Review: The Dagger of Amon Ra

After finishing The Colonel's Bequest (several times) I naturally had to follow up with the game's one and only sequel: The Dagger of Amon Ra.

It’s... not great. The game was written and designed by Bruce Balfour, with Roberta Williams taking a backseat as she worked on other projects. She’s credited as “creative consultant”, which apparently meant she was tasked with making sure the spirit of the first game remained intact and that there was character consistency in the portrayal of Laura.

A switch in creative control doesn’t necessarily lead to a drop in quality – after all, Jane Jenson wrote King’s Quest 6, which is largely considered the best in the series – but there are several problems with this game that leaves it with none of the Replay Value of its predecessor.

Released in 1992, the graphics have advanced in leaps and bounds, going from the 4-bit colour palette and pixelated sprites of just three years ago to rich and detailed scenery and characters. But honestly, I prefer the visual limitations of the first game, largely due to the Nostalgia Filter and the scope for imagination that it provides – often your mind ends up filling in the details of the more unsophisticated graphics.

The Dagger of Amon Ra sees Bequest’s old plantation house in the midst of murky swamplands and raises it a New York museum after closing hours. That’s not a bad exchange as far as ambient locations go, and the designers make the most of the popular 1920’s Art Deco style in order to create the Leyendecker Museum, where most of the game’s action takes place.

But the real drawcard is getting to see and hear Laura herself. A silent collection of pixels is fine for projecting oneself upon, but there wasn’t much of a personality to Laura in the first game. Here, she’s an actual character: a tenacious journalist taking a job in New York, who has to negotiate the male-only space of the newsroom and who takes a far more proactive role in the subsequent murder investigation.

Voiced by Leslie Wilson with a broad southern drawl, she’s bursting with energy and enthusiasm, and it’s undeniably fun to play as her: her physical affectations, her bright-eyed naivety and her dramatic reactions to things, whether it’s dead bodies or walking in on people having sex on desktops.

Fresh out of university, she bids farewell to her father at the train station and heads to the office of Sam Augustini at the prestigious New York Daily Register News Tribune, where she’s immediately offered a plum assignment on a recent burglary at the Leyendecker Museum, with tickets to that evening’s soiree to celebrate the new Egyptian exhibition.

The stolen artefact is of course the Dagger of Amon Ra, which was meant to be the centrepiece of the exhibit until it disappeared from its display case. Recently excavated from a tomb in Egypt by the egotistical Doctor Pippin Carter, there was already plenty of controversy surrounding the dagger – namely that many believed its rightful place was in its country of origin.

For 1992, this was a fairly forward-thinking premise for an adventure game, though the character who embodies this viewpoint is Doctor Ptahsheptut "Tut" Smith, a fusty and effeminate curator who says things like: “as clear as the waters of the oasis” and “that son-of-a-camel should not be allowed to run free upon the sands.” Yeah...

But veiled threats have already been made, specifically: “there are some who would rather fight back than allow their country to be stripped of its national treasures,” which means it doesn’t come as a huge surprise when Doctor Carter is found murdered in a saprophagous with a replica of the dagger stuck in his chest.

The doors are locked, the police start questioning the guests, and Laura’s investigation begins...

***

As with The Colonel’s Bequest, the entire story takes place over the course of a single night, with the time divided up by quarters and the gameplay staggered across six acts. However, that’s where the similarities end, as where Bequest was very carefully structured and paced, The Dagger of Amon Ra is frankly terrible in these areas. Just terrible.

Like I said, both games have six acts, with events gradually escalating as the night goes on. But Bequest structured this by numbering one murder per act (including the crime scene and the location of the body). But the first act of Dagger has Laura gathering preliminary information about the burglary in various New York locations. The second act involves her eavesdropping on various party guests (and future suspects) at the soiree. The fifth act is an extended chase scene in which Laura is pursued by the murderer, and the final act is the coroner’s inquest.

That leaves only act three and four as ones in which the player can actually investigate the crime, which should naturally be the crux of any mystery game. And because the meat of the plot takes place in only two hours, it’s an incredibly muddled and confusing experience. Almost everything happens in act three, which takes the most time to complete and contains the discovery of no less than three dead bodies.

Not only that, but the passage of time is almost impossible to keep track of – in the original game Laura would trigger events that were marked by the appearance of a large clock tolling the quarter-hour. If the player didn’t want to advance at that precise moment, it was easy enough to return to a saved game made prior to a trigger, then return to that location when they were ready to move forward with gameplay.

Here the clock only sporadically appears, often seemingly at random. Worse, it’s small and without numbers, making it difficult to even see what time it is. This proves annoying when you take into consideration that other characters are constantly making plans with each other to meet in certain places; appointments Laura has to spy on which are extremely difficult to reach at the right time. (I resorted to using a walkthrough, and at one point the clock only moves forward when you arrive in a room where a meeting was planned that no one turns up to).

Basically, the player was in control of the passage of time in Bequest, where progression was clearly delineated and carefully spread out. Here, the player is at the mercy of arbitrary leaps forward in minutes and hours, most of which are squeezed into only two relevant acts of mystery-solving gameplay.

***

There are other issues, such as the fact that after Doctor Pippin’s body is found during the party, the rest of the museum staff just... stick around. Why wouldn’t they go home? There is a trifling attempt to justify this, what with custodian Ernie Leach being ordered by the police to lock everyone inside and later telling Laura that he’s lost his keys – but you’re telling me that the staff don’t have their own keys? That someone desperate enough couldn’t just smash a window and hightail it out of there?

The characters therefore move around the rooms of the museum arbitrarily, giving Laura the chance to question them, but once the bodies start piling up (which remain where Laura finds them for the duration of the game) nobody seems to notice. Yes, the museum staff will casually wander past a decapitated body that’s been impaled by the model of a giant pterodactyl and not react in the slightest.

And unlike the cast of Bequest, which was admittedly made up of very thinly drawn archetypes (including a butler literally called Jeeves) the Dagger characters don’t feel like real people at all – rather an array of cartoon grotesques, from the goose-stepping German security guard to the hoity-toity Countess to the slutty French secretary (the second such stereotype to feature in this franchise) who has a sexual relationship with every single male character.

SPOILERS

But perhaps the game’s greatest crime is that the mystery itself is impenetrable. Though there are enough clues strewn about to deduce the identity of the killer, his motives and underlying plan remains completely opaque to me.

The final act of the game is an inquest, in which the player must answer a litany of questions as to what exactly was going on: not only who killed all the murder suspects, but what his motive was (there are thirteen options, ranging from “jealousy” to “financial gain” to “cover another crime” to “had a bad day”).

Laura is then asked several questions pertaining to the secondary mystery that’s been taking place in the Leyendecker Museum: a fraudulent art heist, in which paintings are replicated, replaced on the gallery walls, and then sold on for a profit. Overseeing this felony is a con artist called Watney Little, who has been impersonating museum president Archibald Carrington III throughout the game (explaining the opening sequence in which a man is strangled in his ship cabin and his body dumped in a trunk – one that Laura finds in the museum with a skeleton inside).

This at least is a much clearer mystery to solve, though it beats me how it’s connected to the string of murders. Turns out the culprit is Detective Ryan Hanrahan O'Riley – yeah, the cop! – and according to the correct ending he killed most of his victims to “cover another crime”... which is the art heist, I suppose? Though they never make it clear that he was involved in that?  

But what of the burglary that kickstarted this whole story? The theft of the Dagger of Amon Ra? Well, apparently Watney Little stole it, having been manipulated into doing it by O’Riley – though I swear to you, there is no evidence of this in the actual game.

I honestly have no idea how a player is meant to reach this conclusion based on the clues that are provided (or rather, not provided) during gameplay. How could we possibly deduce this? Why did O’Riley want the dagger in the first place? How did he set it all up? How did the dagger go from the gift shop to the vat in the underground laboratory and who put it there?

There’s nothing worse than a mystery that cheats by not giving you the clues to figure things out on your own.

***

The point-and-click interface is certainly easier to use than typing commands... except if you’re trying to have a conversation with someone. Then you have to click on a person, at which point the inside of your journal with notes of interest (divided into people, places, things and miscellaneous) will appear. Then you have to find the subject you want to discuss, click on it, and then exit from the journal interior. That’s up to five clicks just to ask a single question. It’s more time consuming than typed commands!

There are other glitches too. I got caught in a loop in which I entered Ernie’s office, was too slow to retrieve the wire-cutters from the toolbox, and was promptly kicked out when Ernie comes in and asks Laura to leave, locking the door behind her. I returned soon after, in which Ernie inexplicably lets her stay in order to answer questions, but as soon as I tried to open the toolbox he kicked me out again. It was immensely frustrating, especially since on returning to a saved game I found I was able to grab the wire-cutters but missed out on questioning him.

Then I realized I’d gotten too far ahead without collecting the cheese or the second half of the Rosetta Stone’s hieroglyphics and therefore couldn’t finish the game. Thank goodness for YouTube Let’s Play videos, which let me see things out to the end as by then I really couldn’t be bothered returning to a saved game.

So that was The Colonel’s Bequest’s first and only sequel, and it’s easy to see why. To Sierra’s credit, it’s not just a rehash of the first, though since the joy of its predecessor was very much caught up in that eerie mansion and its 4-bit graphics, something inevitably feels lost here.

It’s fun to see Laura Bow in a new context, with an audible voice and more personality, and the Leyendecker Museum is worth at least one exploration. But the structure of the game is so awkward, with players getting bogged down in that interminable third act and a mystery that has no satisfying payoff. It’s obvious why the franchise stalled after this instalment.

Miscellaneous Observations:

Perhaps the only bit of continuity between the two games (beside Laura herself) is the distinctive melody of the clock striking the hour. I’ll admit, hearing it made me smile.

As mentioned, the game does make the most of the time period, what with the Egyptology craze, the speakeasies, the flapper outfits, and the beautifully spacious Art Deco designs. Just look at some of these backdrops:

There is a moment in the second act, when Laura is eavesdropping on various party guests (who move around to form different clusters) in which the three female characters: Yvette Delacroix, Countess Lavinia Waldorf-Carlton and Doctor Olympia Myklos are talking alone together. Gasp! The Bechdel Test, I thought! Only not... they just talk about the Countess’s late husband Sterling. So close, game, so close!

But speaking of Sterling Waldorf-Carlton, he ends up being something of an unsolved mystery. During the course of the night Laura opens the safe in his office and finds a diary that admits he’s frightened of his wife, written just a few days before his death. So... did she kill him? We never find out.

As mentioned, the character of Yvette is a disappointingly worse retread of Fifi in the first game, as the sexually promiscuous French woman who sleeps with literally every male character in the vicinity (in fact she’s worse than Fifi since she was at least hustling, whereas Yvette’s sexual inhibitions seem to have no motivation at all beyond giving players the chance to poke fun at the slutty secretary).

And it’s the reason she gets murdered since Laura overhears O’Riley telling her he’ll kill her if she cheats on him – the only crime of passion in the whole game. She’s killed when he pours plaster all over her, turning her into a sculpture that (as the epilogue informs us) was kept in the gallery for museum patrons to admire. Yikes.

At least the game has Olympia Myklos, who is a great character: a middle-aged Greek woman with a severe head-bun who works as a palaeontologist, has a morbid fascination with death, and looks after an array of exotic animals, including a ferret called Daisy. She’s living her best life and survives the whole game. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a female character like her before.

As with The Colonel’s Bequest, there are two possible endings to the game – a good one and a bad one. The good one gives the player a “where are they now?” rundown of every single character that featured in the game, including the killer, the coroner, all the dead ones, and the owner of the Chinese laundromat that lent Laura the evening dress she wore to the soiree. I mean, you can’t say it’s not thorough.

The bad ending, in which Laura gives all the wrong answers to the coroner, ends with him telling her that it’s her fault a murderer is running loose in the city, another run-down of all the other characters (most of which line up with those in the good ending – though I actually preferred the ultimate fate of the Dagger in this one) and Laura getting gunned down in her own bedroom by a masked assailant. Um... that’s a bit much.

But regarding her romance with stevedore Steve Dorian (yes really) anyone who has played Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers has the opportunity to examine a noticeboard at the university and learn that a lecture is taking place held by one “Laura Bow Dorian”. Aww.

So the game has quite a warped sense of humour, with jokes that don’t always land – though I did enjoy the Running Gag of the Dermestid Beetles and Daisy the missing ferret, which sporadically pop up and scurry across the screen at various points.

Despite the surprising Values Resonance of Doctor Tut insisting the Dagger of Amon Ra should be returned to Egypt on account of it being an ancient Egyptian artefact and the snotty entitlement of Doctor Pippin claiming it belongs to him since he found it (which he actually didn’t, he was just nearby when the Egyptian diggers discovered the tomb), the game forfeits some of this goodwill with the character of Lo Fat, a Chinese launderer who speaks in broken Engrish and is about as cringeworthy as Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

And I’ve already spoken about the ludicrous sexualization of Yvette Delacroix and the implicit slut shaming that goes with it. One step forward, two steps back I suppose.

That cover art is nice though, right? According to Roberta Williams in my game manual: “we asked our receptionist Lisa Crabtree to pose as Laura. It was kind of cute how visitors would sometimes ask where they’d seen her before.”