just a shame that there’s missing dialogues and a lack of logical solutions to some of the literally ESSENTIAL items needed. If i worked for a gaming company i would totally have a remaster of this gem :))
Perhaps, hear me out, this would have been a better book? With some illustrations included
@cherrytree2165 The puzzles would be a bit awkward considering how many of them are just “give item. Talk to guy you gave item to”
I disagree that the story is solid. Even with the missing dialogues filled in by OneShortEye, the entire crime spree makes no sense and is pretty much physically impossible to pull off. It's the worst type of mystery, where you have no chance of solving it yourself, and when you hear the solution it doesn't even make any sense.
SPOILERS
Take for example ziggy's death. How did the killer cut off a head, run it all the way to the mask room and nail it there without themselves getting covered in blood and without leaving huge trails of blood? Why did they bother doing such a thing that exponentially increases their chance of getting caught? How did they use a paper cutter to cut through the spine?
Or look at yvette's death. There's 0 explanation as to how the killer got access to a human being's worth of quick dry plaster. And why did he do that after murdering her but not think to get rid of the hair in her hand she ripped out during her struggle against the killer? Why did they put a bifocal in her hands to frame the countess with their fingerprints on it? Especially since they were planning to murder the countess in a very obvious way (tied up and bitten by cobra), so why try to frame someone who is clearly a murder victim? (It'd be one thing if they framed her and made it look like she died by accident or suicide, but they hogtied her before having the snake bite her)
It's just such a god awful piece of garbage as a mystery that I don't think those missing dialogues pointed out in the video saves it.
Yknow with all the dialogue of people being convinced the real dagger is a giftshop copy, I wonder if Smith's fate at the end was supposed to be done with the real dagger, mistaken for a fake, but like in the first instance, nobody thinks its the real one. And its just that the game's so messy that the joke doesn't land.
Yeah I’m pretty sure the endings where you “don’t find the dagger” are just nobody believing that the dagger you have is the real one
The dialogue where Laura gives away the dagger to the Countess or O’Riley (but doesn’t really) seems like cut content to me. Like she actually does give it to them and that’s why the lost dagger endings still mention it.
3:30:16 Wild that Wolf Heimlich got to keep his job in the good ending considering 5 murders happened under his watch. And that's not even addressing the rampant art theft or the Egyptian cult that hosts regular meetings in the museum's basement.
I never can understand how Sierra could accomplish so many technical achievements in their graphics and audio and screw up so much basic logic and qa.
I reckon they have the worst workflow lol. Basic plot logic in a game that’s essentially a giant list of if checks get easily lost during development, but if they just had some kind of consistently updated outline it should be fine. Making technical achievements is easy because it is way more linear than adding to a massive ever complex net of red string.
They had the money and expertise to really squeeze out good graphics and audio. But they were also 80-90s developers that were used to making things from scratch and adding on as much as they could in a few months. Games had a
Hacker culture, to a T. Videogame design was still early days, having just entered it's third decade as a business.
When you're the first to do something, you're also the first to do something poorly.
You PICK it up and PLACE it in your purse.
You straighten out your dress; appearances count!
Don't TOUCH it! You don't know where it's BEEN!
Beat me to it 😂
Where else would she store an entire mummy, silly!
I guess it was a bad year for Dr. Pippin Carter afterall.
I was eating grapes when I started watching this video and then stopped when it became the directive main characteristic
After 3 hours, you must have encountered a grape shortage as well.
Bro did you do it
Of the game? Of yourself?
Just got a grape plate and put this video on too 😅
How many grapes did you eat if it takes you three hours?
I'm sorry my parents don't allow me to speculate on unsolved murders.
I'm sorry to be the 667th like, but someone has to do it 😅
@AimeeColemanMan it used to be 69😢
it sounds like ChatGPT kinda
😂
your parents sound like very sensible people
Omg that bit in 6:41 where Laura is pointed out for being small and it cuts to her barely reaching the desk is HILARIOUS
The Laura Bow games really feel like the devs were biting off more with their engines than they could chew, if it got so complicated that vital clues and conversations could be just _missed_ like that in testing.
EDIT: Damn, a lot of deaths come from those gift shop daggers. Boy, safety standards for consumer goods were really lax in 1926.
The clunkiest thing is that you never know when an inconsistency is a clue that helps you frame a culprit, or just the game engine tripping over itself and playing the wrong dialogue. This kind of bugs wouldn't be too bad in a regular adventure game like Quest for Glory, but in a detective story it can break the pacing and reasoning of the player.
Games of that era were tailored to sell hintbooks. I don't think there is much depth regarding the engine or the plot or the design; game is pretty bug free for being what it is, but seems cumbersomely engineered to waste your time and pick on your curiosity so that you feel pressed to spend more money on getting to the solution.
Then even the Hintbook looks haphazardly made, probably product of shaky game direction and / or them being developed in parallel with the game and thus inconsistent with the actual limitations of the engine that had to be patched, such as the clock conversation being impossible to get to.
On the other hand, those are REALLY realistic replicas.
When I played this casually for the first time, I thought the Countess walking through the sky was a clue that pointed to a way to access the catwalks for the pterodactyl murder.
I feel that spiritual successors like Kathy Rain show how very tight gameplay can go a long way in telling this kind of story
6:26 That stupid joke got me. I thought it was a "She's being belittled!" until I found out she was BEING little. The image of her head barely peeking over the desk, peak comedy already and we're not even 10 minutes in
Happy pride month to Dr. Olympia Myklos and Mademoiselle Yvette Delacroix
2:56:39 love how not only laura falls into the furnace for no foreseeable reason but steve ALSO follows her down there. no thoughts head empty just (sizzle)
Steve is the ultimate "ride or die" kinda guy ❤️
Steve: "Oh well, it's a Sierra Adventure Game so I might as well".
He assumed Laura had a plan
I just realized The red hair you find on Yvette is literally a red hair ring, as well as being a red herring towards Steve.
I love that
Oh, wasn't that hair supposed to be from Detective O'Reilly?
@KipchickieV.1It is. The comment is saying that it was a red hair ring, as in a red 'herring'. Basically it's saying it was meant to make the player think Steve was suspicious instead of O'Reilly.
👏
Hilarious.
THE DAGGER WASN'T SWAPPED FOR ONE IN THE GIFT SHOP? WHY WAS THERE ONE THAT WASN'T STAMPED?????? i spent the whole video waiting for that to come back up!!
Ngl I completely forgot about that until reading this comment... what was the deal with that???
Laura Bow: "What do you know about notebooks?"
Gabriel Knight: "Tell me about snakes"
"give me an analysis joey"
What can you tell me about the four Wude?
Oh I'd kill for a OneShortEye Gabriel Knight (Tim Curry version) breakdown.
Yvette delacroix is supposed to be french and is not willing to talk shit about her boss ? That's suspicious, talking shit and complaining about work is half what we french do of our days
That’s how you figure out she’s pretending to be French, lol
Isn't it part of your contracts? 2 months vacation and the right to publicly talk shit about your boss/company? (Sayin "I hate my job" on social media can and has gotten many people fired here in Canada)
@cherrytree2165technically it's forbidden to badmouth your employer here too... But something as trivial as the law hasn't ever prevented a french person from complaining
@cherrytree2165examples ?
Yvette ISN'T French. If you look at the diploma in her office it says Yvette Delacroix received an advanced degree in French from Ball State University. Combined with her and Ziggy having a past, it seems she was putting on a fake persona like the countess (who when angry, shifts to an angry cockney accent before remembering she's supposed to be upper class).
Being haunted for the rest of your life might seem really bad. Fortunately you get killed later that night.
I'm surprised Tubby's even allowed outside to play with other children
The 'you're kind of small' bit legitimately got me, pretty funny
Maybe the ending when you solve the murders but dont find the dagger was meant to happen when you "give away" the dagger to O'Rilley (Which you cannot really do in the final game), That's why Laura says "After you gave it away"
Initially I was sad that I made the decision to watch the video and learn whodunnit, but after seeing all the pixel hunting, the missable cutscenes, the dead ends, dead man walking situations, missing dialogue, and absolutely misleading puzzles that can make you never complete the game, I think I'm glad I chose to not play it.
Sierra things.
Win without playing
@OnyxPriest It's the only winning move.
Thanks for summarizing why I shouldn't play the game for me, I was gonna watch the video anyway but it's nice to know ahead of time I have no reason to feel like I missed out on something.
i truly can't believe what a trainwreck this game is. it has such a charming art style and fun writing but holy hell the ball was dropped somewhere along the way and never recovered
A favourite thing about Dagger is that Laura never drinks the water or empties it out, so, through the whole night, she is splishing water each time she listens at a door.
It's possible Ernie Leech saw where the dagger was hidden, tried to get it, died, and was put in another location so no one would realise where the dagger was.
A fan patch would be sick, but the amount of work would be crazy.
At least this video serves as a good guide for some of the more obvious logic hurdles and pain points to smooth out.
@SetsuneW ya, but it would be nice to be able to play it blind
@nellen55Oh, agreed, I meant use the video as a guide to develop a fan patch.
It sorta looks like half the work would be just repairing the control images so the zones made more sense
@Palooka37that and re- implementing scenes...
And properly removing the dagger from the player's inventory when O'Reily takes it.
Very doable
2:17:47 Dude seriously went "my dad can beat your dad up." My brother in christ half of us have been killed, we have more important problems going on.
"NEIN! Zere is nothing more important than ze masculinity of mine bloodline!"
The reason I think laura is behind Steve in the t rex shot is because she went to press the button while he was still standing there and when she went back over,she is behind him.
“Walkthrough/review/retrospective hybrids about old insane adventure games” is becoming one of my favorite RUclips sub genres
Got any other game recommendations to watch?
@QueryBunsPower Pak’s videos on Kings Quest 1-2 and Space Quest, and Mandalore Gaming’s vid on The Mystery of the Driuds
@QueryBuns Scarfhulu is also fun!
@QueryBuns Marsh is great.
Also, forgot, Genghis Kait and her friend Shaw did a bunch of LPs of old horror and adventure games. They have very good babble.
Worth noting for the timeline, at 35:28 she’s talking about how she thinks 1926 is going to be a great year, weird thing to say in September of that year.
*Looks at the date.* Greenday 2004, Album released September. 'Wake me up when September ends'. 2026/1926 = 26. Perhaps lets keep a eye this year around fall time. Numerology don't lie. 🙏🔺👁🌈😉
The line "that you gave away" makes me strongly suspect the game is SUPPOSED to have a Dead Man Walking possibility when you show the Dagger to O'Riley. Since he IS the thief and the killer, then absolutely, if he gets the dagger it'll just disappear.
For all the stereotypes, the 1920's British archaeologist immediately wanting to throw hands at an Egyptologist for suggesting they keep the Egyptian artefacts in an Egyptian museum is very on brand
Was Kemet always Muslim?
@falconeshield"Kemet" stop the larp bro 💔💔
What!?!? The British would never do that… /s lmao
@Hharvey12700of course they wouldn't throw hands of course! How barbaric! Knives would be the proper way
@hornetisvoldHuh. You'd think the pyramids are older than most Abrahamic religons.
Also ask the Coptics about their dead language. It's quite similar to what the AE referred to their land as the 'Black Land'. And Islam is only 1415 years old.
Player, sarcastically: "Is this gonna be on the test?"
Game: "Yes."
Saying "oh I think it'll be a great year!" in OCTOBER is deranged behavior
I think the reference to giving away the dagger in the endings is tied to that broken dialog with o'riley when you attempt to show him the dagger, and it says you give him it, but it stays in your inventory, maybe that was the intended way to get the ending at a stage in development before the quiz was used
Agreed. I'm convinced you were able to give away the dagger at some point in the design phase.
@OneShortEyeAre there any code or text remnants that hint at this? I presume not.
@patcat8950 Well, you have all the dialog about the Countess and O'Riley taking the dagger, as well as everything the Coroner says, and everything on the ending slides about you giving the dagger away.
In the scripts, the game checks to see if you have the dagger for the best ending, then doesn't check for the dagger in the second ending, which is a pretty strong indicator to me. if they didn't intend for you to be able to miss or lose the dagger, there'd be no need to check for it.
@OneShortEye This is an assumption but I think this started off more like giving the evidence to the police. The dagger's disappearance would seem even more bewildering to anyone who didn't solve the mysteries than what is in the final ending and possibly serve as a massive low effort hint. The conversation was then changed to reference it as a gift shop dagger before they dropped the whole thing.
It would explain how he gets his small fortune if the game's story thinks he got the dagger back and knew it was real.
Speaking of inconsistencies, why does it say in the 3rd and 4th endings that Crodfoller found the murderer but that O'Riley retired? Didn't I pay enough attention? Or didn't the developers?
I cannot express the horror I felt upon hearing “we find ourselves in china town” about this game 20:25
Forget it, Logan. It's Chinatown.
Same lmao
Me when Lo Fat. 😂
" 'Nuff said. 'Kay? "
"Oh no!" I said out loud
29:16 wait that was copy protection! I thought it was just part of it, and that I'd need to have knowledge of Egyptology to play the game.
The flapper’s dialogue choices do have an effect, it lets you decide if you want Laura to be a bisexual icon or not.
Laura is truly the bisexual icon we need
@NullRexexactly. Icon since the 20s
Did anyone else catch the beetles happily scurrying along with the steak through the cult meeting 2:46:10
"Hey, meat!" :D
the ferret, daisy, too!!
WOW, what a cool detail. This comment should be higher
@stacki1040good eye
3:09:03
Let's be honest, Olympia killed her by negligence.
"Aw heck yeah, new OneShortEye video on an old game haha sick, today is gonna be-- **checks timestamp** ohhhh BABY "
my thoughts exactly 😆
"Sequel to the colonels bequest"
OHHHH BABY
I don't know why on literally every RUclips video you have to scroll past two or three comments that are exactly like this one before you get to the real comments. That's also not what the word "timestamp" means.
Exact same reaction here
Found his Longbow video and have been hooked
I love this game so very much, but there was one play through I did where I forgot to collect a shoe. Just one shoe. I had everything else. And I FAILED AND GOT KILLED. BECAUSE OF A SHOE.
I'm so glad you're here, I was thinking about your let's play all the way through!
Your play through was my introduction to the game. It was a really fun watch!
This video and yours are a gift.
ah yes, we shall never forget the softlock caused by forgetting steve's silly little boot. hi PUR ♡♡
Oh, I didn't see this comment in the morning. I'm glad I came back to rest through the comments.
It took me a while to realize that I knew this game from your playthrough.
You were the reason I knew about Laura Bow I love both games so much thank you 😭
2:54:30 I actually disagree here, when Laura earlier said that she ran out of snake oil, I instantly thought "uh oh, he fucked up" because I remembered that one lady mention she'd let snakes loose in the basement. And there's no way that would've been mentioned unless it came into play later. So there was SOME indication that something was wrong for later
HOWEVER, I still don't think it's a good enough indication (especially since using the snake oil the first few times IS needed), way too easy to have forgotten about the other snakes, and the fact that you have to go SO out of the way to refill the bottle is ridiculous.
im at 1:28:54 but so far its so funny to me that apparently like half of the museum staff were having an affair with oneanother
Worst polycule ever.
It's way more than half.
@micahbush5397 Yvette's just living her best life lol
just like Fleetwood Mac
Edgy Boomers lol
Okay. Hear me out. I think the mammoth just did that on its own.
3:40:17 Wait, it makes no sense. They don't want to reveal the murderer, so they use a generic text... but the fact that they are supposed to be caught WHILE having none of the stories of the others being about them in prison makes no sense right?
I'm actually betrayed and disgusted by the fact that you made me, a regular enjoyer of detective media, consider the complex and interwoven plot of the game only to reveal that everything was O'Rielly's fault.
Congratulations, you've perfectly captured the essence of the game in this video. I completely understand the feelings that anyone who played this game must have had, going through ALL OF THAT, only for it to be all explained away by one specific clue hidden by a pixelhunt.
I don't usually subscribe off of one video, but that's just TOO well done.
EDIT: I wonder if "the captain did it" from Return of the Obra Dinn had anything to do with this ending.
Remove the the Obra Dinn spoiler or encode it in ROT13 or something.
@LaukkuPaukku That is... not a spoiler. "The captain did it" is an achievememt where you play the game incorrectly by saying that the captain killed everyone and then leaving early.
@Jezzared OK, thanks for clarifying, I haven't played it and it sounded like a spoiler.
i hope you watch his the colonels bequest video too!
@Yam-jt3vw The solution to the murders in the first game is even worse, yes.
Aw heck yes, that was just terrific. I'll never play this, but the story and all the dialog were fantastic. What a journey
This is how I feel about a lot of point and click games lol
I'll play some of them, but once it gets to the older and/or more cryptic ones I just watch videos about em.
I absolutely adore the genre, so channels like this that cover them makes me so happy lol
@staticlord1oh big same. I'm not huge on let's plays so I love me a deep dive retro. I kinda hope for a Kyrandia one at some point.
I would fail the chase so many times and cry
Makes sense that Olympia's room is the one thats the most likely to put you into a DEAD man walking state
Regarding Ptahsheptut Smith's bizarre epilogue in the "Dagger unfound" endings: Maybe Tut's relentless efforts to have the Dagger sent back to Egypt weren't _actually_ (or weren't _entirely)_ motivated by Egyptian patriotism and national pride? Maybe his _cult_ saw the "theft" of the Dagger by Carter as a legitimate _blasphemy_ against Amun-Ra, and assigned Tut (as the highest-ranking priest with the best public archaeological connections) to get it back? Then after years of fruitlessly hounding Carter and Carrington the cult is starting to lose its patience with Tut, and the events of the game occur and Laura (as far as anyone knows) _fails_ to recover the dagger.
_Now,_ not only has the theft of a _sacred relic_ gone unpunished, but the man they sent to make things right has bungled things _so severely_ that it's been _stolen from the thieves_ by an unknown third party; now, not only is their sacred relic not in _the Right Place,_ it's not even in _a particularly safe or honorable Wrong Place_ anymore! They no longer have _any clue_ where it is or what is being done with or to it. Thus, their patience runs out, and if Ptahsheptut is to have _any_ hope at all of ever reaching the Field of Reeds... his penance must be _severe..._
Yeah, I am fairly certain this is what the devs tried to imply. He essentially sacrificed himself to Amon-Ra to avoid his wrath.
I haven't gotten very far into the video but I refuse to believe that P name isn't you fat thumbing your keyboard. That is not a real name someone really tried their best on making sound Egyptian and really gave to their Egyptian character, then also gave them the last name of Smith. No.
2:40:09 the voice actor may have been saying all the lines to himself to keep the tone of conversation going if they couldn't have Laura and him record together, and the sound editor somehow messed up cutting the lines. That'd be my guess tbh because everyone involved is a native English speaker, and it'd be weird for no one to point out Riley answers his own question.
I don't think this is a likely scenario. It's pretty rare to have voice actors in video games (or any project, really) record their lines together to begin with. Moreover, the voice actors often don't even get a full script, just a list of their own lines to read out loud, with limited knowledge of how they connect to each other or other characters' dialogue. On a side note, this is part of the reason why certain line deliveries in particularly older and lower budget games can be so bizarre; it's not necessarily (just) due to the voice actors being unskilled or inexperienced, they could be reading a bunch of lines out of context without proper direction.
Also it is not the voice actor's job to spot and point out potential inconsistencies like this, they're just there to read the lines they're asked to read. I think the line being handed to the wrong VA is the simplest and most likely explanation for this goof-up.
@liquid_pig
What you laid out is exactly what I said, except you came to a different conclusion. The voice actor for O'Reilly is pretty good, and in order to keep his lines from sounding wooden and unnatural he may have read Laura's lines out loud while recording. Think what live actors do, but recorded. No it's not the voice actors _job_ to point out inconsistencies, but that's doubly so about editing their recorded lines. It's highly likely that within hundreds of recorded lines, an editor forgot to cut something from a VA's recording session, but it also wasn't fixed but those lines would never be heard anyway. It's highly _unlikely_ that a professional studio that wanted good voice acting would throw out lines with no context to their VA's. It's also highly _unlikely_ that a native English voice actor, working with a professional and friendly native English studio, would _not_ ask about what seems to be an incorrect line given to them, if only to understand why their character is saying it. This game clearly had a voice director because most of the voice acting is pretty good, for a goofy little adventure game, and yeah you can get wooden acting from not having other actors in the room but voice actors as a profession rarely get to record with other VA's, even today...not just in video games. It's not a deal breaker. A voice director is there to work around that issue, and the biggest cause for awful voice acting is no direction or poor direction.
And one of the work arounds that likely would have been given to the issue of no one to bounce a convo off of would be to have the VA read all the lines aloud...
...but like even setting aside the VA pointing it out, there's an entire team dealing with the recordings. Not just the editor, but the scriptwriters who may have mislabeled it, the voice director, the game director, the programmers inserting the recordings...that's my point about them all being native English speakers. If the line was accidentally given to O'Reilly, it is beyond belief that not a single person pointed that out.
@PointsofData Sorry, I guess I misunderstood your first point. I thought you were implying that under normal circumstances Laura and O'Reilly's actors would have read their lines together, but in this case Laura wasn't available so O'Reilly read her lines too to keep the flow going. My train of thought was that reading out your partner's lines sounds like something you'd do if you were used to working with a partner, but if you're usually recording alone anyway (as most VAs do) you'd probably have a different approach to making things sound natural. You know? But I misinterpreted what you meant.
I still don't entirely agree that it's "beyond belief" that nobody would notice a voice actor being given the wrong line. Stuff happens when there are lots of moving parts. There's a bit in Oblivion for instance where a voice actor abruptly switches character voices mid-conversation, which to me suggests that while the line was given to the correct actor, he got the wrong direction regarding which voice he was supposed to be doing. Which would also imply that the lines weren't recorded in order. Or, if they were, nobody present cared or noticed he was doing a different voice. Of course Oblivion is much larger in scope but it's just the first example that came to my head, and that game was made by a professional studio too.
But of course it could also be an editing mishap -- the aforementioned Oblivion has those too.
Same. That's what I thought, too.
@PointsofDataNot to mention, he delivers the line in a bit of a throwaway manner, like he's briefly reading something he's responding to. To me, it feels like you're right on the money here.
I will say I’m personally happy with the accents and stutter being written out in text as some of my friends are Deaf and wouldn’t know that he had a stutter unless the used their cochlears.
It's pronounced cochlear.
im really impressed that the giftshop daggers were actual daggers and not some plastic recreations
I think Synthetic Plastics we’re still super uncommon and expensive in 1926.
Still they could’ve easily been wood replicas.
But they are manufactured in Pittsburgh, a city well known for its steel industry which seems like a oddly deliberate detail.
Maybe it was just really cheap steel.
This is an EXCELLENT demonstration of obsessing over a game, and as you learn more and more about it you become keenly aware of all of its little (or in this case, very large) flaws. This game had a ton of charm, but as the video went on it became more and more clear that the highly intricate plot was little more than smoke and mirrors.
What's fascinating to me (and I think it's easy to lose sight of this by the end of the video) is how well the game still _feels_ like it works when playing it, despite all of this. Because you generally don't see just how much of it is smoke and mirrors from the inside without several playthroughs, and definitely not without looking behind the curtain to know for sure. Even with all of these flaws and fake parts, playing through the game seems like a coherent mystery with a strong sense of atmosphere, and the holes are easily assumed to be things the player missed.
I don't think that's ideal, but it's interesting how well it works anyway!
34:03 that’s actually pretty historically accurate! During prohibition the police were stretched incredibly thin going after minor drinking cases and also figuring out who of their fellow officers was taking bribes (all of them basically). The justice system was having issues as well, due to being clogged with minor drinking offenses as the system raised from fines to multiple years of prison time which obviously got taken to court. There was a lot of pressure to catch everyone in the city who dared to touch some homemade beer, which was basically everyone. He’s probably very overtaxed by this so him not worrying about the theft is pretty reasonable
1:39:45 "Don't worry Wolfie, we'll figure out who's been stealing your food"
"Oh sweet free cheese!"
I hate how hard this made me laugh.
39:30: After checking Hemmingway's bibliography, remembering his was rather prolific during this period, I have a proposal: Laura was NOT asking about "The Sun Also Rises" but about Hemingway's novella "The Torrents of Spring", which had come out in May 1926. Ziggy referenced "Sun" as it was the one HE most recently read and he thought it had already come out. It certainly would have been accepted for publication by September 1926, and exact publication dates can slip a bit. Of course that draws the question of why Laura wouldn't correct him on what she was talking about, but at that point I think we have to fall back on the MST3K mantra: It's just a game, we should really just relax.
Considering some of the other references are literally YEARS early I'm more than willing to over look a month early mistake.
Doesn’t seem odd to let something like that slide- she’s a woman in 1926, saving her energy and opportunity to correct a man for something that actually Matters makes sense
What I like about this is it indicates that, despite the fact he seems like the type to lie about knowing famous people, Ziggy IS in fact telling the truth and he's friends with Ernest Hemingway, which might be the funniest possible thing here.
Imagine a Sierra game based on _MANOS: The Hands of Fate_
For me, the MST3K mantra has always been synonymous with "That's enough fun for one day." Why stop now when we can keep going?
2:47:28 acting like our brains didnt delete this riddle the 2nd u switched topics lmfao
42:49 Lo Phat being fake Chinese makes the banner behind him funnier. It looks like jiberish characters similar to other fake Chinese I've seen from the time like he didn't know how to write it.
Mandarin customers: "must be Cantonese?"
Cantonese customers: "must be Mandarin?"
Or
Chinese customers: "poor guy, he must be illiterate"
his 'advisor' told him it translates to "Strength Through Peace; Peace Through Strength"...
...but GoogleTranslate says 'This Shop Is Owned By A Sucker'...
@feitmeBeing born in China and illiterate in Chinese, which would be written the same regardless of dialect, was common. Chinese was/is so difficult to be literate in, the Koreans invented hangul.
So, coming off as illiterate would be uncharacteristically authentic!
I didn't mention it because I wanted to save the reveal for later. But if you examine the symbols, the narrator says: "They're not really Chinese characters. Lo Fat displays them to give himself an aura of authenticity... since he was actually born in Newark, New Jersey."
@nonamenoname1133 thats even funnier 🤣 its easy to forget how fortunate we are to live in an era where literacy is widely available. Time for a deep-dive on how illiteracy affected the cultural preservation of people who moved outside of their mother countries.
I feel like this game deserves a proper remake thst keeps its artstyle but cleans up all its issues. This is such an interesting game and its such a shame that theres so many issues
Crimson Diamond is taking a lot from the first Laura Bow game
@Fronzel41 while that kind of action should be lauded, id like to see a remake specifically of *this game* as I think it has so much more potential wasted over so many gaps and pitfalls
I agree! Though, they would have to remove all the racial stereotyping (LOOKING AT YOU, LO FAT) or at least refine them so they aren't nearly as distasteful. This I don't inherently have a problem with, but I know there will be old fans of this game who think that the stereotypes are PIVOTAL to the game.
@joshuawiener5003 exactly! Keep the pixel style remove the stereotyping, add some more detail and clean up the mechanics and this would be a delightful mystery thriller. Though the adjustments needed to the plot might throw people off.
3:39:56 Olympia cannot stop winning
The crazy roller coaster of requirements and scenes in this game makes me think a lot of this game was cut or re-worked and they where running out of time to ship the game so they just stitched what they had together
This has to be it, along with something I have much experience with: a huge chalkboard with many smudgy erase marks, and a notebook so worn the pages are falling out. So many people must have worked on this, it's no wonder all the details didn't add up. "Wait where can we slot in finding the pocketwatch?" "Yeah O'Riley takes the dagger so..." It's an ambitious and enormously complicated game. Feels like only a couple people had all the details and the larger team got conflicting pieces to work on.
The virgin Ryan O'Riley:
-Is completely lax about doing his job and would rather eat and drink on duty.
-His stereotype has no actual importance to the story.
-Takes bribes.
-Murders Yvette out of jealousy that she sleeps with other people (seriously, her body count is higher than his).
-Kills a ton of people just to get away with a dagger so unimportant almost nobody even recognizes it in front of them.
-His best ending has him get caught by Crodfoller anyway after barely getting to retire.
-Is a cop.
The chad Wolf Heimlich:
-Takes his job seriously despite a mixed track record, to the point he'd rather die than accept failure.
-His stereotype has actual backstory (in one random conversation he'll reveal his mother's an artist whose paintings were stolen from another museum, implying his overly-serious demeanor and burning hatred of thieves stem from a desire to prevent it from happening again).
-Would NEVER take a bribe.
-Doesn't care who Olympia sees in her spare time, remains loyal to her, and even indulges her gore/death fetish to make her happy.
-Never actually hurts anyone despite his many threats, and would only do so to keep the museum and its artifacts safe.
-His best ending has him keep his job and start a happy family with the woman of his dreams.
-Is not a cop, just chief of security.
When your body count is bigger than the actual serial killer of the story 😭
@chunta957 If your lover turns out to be a spree killer, might as well pull the biggest flex you can on the way out.
-Is a cop
-Is not a cop
We can tell your elbow is the widest part of your arm.
@kman9884?
ehhh, yikess, I know it's a joke but he technically murders Yvette because she was constantly cheating, wasn't she? Girl lied and called everyone her lover. She already knew what O'Riley was and continued her affairs.
Love olympia's dialog when you show her the snake oil. 2:01:02 she smells it once and immedently decides she need to go plow Yvette immediately
Is no one questioning the ethics of displaying so many of the murder victims in the museum during one of the endings??? I feel like no one is reacting to that lol I mean, it was the 20s but STILL
It is weird, but I think it's a mix of the game being macabre with its humor and also having a dig at the 1920s and how cavalier some things could be (at least, in the same way a lot of the stereotypes are in the game).
15:05 I like that corned beef, specifically cured to be preserved for long durations, is being lauded as being "so fresh"
It's still better when it's fresh
As something of a corned beef aficionado, I can also confirm that advertising the leanest corned beef in the city is legitimately insane behavior. "This corned beef is-a cracker dry, lady."
@cube-drone"driest sammich in the city that ain't crackers on toast."
I don't get something. Can she eat the sandwich or not? I've heard people claim it's possible and softlocks the game.
@thenobody2024urban legend
"You've cracked the case" is absolutely bananas. That had people in the room while I'm watching this bust up laughing with only the barest knowledge of what's going on. 11/10 work Sierra.
3:21:47 two things: 1) I thought "fencing meeting" was code for Big Al calling a hit, and 2) barring that, my brain went to the sport of fencing rather than fence installation
I thought it was code for a hook up at first😭
Fencing is also the term for selling stolen property. Hence a thief would look for a good Fence to sell their loot.
@mikewazowski3303VALID
I'm sorry OneShortEye, my parents said I wasn't allowed to comment about anything.
Im sorry Fruckert, my parents said I wasn't allowed to reply to this comment.
I’m sorry @RyanBrockscronce, my parents said I wasn’t allowed to comment on those commenting in response to @fruckert.
Wow, y’all are being so respectful, lemme go tell your parents how y’all are just sitting down and not commenting.
@RyanBrockscronce I'm sorry Darkspecterness88, my parents said i'm not allowed to do anything.
@DwanTheBaptistwhat does that have to do with anything?
Steve is such a funny fucking love interest. He is entirely empty headed. No thoughts. Constantly dragged around by women, a damsel in distress that dies if he stubs his toe. Big fan of cheese. Aggressively deep and monotone voice, completely lacking in emotion or passion, despite proclaiming his love for our protagonist.