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The Dagger Of Amon Ra |
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Studio: |
Sierra
On-Line |
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Designer(s): |
Bruce
J. Balfour / Roberta Williams |
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Part of series: |
Laura
Bow Mysteries |
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Release: |
1992; 1993 (CD version) |
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Main credits: |
Designers/Writers: Josh Mandel, Bruce J. Balfour, Andy Hoyos Programming: Brian K. Hughes |
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Useful links: |
Playthrough:
Complete
Playlist Parts 1-10 (620 mins.) |
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Up
until 1992, all of Sierra’s franchises had remained the exclusive
brainchildren of their respective parents. Roberta Williams worked on King’s Quest; Mark Crowe and Scott
Murphy continued to humiliate Space
Quest’s Roger Wilco in more ways than the galaxy ever thought possible;
Al Lowe kept digging into the bottomless pit of dirty jokes for Leisure Suit Larry. Yet as the company
continued to expand, making a bumpy, but ultimately successful transition
into the age of point-and-click, the basic principle of «one person, one big
idea» began to wane. With more and more people added to the staff, Sierra was
able to simultaneously work on numerous projects — way more than the original
veteran creators could handle — and this meant finally starting to detach
franchises from their «auteurs» and view them rather as the collective
property of the company. As was common in the Sierra family, any such new
development had to be centered on the Holy Mother — Roberta Williams — and it
was her who willingly sacrificed her youngest daughter, Laura Bow, for the
greater good of the firm. Although credited as «creative consultant» for The Dagger Of Amon Ra — the second and
last game in the Laura Bow Mystery
series — this was probably just a polite way of reminding us who had invented
the character in the first place. I honestly have no idea what sort of
«creative consultations» the game’s designers would be running to get from
their boss — 1920s hat fashions? (I don’t think Roberta was ever into that angle). Anyway,
the two most important names in the creation of The Dagger Of Amon Ra were Bruce Balfour, a mystery and sci-fi
writer and game designer with a bunch of poorly known strategy and adventure
titles behind his belt; and Josh Mandel, who had already been with Sierra for
a couple years, working various odd jobs from producing to voice acting to a
little writing. Balfour was in overall charge of the project and supplied
much of its «mystery» angle; however, most of the actual writing for the game
came from Mandel, who was ultimately responsible for the main spirit of The Dagger — besides, Balfour did not
last long at Sierra, whereas Mandel, having cut some serious new teeth on the
game, would go on to become one of the most important people at Sierra for
the rest of its duration. Thus, The
Dagger Of Amon Ra remains largely associated with Mandel, the guy to put
his nose inside almost every pie baked for almost every Sierra franchise in
the 1990s. Somewhat
predictably, since it would be difficult to find two game designers and
writers with more differing approaches to their work than Roberta Williams
and Josh Mandel, The Dagger Of Amon Ra
feels like it owes almost nothing to its direct predecessor, The Colonel’s Bequest, other than the
name of its protagonist — oh, and the fact that this is another murder
mystery where the protagonist finds herself in an enclosed, inescapable space
with murder victims dropping around her faster than the actual screen loading
times. The biggest technical difference is that the game was finally a talkie
(at least, in its final CD-ROM version from 1993; the original floppy disk
version from 1992 carried only text messages) — and thus, a perfect
playground for Josh Mandel to test out his own brand of witty humor. Where The Colonel’s Bequest excelled mainly
in terms of «sensual» atmosphere, The
Dagger Of Amon Ra would place a far stronger emphasis on the snarky,
sarcastic, post-modern intellectual side of things — something about as far
removed from Roberta Williams’ proverbially «housewife» approach to
game-making as possible. Admirably, Roberta herself endured and even
encouraged this, almost as if she were sending away her farm-bred girl to
Harvard University. It
is little wonder, though, that The
Dagger Of Amon Ra managed to assemble itself quite a cult following over
the years: even a cursory investigation of gaming forums, YouTube channels,
etc., shows that memories of it are still going strong, and that far more
people continue to have it on their minds than there are veteran fans of The Colonel’s Bequest. Of course, to a
large degree this is because the first game is older (in 1989, there were
still a whole lot fewer gamers around than in 1992-93) and has no voice
acting; but an equally significant reason is that Sierra’s Mandel-style games
typically appeal to the same kind of tongue-in-cheek,
sarcasm-over-sentimentality college geeks who, over the years, have succeeded
in making «LucasArts» sound so much cooler than «Sierra». Ironically, the
game still inherits a large number of flaws from its predecessor — to the
point of still being more of a «multimedia experience» than a proper «game» —
but the new-found slickness of its design and sharpness of its verbal humor
masks these flaws much more successfully. |
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Content evaluation |
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For Laura Bow’s second adventure, Balfour and Mandel decided to
bring the Southern lady a little closer to home; the Queens-born Josh Mandel
probably did not feel too comfortable about setting the action back up in
Louisiana, and thus it is that at the beginning of The Dagger Of Amon Ra, we see our heroine, having graduated from
Tulane, board a train for New York, where, in an age of new-found
emancipation for women, she is going to try and find herself a job with one
of the city’s prominent newspapers.
Largely because of a bit of a pull that her father has on the editor, she is
hired for a brief probation period, during which she has to cover and help
investigate the theft of a precious Egyptian dagger from the prestigious
Leyendecker Museum (loosely based on the Museum of Natural History). Like
its predecessor, The Dagger Of Amon Ra
is structured into several «Acts», within each of which you have to complete
a certain set of time-advancing actions in order to progress to the next
stage (and if you procrastinate or get stuck, some of these events are going
to take place even without you involved; the game constantly has the clock
running). However, this time around the world surrounding you is a bit more
of a sprawl — where The Colonel’s
Bequest immediately chained you to the Colonel’s mansion and plantation,
the entire first act of The Dagger Of
Amon Ra lets you freely roam around several locations in New York City,
using a cab to journey from one point to another, and it is not until the
second act of the game that you become fully confined to just one locked-in
environment (the Leyendecker). Admittedly,
the first act is not entirely disconnected from the rest of the game — you do
get to meet several important characters who shall be a constant presence in
the Museum as well, such as Detective Rian O’Riley, responsible for handling
the case of the missing dagger; «Ziggy», the ratty stool pigeon spending most
of his time around the local speakeasies; and the handsome stevedore Steve
Dorian (duh!) from the ship which had earlier transported the Egyptian
cultural artifacts to the US. Through those guys and other encounters, you
can gather some preliminary information on the case before the main course
starts at the Museum. However, in
general, I do believe, the chief purpose of the first act is to establish
the motif of «Southern Girl Makes Good In The Big Apple» — and recreate the
vibrant atmosphere of New York in the 1920s, ever so slightly warped with a
touch of sarcastic humor and the inescapable post-modern attitude. The
scene is a little messy at first, in that the game does not quite understand
if it wants to be a «loss of innocence» story (it certainly begins as one,
with Laura getting mugged as soon as she gets off the train to New York), a
straightforward detective story (which it reverts to as soon as you ask
anybody a pertinent question), or just a collection of humorous remarks on
the flaws and virtues of ordinary New Yorkers in the Jazz Age. Then again,
why should it necessarily be only one out of three? Granted, the «loss of innocence»
thing quickly dissipates, as Laura’s personality becomes one-sidedly
concentrated on the angle of «strong, stubborn girl making her way through a
world of male chauvinists»; and the flaws and virtues of ordinary New Yorkers
are left behind in the dust once we make the transition to Act II, after
which Laura almost never gets the chance to revisit those ordinary New
Yorkers again. (There’s a little bit of socially conscious banter centered
around Ernie Leach, the Museum’s African-American caretaker and a veteran of
World War I, but it’s short and most people will miss it anyway because it’s
quite a pain in the ass to catch Ernie in a talkative state). Sooner or
later, everything fades away, fizzles out, and makes way for the murder
mystery. Which
is not too good, because, frankly, the murder mystery sucks. At the very least, in terms of plot twists, intrigue, and
denouement it is in no way an improvement on the mystery of The Colonel’s Bequest. There are just
too many superfluous twists, too many plot holes, too many actions that do
not make any sense — and I do realize that this is not so much a serious
murder mystery as a parody on a murder mystery, but even parodies have to
have their inner logic, and this particular one places way too much emphasis
on «surprise» and «shock value» to have enough left for reason and logic. The
plot is certainly more complex than last time around — for instance, the
killer is ultimately revealed to have been motivated by more than one motive
in his endless rampage — but this is one case where extra complexity only
serves to ruin the mood. We
may at least be thankful to the writers for getting rid of the strangest plot
circumstance of the first game — namely, that throughout the game Laura Bow
is the only person to ever be aware that a series of murders is going on —
but it’s not as if they are doing a great job with it: this time, even when
some of the other NPCs do learn
that a murder has been committed, all they do is take notice, commend Laura
for a job well done, then continue to roam around the Museum as if being
locked up in a confined space with a serial killer running around is just one
of the many uncomfortable perks of life you’re supposed to walk your way
through. Yeah, sure, I’d love to get out of here and all, but... the front
door is locked, and the service guy has lost the key, so pardon me while I
just roam around all these corridors some more while the killer is taking
their time to decide whom to bump off next and in which particularly gruesome
way. Unsurprisingly,
while much of the dialog in the game — particularly in its first Act — is
sharp, witty, and hilarious, this only
concerns those lines which have the least of all to do with the mystery plot.
By contrast, a typical detective-related dialog runs something like this: The
Countess:
What are YOU doing here? Laura: I just happened to be hiding behind the tapestry. The
Countess: You’re LYING! Laura: How could you tell? The
Countess: Nobody just happens to
HIDE behind a museum tapestry! Laura: And nobody
just walks around a museum late at night with paintings under their arms. The
Countess:
Paintings? Oh, you mean THESE
paintings? Ah...I just found them laying around on the FLOOR...and I picked
them up so nobody would STEP on them! Laura: I don’t think so. The
Countess:
You don’t think so? Are you ACCUSING me
of something, you SILLY girl? Laura: What do you think? The
Countess:
I think you’re a RUDE girl who needs to
learn some MANNERS. The nerve... going around ACCUSING people of stealing
paintings! Laura: Did I say anything about you stealing them? The
Countess:
Well...of COURSE you did! Don’t try to
TRICK me, girl. I've got more tricks than you have BRAIN CELLS! I
only hope it wasn’t Josh Mandel who wrote this kind of tripe and forced the
poor voice actors to record it, but nothing could really be excluded. I, for
one, much prefer dialog like [Laura] "What do you think of New York, Mr. Carter? Isn’t it exciting?"
— [Dr. Pippin Carter] "I hate it.
It’s crowded, it’s noisy, and you Americans have no concept of how the class
system is supposed to work. You go around treating each other like equals,
which I find very distasteful." Or: [Dr. Olympia Miklos] "You are wise to carry a magnifier, my
dear. You miss so many of the good things if you don’t look close enough.
Imagine never seeing pores, or lice, or fungus spores!" Sure, this
has nothing to do with the plot as such, but really, The Dagger Of Amon Ra is all about its characters, and it is here, certainly not in the ugly
twisted contortions of the plot, where the game really stands head and
shoulders above its comparatively bland predecessor. Of
course, all these characters are every bit as stereotypical and
clichéd — I think Balfour and Mandel specifically made a point of them
being clichéd, so as to keep strictly in line with the first game — but
the difference is that now they talk funny, and sometimes they talk funny and smart at the same time. The new
French sexy tart, Yvette Delacroix, gets ten times as many lines as did Fifi,
the French maid, in The Colonel’s
Bequest, and you get to be both disgusted at her character and feel some actual pity for her
plight as her story unfolds from its uncouth beginnings to its gruesome
conclusion. The «aristocrats» are all comically snobby, yet even the above-mentioned
Dr. Pippin Carter (obviously named after and loosely based upon Howard
Carter, the discoverer of Tutankhamun’s Tomb) occasionally gets the chance to
deliver a snarky, insightful observation on life that’s worth mulling over.
The Museum’s Security Chief, Wolf Heimlich, is perhaps the single most
over-the-top parody of a classic Imperial German militarist ever designed for
a video game — or, at least, should be somewhere in those ranks ("NEFFER point a veapon at me, Fraulein Bow!
My highly trained reflexes could kill you in three seconds if I vanted to!
THREE SECONDS!"). Only Laura’s potential love interest, the
stevedore Steve Dorian, is about as boring as a splash of paint on the wall —
but I suppose that was at least partly intentional as well, as there was
probably some deep meaning implied in the fact of Laura getting the hots for
the single least explicitly «interesting» member of the party. There
is definitely a bit of a social angle to the game as well: much of the plot
revolves around the idea of the Dagger of Amon Ra unscrupulously smuggled out
of its native country (Egypt), and of certain individuals’ brave
anti-colonial struggle to restitute it. That angle is clearly handled with a
bit too much humor, crudeness, and political insensitiveness to be acceptable
for today’s mainstream values — but in the game’s defense, let it be said
that Mandel and Co. apply pretty much the same parodic standards to each and
every one of their characters, be it a snub-nosed, elitist British
archaeologist with clear ideas on racial superiority, or a snub-nosed,
elitist, European-educated Egyptian bourgeois with equally clear ideas on a
different kind of racial superiority. The game lets you in on the eternal
debate about the ruthlessness of British and American colonialism, but
declines from taking sides — which is, perhaps, for the best. The Dagger Of Amon Ra’s main purpose
is for you to have fun, not raise your level of awareness; but if you do want to profit from the sensitive
topics it lightly touches upon in order to raise that level, you are most
certainly welcome to try. The
game does go somewhat over the top in its anachronistic depiction of Egyptian
neo-paganism (today usually known as «Kemetism»), presenting all
(both) of its Egyptian characters as comically over-the-top
reconstructionists of the cult of Amon Ra at a time when genuine «Pharaohism»
was typical of a small freakish minority, as opposed to the more generally
Arabic- and Islamic-minded independence movement. It is clear that Mandel and
Co. made quite a bit of research into Egyptian mythology and history while
writing their dialog for the game, but much of that research seems to have
been superficial — to the extent that it is hard for me to tell, when one of
the characters says stuff like "I
do not understand your meaning. Perhaps it is the English... it is such a
curious language... not as clear as Egyptian", if that line is
supposed to be taken seriously or tongue-in-cheek, considering that «Dr.
Ptasheptut Smith»’s native language could only have been Arabic, and that
even if he did go to the trouble of
learning to speak Ancient Egyptian, he would have had serious trouble
perceiving it as «clear». Then
again, Mandel’s writing style is always complex: over and over again, real
and accurate information on the reality of Ancient Egypt is interspersed with
intentional humorous nonsense and gibberish, mixing admiration for the
culture with merciless lampooning, so I would rather honestly refrain from
pronouncing any strong judgement on anything that might superficially feel
«ignorant» or «offensive» in this game, and just relax and enjoy the comedy
instead. In
any case, let us just mark the inescapable fact that the dialog — at least in
those parts where it does not explicitly concern the main storyline of the
game — is a huge improvement over The
Colonel’s Bequest; that the plot of the game, on the whole, makes even
less sense than it used to; and that, once again, it really doesn’t matter as
long as you get your laughs, your atmosphere, and your «edutainment» value. |
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The puzzle system is where The
Dagger Of Amon Ra shows the most continuity with its predecessor. Just like The Colonel’s Bequest, it dumps Sierra’s classic point system in
favor of certain sets of actions you need to perform in order to unlock the
«good» ending of the game (one in which Laura manages to stay alive, find the
Dagger, and properly identify the murderer). These actions involve getting
useful information from the surrounding NPCs, collecting a large bunch of
potential evidence from crime scenes, and gathering various visual clues all
over the museum. However, unlike The
Colonel’s Bequest, you do not get any actual «rankings» — what you have
to do at the end is be able to correctly answer a number of questions and own
a certain amount of corroborating evidence in your possession; failing this,
Laura may meet a grim end, and the Dagger may never return to its rightful
owners. (The «bad ending» of the game is still well worth getting, though —
just about every single character meets a different fate due to Laura’s
blunders!). As
before, this means that you can essentially all but sleepwalk your way
through the game, for instance, spending most of your playing hours just
admiring the various exhibits in the museum while time slowly marches on and
people get murdered one after another without Laura paying any attention
whatsoever. A much larger part of the action this time is tied to specific
time windows — by failing to be in the right place at the right time, you can
miss some crucial events or some useful chances to extract information from
people when catching them red-handed. This is, however, not a problem, since
(a) most of the time, the blame is on the player for failing to properly
analyze a clue or to explore each area as thoroughly as possible once the
game moves into the next «Act»; (b) in this way, it adds to the replayability
factor, as there almost inevitably will be interesting, and sometimes funny,
things that you will have missed on your first playthrough. You do have to
work quite hard to be on the very top of your game — and there is nothing
wrong about not being pampered all the way through. What
is a problem is that the lack of a
point system, just as it did in The
Colonel’s Bequest, does not properly allow you to track your progress.
You can talk to almost every character on a number of subjects, and this time
around, their answers will be more informative, more diverse, and/or more
hilarious than they used to be — but you have no way of knowing which of the
answers were «formally» useful to you and which ones were just decorative,
and this is particularly frustrating given the inconvenience of the dialog
interface: every time you have to ask somebody about something, you have to
pull out your notebook, browse to the appropriate topic, click on it, read
the character’s answer, and then repeat the process, which is thus quite
time-consuming compared to the more standard dialog trees to which we are
used in modern adventure and RPG games. So, even if talking to people is
typically more productive and entertaining this time around, it actually
becomes even more of a chore than it used to be. In terms of actual «puzzles», the game is a bit more
challenging than Bequest, at least
in its first «Act», where Laura has to come up with various strategies in
order to achieve her objectives — the most difficult of these involving
getting herself into her first speakeasy and finding an official dress for
the reception at the Museum. They are not too
difficult, though, as long as you remember to thoroughly explore your
environments and regularly hop from one place to another, as people and
objects sometimes change places after you have completed certain other
actions. Personally, I don’t remember getting stuck for a long period of time
anywhere — I do remember missing
stuff, though, and even today am not 100% sure that I have actually uncovered
every secret conversation or every individual clue in the game
(perhaps I’m just too lazy to read through the entire transcript of the game
which is now, of course, easily available on the Web). In classic old school Sierra fashion, there are some
dead ends in the game — all of which come to haunt you for its last «Act»,
when the game suddenly turns from a suspenseful, but rather leisurely and
relaxed process of detective exploration into a frenetic cat-and-mouse chase
scene. In The Colonel’s Bequest, the
murderer always manifested oneself as an unseen, hidden presence, watching
you from the shadows, liable to make an unexpected move every now and then
but never ever stepping out into the open. In The Dagger Of Amon Ra, the last section of the game becomes an
exercise in survival horror, where you have to take quick decisions
concerning your own safety — and, unfortunately, some of these decisions depend on your possession or lack of
objects that may have been collected earlier in the game; if they are not in
your pockets by now, tough luck as you are going to die in one of the
inventive half-dozen ways of dying. At least a couple of these are very absurd and moon-logical, most
importantly the one bit where you have to offer your temporarily handicapped
boyfriend one of your useful finds in order to prevent him from stepping on a
nail and dying (!). Needless to say, some of those sequences could have been
designed a little better. But I wouldn’t call these decisions too catastrophical. In fact, the game really only gets seriously bad — as opposed to «tolerable» — in
its challenges at the very end, when you are supposed to identify all the
murderers and match the corresponding motives from a large, and largely
useless, menu of choices during the Coroner’s inquest. The problem there, in
addition to you never knowing which particular objects you have to be in
possession of in order to corroborate your answers, is that the menu options
are quite ambiguous, particularly in the «Match a motive» part, and even if
you have managed to reconstruct the
chain of events reasonably well in your mind, you may easily check the
«wrong» box despite the answer being quite acceptable (e.g. the difference
between «Fear», «Jealousy», «Thrill», or «Revenge» as a motive is not always
clearly understood). The entire inquest just happens to be very poorly
designed, and I think that Balfour and Mandel acknowledged as much in some
later interviews on the game. From this point of view, the final scoring in The Colonel’s Bequest, where the AI
simply evaluated your performance on its own, was actually superior — at
least you had no chance to fuck things up at the end due to poor designer
work after doing everything right throughout the game. In other words, the chief flaw of The Dagger Of Amon Ra is the one it
shares with its predecessor, despite being designed by an entirely new crew:
both Laura Bow games pretty much suck as «detective» games. You have to sweat
the shirt off your back to discover every clue — only to learn at the end of
the game that you didn’t really need half of them and cannot put the other
half to truly good use. You have no way of influencing the chain of events;
and many of your conclusions will still be based on intuition rather than
strict, logically flawless deduction. The back story that you uncover will be
completely and utterly absurd, rife with plot holes and stupid senseless
crimes committed by people who are supposed to be cunning criminals. In a
way, The Dagger Of Amon Ra feels
even more like a parody on an actual detective story than Roberta Williams’
take on the genre — hers was, at the very least, a fairly simple tale where
the characters’ motives were clearly defined. Here, the level of absurdity
totally blows the roof off the house — and the only salvation is that, in all
honesty, I have never ever in my mind really thought of The Dagger Of Amon Ra as a «detective» game. Instead, all of its
charm — maybe even all of its genius
— lies in a completely different dimension. |
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Both the first and the second Laura Bow games mainly get you
through the «feels» — and this is where the difference between a Roberta
Williams game and a Josh Mandel game really makes itself palpable. The Colonel’s Bequest, as I wrote
earlier, based its feels largely on a conflict between the light and the
dark, the old and the new, the progressive present and the conservative past
— the game loved its references to the Jazz Age not by themselves, but in
contrast to the 19th century ghosts of the old plantation house. It was
really all about chillin’ to a Scott Joplin rag in the fancy billiard room of
the house, then stepping out into the creepy darkness of the swamp and
getting swallowed by an alligator, just to be reminded that Mother Nature does
not think all that much of human progress in the industrial era. The Dagger Of
Amon Ra still has some of that «contrastive» spirit, but since the entire game
takes part in the Big City, there is hardly any space here to go on with the
mystical tug of anti-civilizational forces. There is enough space, though, to
offer the player two different atmospheric environments — which do not enter
into mutual conflict all that much, since they are essentially separated from
each other by the chronological line between «Act I» and the rest of the
game. In fact, emotion-wise it’s almost as if you were offered two completely
different games: «Southern Girl Arrives In New York City» and «Gee But The
Museum Is A Creepy Place». There is a bit of continuity between the two, but
ultimately it’s rather hard and strenuous to imagine a smoothly running,
logical plan that would derive the second one from the first. Which is not a
tragedy — in a way, it’s like you’re getting two separate stories for the
same amount of cash. Of these two stories, my personal favorite is
unquestionably the first one. I love New York, Josh Mandel loves New York,
and I admire Josh Mandel’s lightweight, satirical, but loving portrayal of
New York in one of the most fascinating and exciting periods of its
existence. We don’t get to see too much of it, but we do get to explore
several different locations — the docks, the police station, the Chinese
laundry, the newspaper office, the speakeasy — each of which has a little
spirit, reflected in the beautiful art, the appropriate music, and in
Mandel’s snappy dialog. As you travel back and forth between these locations
in the exact same grimy taxi cab, you are constantly reminded of the day and
age you have been transported to (e.g. Rocco, the taxi driver: «Be careful of the sticky spot on that
seat! I’m always taking that 6-year old Asimov kid over to his parents’ candy
store in Brooklyn. He likes to read science fiction pulps and lick lollipops
in the back seat. Intelligent kid, but kind of messy» — amusingly, this
is a fairly historically accurate depiction) — and overall, what with all the
random NPCs walking about and the occasional short dialogs you can have with
accidental bystanders, this version of New York City is about as alive as it
could be in a 1992 adventure game. As in The
Colonel’s Bequest, most of the people around you remain stereotypical;
the difference is that Mandel provides them with individual personalities as
well, successfully mixing tropes and clichés with sarcasm and wit.
Some people today might cringe, for instance, at the allegedly «racist»
depiction of Lo Fat, the owner of the Chinese laundry (starting with his very
name, which I personally think is hilarious), but stick around his laundry
long enough and you clearly get to understand that the funny-talkin’
mock-Chinese NPC is actively selling his stereotypical Fu Manchu image to his
loyal customers as part of a wickedly cunning commercial strategy. (Try to
look at the «Chinese» characters behind Lo Fat’s back and you get a brutally
honest reply: «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»). The New York around Laura is full of such characters
— brimming with various aspects of life, from street wisdom to snarky humor. The
kids outside Lo Fat’s laundry, getting busy incinerating ants with a magnifying
glass, represent the city’s spirit of survival («It’s a nice day, isn’t it?» – «I dunno...» – «Well, there’s not a
cloud in the sky and the sun is shining!» – «I guess. Makes the ants light
quicker, that’s for sure»). The Irish sergeant at the police desk (who
sometimes behaves as if he were really Scottish) is the classic «good-natured
cop suffering from bureaucratic pressure». The lesbian flapper in the back
room of the speakeasy (voiced by Sierra’s creative genius Jane Jensen, no
less) reminds us of the exciting «moral relaxation» of the decade.
Seriousness, humor, sarcasm, and absurdity produce a mix that feels more
influenced by the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton than F. Scott
Fitzgerald or Virginia Woolf, and provides us with one of the funniest and wittiest love letters to the old
(but once very, very young) spirit of New York in a video game. Skip ahead to «Act II», though, and all of that is
largely gone. As Laura finds herself swallowed up by the vast expanse of the
Leyendecker Museum, not to be released until the very end of the game, by
which time she has lost all agency anyway, she becomes locked out of the
semi-realistic, semi-parodic New York and enters a whole new dimension — one
in which all of the surrounding characters suddenly become small and
insignificant next to the sprawling and looming heritage of human and natural
history. The Leyendecker Museum hosts pretty much everything, from mammoth
and dinosaur fossils to Renaissance paintings to medieval armour to enormous
Ancient Egyptian exhibits — it’s really like the Metropolitan and the AMNH
all in one — and, as befits a classic horror story, it behaves as a huge,
autonomous organism with a life all its own, so much so that it actually
seems futile to look for the murderer, when it is clear that the entire
series of murders has been orchestrated by the Museum itself. With dead
bodies trapped inside sarcophagi, cast in plaster like ancient Greek statues,
dismembered in order to look like exhibits in the Anthropological section, or
implaed on Mastodon tusks for authentic reproduction, it is once again as if
the ghosts of past history have rallied themselves against their foolish,
greedy, and brainless descendants. To me, though, this second part is a bit of a
letdown, possibly because it is a bit too
sprawling. Unlike the plantation house and environment in The Colonel’s Bequest, the Leyendecker
Museum is too large and disjointed. It is confusing and difficult to
navigate; exhibits seem to be arranged completely randomly, with dinosaur
fossils next to medieval tapestries and medieval tapestries two feet away
from Egyptian mummies. Strangely, the game also places a huge emphasis on
«mock-edutainment»: most of the exhibits are accompanied with detailed
descriptions, some of which are quite accurate (e.g. information on all the
1st century Roman emperors when you look at their busts in the atrium) and
others are there just for the joke (e.g. the silly stories about the
Hottentot and «Poppentart» tribes in Dr. Carrington’s office). I fully
appreciate the idea — after all, everybody with a good IQ should be able to
distinguish between truth and fiction in these depictions on their own — but,
unfortunately, all the humor also serves to detract from the creepiness /
spookiness of the murders. Perhaps that was the gist of it — not let the
player be creeped out by all the seemingly random murders by making the whole
situation overtly grotesque, like a set of Mortal Kombat fatalities — but this is not an ideal combination
of humor and horror. (Something like Gabriel
Knight would manage this mix a lot more successfully). Where the first act of the game clearly stated I
LOVE NYC, the rest of it hardly makes any clear statements at all. For sure,
it’s got some great jokes, some cool red herrings, and some impressive signs
of dedication — like the medieval armour exhibit, where, for, like, no reason at all, you can just hang
out for about thirty minutes, reading all the detailed descriptions of
various helmets, cuirasses, and banners, trying to sort the historical facts
from the pseudo-historical jokes. As a collection of all sorts of random
jokes, witticisms, and unpredictable twists, the Museum sequence is great;
but it is nowhere near as coherent and reasonable as Laura Bow’s adventure in
The Colonel’s Bequest. You
generally live here in anticipation of seeing what other crazy twist of fate awaits you behind your next door — it’s
more of an Alice In Wonderland vignette-style adventure than a
Gothic-influenced murder mystery. The only thing missing, really, is a potion
bottle that says DRINK ME and lets Laura Bow squeeze through the keyhole of
her next locked door. (Those huge alcohol vats in the basement which even
have entrapped unicorns and King Graham itself stored there take us as close
to that reality as possible, though — I know these things are really designed
as Easter eggs, but they still fit in rather naturally with the surrealism of
the environment). When the final act comes along and the environment
changes from potentially dangerous to a real active threat, the effect is not
nearly as strong as it would eventually be in Roberta’s Phantasmagoria — precisely because the game has been way too
funny for most of its duration in order for us to begin truly fearing for our
life at this point. Oh, some Grim Reaper clown with a mace just clubbed Laura
to death in the hallway? Well, didn’t we just read «Death is a natural part of life, so when your time comes, it’s best
to accept it and go out gracefully» on a bottle of snake oil? It’s a
little inconvenient, sure, that all these clubbings get in our way of beating
the game before bedtime, but other than that, it still kinda feels like Monty
Python. It doesn’t help, either, that when you run into the sinister Cult of
Amon Ra in your attempt to escape from the murderer, the cultists are heard
to be chanting "RA RA AMON RA... RA RA SIS BOOM BAH...". You’ll die
of laughing before you get a chance to die of anything else. This is not to say that the entire time spent inside
the Leyendecker Museum is not enjoyable as such. It is simply skewed way too
heavily on the humorous side for a game that is formally a suspenseful murder
mystery — as opposed to something like Freddy
Pharkas, for instance, which also had a bit of a detective plot, but its
chief purpose was to be a video game equivalent of Blazing Saddles and the game never for one moment pretended that
it was something different. Meanwhile, The
Dagger Of Amon Ra relates to The
Colonel’s Bequest a bit like Dracula:
Dead And Loving It would relate to 1931’s Dracula, especially if it were advertised as the «true sequel» to
the 1931 movie. True, it totally annihilates the original game in terms of
quantity, quality, and depth of its dialog and characters — but does so at
the expense of completely mutating the original’s game genre and atmosphere.
And it is also not a very good thing that there is not a single moment,
whenever I’m playing it, when I am not
feeling a little sad about being taken out of the good old lovable New York
City and stuck into this weird out-of-time place with no connection to
reality whatsoever. That said, I do not want to complain too much, because even if Mandel’s
creative genius does seem a little misapplied in the game, it’s still genius.
Exploration in The Colonel’s Bequest
was merely okay — rather perfunctory and rarely rewarding, as the text was
usually laconic and bland and the game’s atmosphere was more due to sound and
visuals than words. Exploration in The
Dagger Of Amon Ra is tons of great fun, as pretty much every single object
either reveals a juicy bit of historical trivia or a joke (as a rule,
genuinely funny). Even if you are not scooping up a lot of murder-related
clues, you are still getting
actively rewarded for trying to look at or touch just about anything in plain
sight — or trying to talk to various NPCs about stuff like charcoal, carbon
paper, or an electric bulb in your possession. It’s not particularly
«atmospheric», but it keeps you on your toes and never lets the game slip
into boredom — particularly if you are playing the «talkie» CD version with
voice acting, the perks of which we shall get around to discussing fairly
soon. |
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Technical features |
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On
a purely visual level, The Dagger Of
Amon Ra reflects Sierra’s general standards of quality, but I wouldn’t
call the game exceptionally stunning or unique. Naturally, the main interest
here should be directed towards «Act I» and its depiction of New York — both
the exteriors and interiors of which look credible, but not particularly rich
in detail, almost as if the artists responsible were on a strictly regulated
time basis. The hand-painted backgrounds are stylish, yet somewhat
perfunctory, and you probably won’t be spending too much time pausing your
game just to take in the scenery. Some interiors are just downright
disappointing — like the speakeasy, for instance, which looks more like a
quickly put together imitation for some high school theater play rather than
a properly authentic recreation of a hustlin’ and bustlin’ environment.
Overall, Dagger’s New York looks
just a little... frugal, perhaps, next to what we usually think about the Big
Apple in the 1920s. Nice and colorful, but I think it’s safe to say that it
comes more alive in this game through text (and speech) than visual
impressions. The
same, slightly Spartan, approach is chosen for most of the interiors in the
Museum, but in this instance, the artistic approach works better — for one
thing, the emphasis is on showing the Museum off as a generally cold,
inhospitable place, not particularly welcome for its guests; for another,
cluttering the Museum too much
would have seriously inconvenienced the gameplay, much of which is focused on
exploring every nook and cranny. On the other hand, the visual contrast
between all of the Museum’s different locations — the dinosaur exhibits, the
Egyptian room, the Old Masters’ gallery, the medieval armor hall — is
presented quite sharply, emphasizing the somewhat surreal and thoroughly
unpredictable nature of this weird place you’re in, disjointed as it is from
any sense of reality, even a museum-related one. When
it comes to people and animations, most of the character sprites reflect
Sierra’s typical early 1990s ugliness — and it does not help that, in an
attempt to make at least a slight approximation to 3D, sprites get
progressively bigger or smaller depending on their proximity to the player;
«bigger», in this particular case, just means «more pixelated». It’s even
worse because the sprites contrast in such an ugly manner with the close-up
portraits of the characters, which, on the other hand, represent the highest
level of Sierra art to that particular date — all the faces are realistically
painted, skilfully animated, and let you know a whole lot more about the
personalities behind them than the perfunctory sprites. Perhaps there is not
quite enough continuity in Laura Bow’s own image from the first game (where
she had a fairly «downhome» aura) to the second (where she is portrayed a bit
more like a stereotypical «Southern belle» type), but there’s nothing to
prevent us from thinking that she might have simply «upgraded» her class for
the important visit to New York City. Another
area where the game certainly improves on the first one is the amount and
quality of the close-ups — this time, for instance, you are able to see the
«gruesome» murders up close, with each body arranged in its own uniquely
macabre fashion and with clues available for visual inspection, not just
appearing as results of blindly typing in «search the body» or the like. All
these «fatalities», though certainly not of the Mortal Kombat variety (this is a family-friendly game, after
all!), nicely support the game’s dark humor theme and are sure to procure at
least some players of the young adult variety a few delicious nightmares.
(And they definitely succeed in making us understand the concept of «the Art
of murder» with their chilling closeup of Yvette Delacroix’s «arrangement»!). On
the whole, though, I think that pretty (or pretty gruesome) pictures will not
be the first thing people are going to remember about this game —
particularly if they have the full (CD-based) version of it, allowing to
complement the visuals with a full voice acting cast... which is probably the
most enticing and bizarre part of
the game’s technical aspects. |
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|
The original floppy disk version of the game from 1992, which I
vaguely remember I played first, did not have any voice acting, thus having
to rely exclusively on the music to set up the aural atmosphere; and, much
like the visuals, the music was really quite good, but not particularly
outstanding. Naturally, for the first «Act» principal composer Chris Braymen,
a Sierra veteran from the days of King’s
Quest V, wrote several tracks reflecting the spirit of the times: some are
distinctively New Orleanian (‘Laura’s Theme’, playing during her introduction
and reprised as a piano rag at the beginning of each new «Act»), while others
are decidedly more «urban» in nature, including the happy Charlestons and
luscious waltzes playing down at the speakeasy. Chinese-style music is
expectedly playing at Lo Fat’s; a grumbly military march expects you at the
police station; and a Scott Joplin-derived theme is chirping away in the
office of Sam Augustini, Laura’s newspaper boss. It’s all lightweight, but
fun; do not expect the full impact of something like The Sting, but do expect to get all the moods set up just right. Similarly,
at the Museum, when you are abruptly ushered out of your specific
time-and-place window and into a totally surreal and unpredictable environment
where entourages change almost a random, the music usually fits the setting —
there is a «mystical» Mid-Eastern theme floating through the Egyptian exhibit
room, for instance, while Laura’s general travels through the museum
corridors are accompanied with suspenseful incidental music, reminiscent of a
1950s or an early 1960s soundtrack to some thriller or noir. Individual NPCs
are sometimes provided with their own appropriate themes (Yvette Delacroix,
rather predictably, gets jazzy «strip club muzak» to represent her character);
and the soundtrack gets appropriately sped up and frenzied during the mad
chase scenes in the last «Act», though, due to limited budget and ambitions,
the music still remains somewhat cartoonish as compared to, for instance, the
nearly-movie-quality musical arrangements for Phantasmagoria several years later. At
some points, you’ll probably want to turn the music off, because the design
is not always perfect — the lengthy second «Act», for instance, which you
mostly spend hanging out in the huge Museum lobby, chatting up and
eavesdropping on the guests, is accompanied throughout by the same ‘Museum
Waltz’; by the time you’re through with the action, you’ll probably have it
ringing in your ears on a permanent basis something worse than do you believe in life after love. For
some reason, nobody came up with such obvious ideas as varying the soundtrack
for a single environment, or using the theme only as an introduction, or at
least setting up lengthy pauses in between the reiterations (as they would do
in a Shadow Of The Templars or a Baldur’s Gate game later). For
the 1993 CD release of the game, the music did not change much — but,
following in the footsteps of King’s
Quest V, the developers threw in a «mini-song» performed at the speakeasy,
a bit of novelty vaudeville entitled ‘I Want To Marry An Archaeologist’
which is quite hilarious but, unfortunately, not quite original, being
strongly based, both musically and lyrically, on Erika Eigen’s ‘I Want To Marry A
Lighthouse Keeper’, well known to every fan of A Clockwork Orange. It is not totally out of left field, though —
the song does remind players of the
walk-like-an-Egyptian «Tutmania» ruling over the Western world ever since
Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun’s Tomb in 1922, and its reflection
in all sides of life including popular song and dance. And it’s certainly
better that they used ‘Lighthouse Keeper’ as a base reference point, with its
already persistent 1920s atmosphere, than, say, trying to make a meta-spoof
on Steve Martin’s ‘King Tut’ or something equally obvious (though, as we have
already established, The Dagger Of Amon
Ra can be quite friendly to anachronisms, what with the RA RA SIS BOOM BAH thing and
everything). Much
more odd than the music, however, was the voice cast assembled for bringing
the world of Laura Bow as close to life as possible. In 1992, Sierra was as
of yet unaccustomed to getting professional actors to voice their games,
other than maybe an occasional guest star or two (like inviting Gary Owens as
general narrator for Space Quest IV);
and whatever budget the studio may
have had at the time was all targeted towards Roberta Williams’ main project,
King’s Quest VI. Thus, pretty much
everything had to be voiced by the Sierra staff itself, like they did for
previous games starting with King’s
Quest V in 1990 — the exception being that this time, the amount of
dialog to be recorded was simply enormous, the cast of characters so large
that multiple NPCs had to be voiced by the same «actors», and most of these
characters were supposed to be so clichéd and stereotypical that the
«actors» were pushed hard to «over-act», sometimes with hilarious and
sometimes with embarrassing results. In the end, you may like the acting or
you may hate it, but you’ll probably never forget it. First,
the good news: Leslie Wilson. A lowly staff member at Sierra (either the
receptionist or a proofreader and text editor, I honestly forget which), she
was drafted along with everybody else to do some voice work, and after she
managed to fake a properly sexy French accent for Yvette Delacroix, Balfour
offered her to take on the roles of both Laura (which required a Southern
accent, of course) and the game narrator, which required... the ability to
entertain and charm the player by reading aloud a lot of boring or humorous
text, ranging from «you see a street
lamp» to «death is a natural part
of life». Apparently, Leslie Wilson emerged out of this game as Leslie
Balfour, and I can see, uh, hear
why — as the Narrator, she has an almost nightingal-ish purity to her voice, with
a slightly educational and moralistic tinge as would befit, say, a recent
graduate of some Finishing School for Young Ladies. As Laura, her Southern
accent is clearly fake, but she wiggles her way out of it by portraying Laura
Bow as, you know, a provincial type trying to adapt to a more New York type
of speech — with a nice degree of naïve innocence, inborn intelligence,
and independent, proto-feminist stubbornness. Sometimes she falls prey to
overacting (particularly in her romantic dialog with Steve Dorian), but
usually she is spot on, and pretty much the
main reason why you should give a try to the voiced version of the game. As
for the rest of the cast... well, probably the best I can say is that it’s
much easier to tolerate if you take the entire game for a spoof, which it
more or less is. Balfour and Mandel themselves take the lead, with Balfour alone
having to generate the snotty aristocratic Englishness of Dr. Pippin Carter,
the proverbial Teutonic militarism of Wolf Heimlich, and the New Yawk street
rat nature of Ziggy the stool pigeon — pretty impressive how he pulls off all
three, but it’s really all about pure parody. Meanwhile, Mandel totally
misses the boat with Laura’s beau Steve Dorian, whose voice, for some reason,
was imagined as a deep, rumbling bass, despite being totally incompatible with his sweet tenor appearance. Considering
that bass is not Mandel’s natural tone of voice, the result is doubly
grotesque; throw in Leslie’s rather clumsy handling of her love lines, and
the entire romance angle is blown to bits. John Smoot gives us an equally
unconvincing Detective O’Riley, who sounds more like a whiny banking clerk
than an intimidating police chief; and programmer Cynthia Swafford makes a
completely cartoonish, poofy Countess Waldorf-Carlton who sounds like she’s
on a constant dose of helium. Only Kelli Spurgeon as Dr. Olympia Myklos, the
Greek lady with a penchant for all things macabre, does a proper job, I
believe. Unfortunately,
even the idiosyncratic success of Leslie Wilson was not enough to turn her
into a voice acting star for future games — and the dubious «talents» of the
other «actors» showed Sierra, once and for all, that in the future they would
have to spend more money on some proper
talent if they did not want to end up as the laughing stock of a new era of
video gaming. Above all, this was realized by Jane Jensen (who is also here,
by the way, voicing the rebellious lesbian flapper in the changing room of
the speakeasy — in her usual nasal, sneery tone), who, fortunately, would
insist on a real Hollywood cast for her own Gabriel Knight next year (could you imagine the horror of having
Bruce Balfour or Josh Mandel voicing Gabriel Knight instead of Tim Curry?).
But, like I said, the overall eccentric and comical nature of Dagger at least partially redeems all
the negative consequences of having such a limited budget. |
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|
The general gameplay of Dagger
follows the standard patterns of Sierra’s point-and-click interface of the
early 1990s. Due to
Laura’s special ability to question the NPCs on various subjects, this was, I
think, the first game to split the traditional «Talk» option into two
varieties — the exclamation mark (!) takes care of «regular» conversations,
usually consisting of very minor dialog exchange, while the question mark (?)
leads to actual questioning (with a rather cumbersome notebook-based menu of options
whose logistic inconveniences I have already mentioned earlier); the same
principle would later be borrowed by Jane Jensen for Gabriel Knight and used in a few other games as well. Just
like it was in The Colonel’s Bequest,
Laura can die in half a million different ways — some of which are quite
honestly predictable, like when trying to cross a busy street, or spending
way too much time near the intoxicating alcohol vats in the Museum’s
basement; others are fairly mean (for instance, recklessly opening the trunk
in Dr. Myklos’ laboratory without knowing beforehand (!) what specific sort
of danger lurks inside) and require you to save your game before attempting
to perform any action that could be even vaguely
risky. But that’s Sierra for you — when they write up a small death vignette,
they simply want to make sure you don’t miss it («death is a natural part of life», remember?). Worse is the
presence of several dead ends, all of them near the end of the game — if you
have a save file right before Laura’s investigation of the last murder, this
won’t be too much of a problem, but if not, tough luck. In
terms of overall gameplay, an interesting innovation, carried over from The Colonel’s Bequest but seriously
expanded, is to have the NPCs strut all over the Museum, rarely sticking in
one spot but more frequently moving from one hall to another, as if having
nothing better to do. Ironically, even though this was probably done for the
purposes of adding extra realism, the result is rather goofy — the characters
spend the entire night pointlessly roaming around with no apparent purpose,
waiting to be killed off by the murderer. If you happened to be locked up inside a large museum for an entire
night, your most realistic purpose would probably be to find yourself a cozy
corner to catch some sleep... not for those
guys, though. It also makes it fairly inconvenient to catch any one of them
for some questioning — sometimes they have a habit of disappearing
completely, only to re-emerge after you have given up and switched to some
other purpose. Admittedly, it’s still engineered a little better than
Revolution Software’s Virtual Theatre games, in which interacting with moving
characters was a true logistic nightmare, but even so, still serves as a
classic example of that road to hell, paved with good intentions. The
only other thing worth mentioning is the copy protection system — only used
for the floppy version (the CD edition, like King’s Quest V and other early games from the CD era, did not
have one, since back in 1992 developers were still naïvely thinking that
CDs could not be copied), it regularly required you to prove your «knowledge
of Egyptology» by matching the image of an Ancient Egyptian deity with one of
its common attributes, only possible either if you had the manual or already
were a big fan of Egyptian mythology and visual arts. The move was stylish
and ingenuous, but it was a little
annoying to have to repeat it at the beginning of each «Act»... also, it
really wasn’t much of a copy protection, as I distinctly remember rather
quickly guessing all the right answers while playing my own pirated copy,
without the slightest hint of a manual. Overall,
the interface and gameplay of The
Dagger Of Amon Ra may be said to respect the legacy of The Colonel’s Bequest: make things
just a bit aesthetically different from the «regular breed» of games to make
the experience a little more stylish and exquisite. The actual results,
however, are less satisfactory, both for reasons of convenience (the
unnecessarily time-consuming and clumsy notebook system of questioning) and
taste (even the clock, appearing in a corner of the screen to mark out time
after you have completed some significant goal, looks primitive and
perfunctory compared to the nicely ornamented wooden frame in The Colonel’s Bequest). Despite
suffering from being made three years earlier, The Colonel’s Bequest is, on the whole, more stylish in its general mechanics — although this is, really,
a very minor point. |
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|
Although I am probably alone in preferring, on the whole, the first Laura
Bow game to the second one, The Dagger Of Amon Ra still has plenty of
redeeming qualities to count as an overall enjoyable success. Its major
problem, I think, is the lack of internal consistency — it tries to be as
much of a «Roberta Williams-type» mystery game as a «Josh Mandel-type» lovingly
comic spoof, and the two sides frequently contradict each other; the result
is something like The Colonel’s Bequest meets Freddy Pharkas, and
it is hardly a surprise that I rate both of those higher than The Dagger Of
Amon Ra, which, due to this conflict of interests, is neither as
suspenseful or as funny as it would hope to be. The New York part of the game
is almost magnificent — the vistas, the puzzles, the dialogs, the humor all
come together in a stylish atmospheric experience; but with the lengthy Museum
sequences, the game becomes a completely different entity that leaves me
frustrated almost as often as it gets me excited. Still, there is no denying that in the Leyendecker Museum, with all
of its surrealist diversity and dark, creepy secrets, Balfour and Mandel had
created a fairly unique environment; and especially Mandel’s manner of mixing
in true historical and cultural facts with elements of pure parody was a pretty
fresh touch (later on, Sierra would explicitly adapt the principle to its educational
Pepper’s Adventures In Time project, where kids could conduct actual
checks on which parts of the game were historically true and which ones were
intentionally anachronistic — this, however, is an adult-oriented
game, and you are supposed to weed out the chaff on your own). Throw in the uniquely
wonderful presence of Leslie Wilson, the likes of whom would never again be
seen in an adventure game, and all of this ultimately redeems the game’s many
flaws. As of today, judging by their relative presence on the Web, the cult
of The Dagger Of Amon Ra is unquestionably much stronger than that of The
Colonel’s Bequest — after all, the game is larger, has voice acting, a
ton of irreverent humor, and better graphics (at least technically), so this
is perfectly understandable. It even managed to make an actual personality
out of Laura Bow herself, which Roberta Williams was unable to achieve on her
own. What it did not manage to make was a game that could creep you
out with the same effect as its predecessor, or a game that could make you so
easily forgive and forget the clichéd representations of its
characters or the corniness of its mystery-related dialog. For everything
that’s snappy, snazzy, and awesome about the game, there is something silly,
illogical, and badly worded; The Colonel’s Bequest feels «wholesome»
in comparison to this somewhat messy, disjointed experience. And even so, I
still like it a lot. If anything, messy, disjointed experiences usually give
you a whole lot of points to think about... |
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