Update 8: Laura Bow, Psychic Detective
Welcome to Act 3, where we’re going to start doing a lot of things that would make absolutely no sense to do except that we happen to know they progress the plot. Some of these actions are actually revealed by the game if you wait long enough - but doing that will actually cause you to miss out on a lot of stuff. In Act 3, apart from one initial time change at the beginning, none of the time changes are scripted. Act 3 is by far the longest one in the game.
Oh, well.. thanks, game. I guess. The beginning of each act has one of these (I accidentally forgot to grab the one for Act 2) that basically tells you whether or not you missed anything important in the last act. In this run, we actually grabbed everything we could in Act 2 right off the bat, which saves us some precious time in Act 3.
We open Act 3 back in the foyer, with Detective O’Riley interrogating the museum’s staff. The rest of the guests from the party have been cleared out.. yet strangely enough the detective hasn’t called for backup or sealed off the crime scene. We can’t do anything except watch as time advances to 10:00 p.m., the only scripted time shift in this act.
All of a sudden, Danny Glover appears out of nowhere.
Ernie is basically the museum’s handyman - he’s the “underling” that Wolf mentioned when he confronted Laura in the gift shop. He also appears to do some of the lab work. Ernie is the last new character we’re going to meet in Dagger of Amon Ra.
Once Ernie leaves, Laura asks O’Riley about his investigation. This is an automatic conversation.
: “Don’t bother your little head about it, lass.” : “It’s my job, sir.” : "Zis ist an official murder infestigation, Miss Bow! Do not be interfering!’ : “Oh, I don’t mean to interfere. I just want to know what’s going on. Any leads so far?” : “Dr. Carter died as the result of someone sticking a gift shop dagger in his chest. What more do you need to know?” : “Well, for one thing, who did it?” : “Someone who didn’t like him… that’s my guess.” : “Brilliant deduction.” : “If you think that YOU can do BETTER…!” : “I can try!” : “Oh, wunderbar. Now we’ve got ze AMATEURS involved…” : “I may not be a detective, but I’m terribly clever. I’ve solved murders before.” : “Just stay out of the way, lass, and don’t destroy the evidence.”
Now that Wolf is out of the way, we can finally go visit the Old Masters Gallery. If we touch any of the paintings except for one, we find out that the paint on them is still wet. You may notice Dr. Carrington standing around - from this point onward, we can find various staff members wandering the halls. I play with the movement speed on the fastest setting, so Laura moves much faster than they do, increasing the number of times we’ll see them. If we touch the big painting on the wall Dr. Carrington is looking at, we find that it’s actually an original.
It takes a noticable amount of finagling with the controls, but there’s a glint coming from the right side of the painting. By moving up and looking at that spot (actually not on but near the glint, it’s very finicky) we can get a zoomed-in look at it.
Inside the pot of gold, roughly where my cursor is, you can zoom in AGAIN using the magnifying glass to find..
A mysterious key. Unfortunately, the key is stuck in the painting and we can’t get it out for some reason. It is, however, good to know that this is here.
Beyond the gallery is the statue room. Come to think of it, we’re going to know most of the secrets about the museum by the end of this update, so it’s about time I posted the entire map of the first floor.
The door Laura is looking at is Yvette’s office door. We can hear whispers coming from it.. and this is where we use our drinking glass. The drinking glass can be put up against doors to hear conversations beyond them. In this case..
Olympia?! Wait.. the door’s locked..
: “You’re very welcome, my dear. What can I do for you?” : “A bone, you say? How fascinating. Where did you find it?” : “I found eet right here in the museum. Here eet es, Doctor.” : “Ha ha! Yvette, you silly girl! This is a chicken bone!” : “Eet ees?” :" Yes, of course! Why, it is still greasy. You got this at dinner, didn’t you?" : “giggle Oh, you have caught me, Olympia. I was playing ze leetle joke on you.” : “You are a funny girl, Yvette, but I am quite fond of you.” : “Olympia? We are ze good friends, no? I have ze problem I wish to talk to you about.” : “Oh? Certainly. What is it?” : “Come closer so I can whisper eet to you. Eet ees very personal… and I want no one to overhear…” : “Oh, my. Oh, my… OH, MY!”
Oh…kay, let’s just pretend we didn’t hear that. In fact, let’s look at the statue - specifically, the handful of pixels that make up the statue’s neck, as opposed to its head or back which will not get us the same description. If you go long enough without finding this, Yvette will eventually use the statue and reveal its secret, but now that we know…
Oh look, the statue was a secret switch the entire time. We’ll see what it opened.. actually, right now.
Using the statue’s head opens up a hidden staircase in this column in the room just behind the statue. Unfortunately, the light bulb burns out as soon as Laura gets close - a reference to the staircase to the basement in The Colonel’s Bequest which had a similar hazard. Trying to go down the stairs now will result in Laura breaking her neck, so we need a new light bulb.
So instead, let’s go into Yvette’s office. Strangely, we never see her leave it (unless she did it in the roughly ten seconds Laura spent on the screen with the staircase). This is the site of another dick move by the developers - there are actually two items we need in this room. One is in the garbage can, but we’ll grab that on the way out. The other..
Is Yvette’s working light bulb. Unfortunately, the light bulb is too hot to touch right now. This means..
We need to shut the light off. We still can’t take the bulb even with the lamp off, by the way - we actually need to wait for an event flag to happen in the next room (the door to the right). First though.. is that a diploma on the wall there?
Ball State University is in Indiana, if you don’t get the joke. (Spoilers: Yvette isn’t actually French).
Anyway, welcome to Carrington’s office. As soon as we go in here, the door locks behind us and we can hear Yvette again. This time, she has Rameses Najeer with her. Their conversation is, uh.. exactly what you’d expect to hear between Yvette and literally any man ever. However, there is this highly important tidbit. This is important. Remember this.
Next update, we’ll look around Carrington’s office, pixel hunt for evidence, and go downstairs. Also, as a bonus:
I had actually taken screenshots up to replacing the lightbulb on the stairs for this update (and somehow lost them as my screenshot tool decided to stop working the second I entered Carrington’s office) and completely forgot about this but ran into it on my second time through. If you go back through Yvette’s office (she leaves with Rameses once they finish talking and the door magically unlocks) after searching Carrington’s office and forget to grab the light bulb or the item in the garbage can, you walk in and this happens:
