Update 11: Porcupine Killer
When last we left Laura…
Oh right, she’d been caught by Wolf and O’Riley while standing directly next to a severed head while also carrying the Dagger of Amon Ra in her purse.
: “You’ve got some explaining to do, young lady. Why are you screaming?” : “I.. found.. Mr. Ziggy’s head.” : “Very odd how you are always findink ze bodies, Miss Bow. I think ve should be going back to my office and interrogatink you now.” : “Here now, Wolf. The young lady just found a man’s head. Give her a moment before you get out the thumbscrews, then.” : “Thank you, Mr. O’Riley.” : “Don’t thank me, lass. I’m not saying you didn’t kill the man, I’m just trying to restrain Mr. Heimlich’s enthusiasm for his job.” : “But I vill get results! Let me talk to her privately!” : “Now, I realize you’re just trying to help, Wolf, but I think we can learn what we need from the lass without harming her.” : “She could lie and you’d never know it! You Americans are too soft on your criminals!” : “I just walked in and found his head! That’s all.” : “Well, Mr. Heimlich does have a point, lass. It’s a wee bit curious that you keep showing up at the murder scenes before anyone else. How do you explain that, then?” : “Just lucky, I guess.” : “Well, you do seem to be a wee bit small to be sawing off a man’s head, I’ll say that much.” : “Zis fraulein could have had help! Or maybe she’s very clever!” : “Or maybe you’re trying to pin the murders on her so you can find the murderer and save your job, eh?” : “My job is quite secure, Herr O’Riley.” : “Oh, really now? A security chief who allows burglars to steal the exhibits, then overlooks several murders happening under his nose? I’d think twice about your security methods if I was running things here.”
With that, Detective O’Riley and Wolf fuck off to grab the crime scene kit, after giving us another stern warning not to leave the museum - not that we can, as Ernie locked us in after the party. This next part of Act 3 is kind of a clusterfuck of event flags that don’t work out very well, so there is a LOT of waiting.
Anyway, we know what our goal is: find Dr. Carrington, return the dagger, and get out of the museum. Up until now, we could find Dr. Carrington (along with all other non-dead NPCs except Ziggy and Ernie) wandering around the museum. This time, he’s nowhere to be found. Let’s take the initiative and head to his office ourselves.
We have to stop in Yvette’s office to get to Dr. Carrington’s (note: this actually isn’t true. I’ll explain later.) and while we’re there.. oh look, her paper cutter is covered in red liquid. I wonder what that’s all about. As soon as we examine the paper cutter, Dr. Myklos just kind of wanders in.
She’ll complain at us for being in Yvette’s office, but doesn’t actually try to kick us out or get Wolf or anything. It’s one of the most bizarre scenes in the game. I’m also not sure whether she’s telling the truth here - she works with animals, so I’d imagine she knows what blood looks like. There’s also a conversation (which is just more flirting) between Yvette and Dr. Smith we could have run into if we kept going in and out of Dr. Carrington’s office right before finding Ziggy’s body where she says she spilled some strawberry jam, so I’m not sure what the truth actually is.
Carrington’s door is unlocked, so let’s just go in there..
Oh no. Laura, we’ve been over this. You’re going to scream and..
To Laura’s credit, she only gasps this time. Great job, Laura! Now if only you had done that for the first two murders..
Welcome to the dumbest murder scene in the game. We can actually examine the porcupine to find out..
Note: Porcupines do not actually work that way. Their quills are maybe two inches long, not two feet. There’s not much we can do with Dr. Carrington’s body right now - his keys are gone (though the game won’t tell you that) and there’s no other evidence in the room we can collect, short of finding out that the clock stopped at 12:04 a.m.
With that, time advances to 12:45 a.m.
Oh, remember how I said we didn’t necessarily have to stop in Yvette’s office to get to Dr. Carrington’s? There’s actually another way in, using the bookshelf trap from a few updates ago in Wolf’s office.
Because we have the lantern, rather than dying we can use Wolf’s bookshelf as a secret, one-way passage to Dr. Carrington’s office. Dr. Myklos also has one of these in her office:
The passage in her office leads to the Alcohol Lab, which allows us to creep in on Yvette for the second time tonight.
We can also dick around in the armor room and find out that Dr. Carter’s body has been hidden in one of the armor suits. The Armor room is right between the Egyptian exhibit (where Dr. Carter was killed) and the Pterodactyl room (where Ziggy’s body was found assuming he wasn’t killed in Yvette’s office).
The way to progress, however, is to wait for Yvette to leave Ernie’s office (she does so after Carrington’s body is found) which allows us to grab a couple of things.
First is this weird-looking hoop under Ernie’s desk.
The hoop turns out to be a snake lasso. We don’t have any immediate use for it, though if we hadn’t gotten the cheese from the mousetrap in Wolf’s office, we could use the lasso to trigger the trap instead of the dinosaur bone. We can also look in Ernie’s toolbox..
And find a pair of wirecutters. These actually are immediately useful. We can also examine Ernie’s desk to find a log of what’s in those vats outside.
I’m not entirely sure how this is supposed to help you divine that the Dagger was in Vat 13 the entire time.
Finally, this thing near the desk is actually a switch for a hidden passage. Unlike the other two we’ve encountered, it doesn’t open a door directly in Ernie’s office.
I should also mention that Ernie’s office is on a timer - if you take too long, Ernie will eventually come back and ask you to leave. I got this right after opening the passage, but it doesn’t always happen that way.
Now comes what is in my opinion the worst part of Dagger of Amon Ra: playing the waiting game. There’s no way to trigger the next time shift short of just wandering around until it decides to come up on its own. There’s one thing I wound up doing between Ernie’s office and just kind of sending Laura up and down the stairs until the time shift happened.
If we use the wirecutters on the downed Pterodactyl (to do this, you need to get the close-up on Ziggy’s body and then use the wirecutters on the bottom-left wire, as for some reason Laura will refuse to cut the other two) we can obtain a clipping of wire. Surely messing with the crime scene and potentially causing Laura to be mis-identified as the killer was worth it to obtain this wire.
Ten minutes of walking up and down the stairs later..
The time is now 1 AM. This doesn’t change a whole lot, except for the fact that one door in the basement that was previously closed is now open. Back at the Mammalogy lab, Dr. Myklos is nowhere to be found. We can also see a secret passage on the wall - this was the passage that opened from the switch in Ernie’s office.
Dr. Myklos apparently left her snake oil down here, so let’s grab that before she comes waltzing in like she tends to do.
Oh look, it’s Daisy! Maybe we can help Dr. Myklos out and grab her..
We can’t actually do anything with Daisy, but she seems really interested in that chest underneath the table. I wonder what that is..
Uh-oh… I’m starting to get a very bad feeling about this. The trunk is actually locked right now - and is one of the most dickish traps in the game, to the point where there’s no way to know it’s a trap unless you die to it. We could unlock it with the skeleton key we found in the painting, but instead, let’s do something completely illogical.
On the far wall is a cold storage unit.
If we look inside, we get a close-up of a rancid piece of meat. Why would we take this, you ask?
The answer is that once you open the trunk, you trigger a 5-second or so timer. There are flesh-eating beetles in the trunk. How did they get there? Hell if I know. You can’t see them when opening the trunk, and Laura has no reaction until they come out and start eating her.
The correct answer to this trap is to immediately open your inventory and dump the slab of meat into the trunk. This causes a segment reminiscent of King’s Quest V where the background music changes to an army march. The beetles take the slab of meat..
And just kind of run off with it, leaving Laura to whatever is in the trunk.
This doesn’t even elicit so much as a gasp from Laura, who apparently has gone through the Seven Stages of Iji and is now ready to commit alien genocide. The skeleton contains an important evidence item, but good luck knowing it’s there - using the “look” action gives you a generic “Hey dipshit, it’s a skeleton!” response.
Oh, crap. This was the trunk that we saw the body get dumped into in the intro sequence. The question now is - if this is Dr. Carrington, who was the guy we saw impaled on the porcupine in Dr. Carrington’s office? I think it’s about time we went back and investigated the fake Dr. Carrington some more. We could go all the way back up the stairs to do this, but we should see where this passage goes.
Well, I suppose this explains some things, namely how Yvette got her footprint by Dr. Carter’s body. The passage lines right up - and if she knew about it, it would also go to reason that Ernie did as well. This is how Ernie was able to see Dr. Carter’s murder despite not being anywhere near the party until the end. Let’s just progress back to Dr. Carrington’s office.
If you look at where the cursor is, the letters “CP” are there in blood. There’s a good chance you’d miss this just looking at the murder scene, and it’s not really clear what the letters refer to. Time for ANOTHER dickish pixel hunt of a hotspot.
See the spot where the cursor is? That one, single, solitary book is the only hotspot on Carrington’s bookshelf. We actually could’ve gotten this the first time we came in here as far as I know. The dickish part is that the look action and the magnifying glass will not tell you that anything is here, even if you examine the exact spot on the shelf.
That exact spot happens to contain a first-edition translation of Crime and Punishment - this is what you’re supposed to get from seeing the “CP” on the desk.
Inside is a convieniently-labeled police file. We can’t actually look at it here, but we can take it and add it to our inventory. This, along with the pocketwatch, are key clues to the dagger theft and the murders. Looking at the file in our inventory, however, gives us the longest item description this side of Dark Souls. The title is “Watney’s File”.
: “You read a police report on the criminal career of Watney Little, con-man extraordinaire.” : “The file contains an amazing list of offenses, mostly fraud, conspiracy to commit fraud, and various degrees of larceny.” : “Glancing at the top of the page, you notice that the investigations were conducted by Scotland Yard. You also notice that the last entry describes Little’s recent escape from Dartmoor Prison.” : “Clipped to the outside of the folder is a small handwritten note that reads simply, “Remember our deal.” Apparently, this file was provided in exchange for somebody’s silence.. or service.”
Next update, we’ll finish Act 3.