Time for the last update! Naturally there are going to be spoilers here, so if you haven’t read the rest of the LP, don’t start with this part!
Act 6 is kind of an oddball in that it contains a completely nonsensical situation made up entirely for the stupid pun to work.
This is where all of those evidence items come in handy. We won’t actually need to present any of them, but the game basically checks to see if you have them or not before it will allow you to finish the game - even if your answers are correct. The coroner is also telling the truth when he doesn’t mention the theft of the paintings from the art gallery: there is actually a conversation in the armor room (which I tried multiple times to get to work but couldn’t) between the Countess and the fake Dr. Carrington about the forgeries. The coroner will ask us about it, but it’s possible to get all of the questions related to the art thefts wrong and still finish the game provided you have all of the evidence items and answer all of the questions about the murders and the theft of the Dagger correctly.
Each question gives us two menus to choose a person and a motive (for the murder-related questions). Both items must be selected correctly to finish the game.
Question One
Dr. Carter’s murder is actually the most difficult to solve out of all of them. Both of the clues found at the scene (Dr. Smith’s necklace and Yvette’s footprint) were planted there by the real killer - though how you’re supposed to figure this out, I have no idea. The closest I can come is that Yvette’s footprint more or less lines up with the secret passage from Ernie’s office, and Dr. Smith’s necklace would have been covered in blood had it dropped off during the actual murder rather than being found on top of the bloodstain on the floor.
On top of that, you also have two people with a potential motive for killing Dr. Carter. Dr. Smith wanted the dagger back and also turned out to be a batshit insane murder cultist, but Watney Little (aka the fake Dr. Carrington) also kind of had a motive: if he’s the one who stole the Dagger in the first place, he could be doing it in an attempt to stop the investigation into the theft. We also know O’Riley had something to do with the theft, so he’s basically got the same motive that Watney Little does assuming Yvette was right.
Honestly, I still believe that it’d make more sense for Watney Little to have done it, but the game expects us to blame the Irish for everything. The correct answer is Detective Ryan Hanrahan O’Riley, motive being Financial Gain. The logic basically follows mine.
Question Two
The game’s logic here is also kinda shaky. The assumption is that Ziggy was murdered for his involvement in the thefts from the art gallery - we know he was involved because he was supposed to attend the meeting with Watney and the Countess in the Armor room (the meeting found on Dr. Carrington’s desk). It honestly kind of makes no sense to me why O’Riley or Watney Little would go after Ziggy, since ultimately the art thefts really weren’t going to get in the way of the Dagger investigation.
The correct answer is Detective Ryan Hanrahan O’Riley, motive being Cover Another Crime.
Question Three
This one is easy. We know that Ernie was killed because he saw something he wasn’t supposed to - he even tells Yvette as much. What he saw was Dr. Carter’s murder. The secret passage that the button in his office opens up goes right into the Egyptian room, so it’s not a stretch to imagine he could’ve seen O’Riley walking away from the crime scene.
The answers here, unsurprisingly, are Detective Ryan Hanrahan O’Riley and Cover Another Crime.
Question Four
So.. the conversation that’s supposed to key you in on this is something I purposely didn’t show, because it would have made it immediately obvious that O’Riley is the killer. At the end of Act 3, you can listen in on a conversation between O’Riley and Yvette where he outright tells her that he’d kill her if he found out she was sleeping with anyone else, because O’Riley is the most dense man in the universe. In addition, the red hair found on Yvette’s body is his, as are the glasses (which is a little weird because there’s no mention of him ever wearing glasses).
This one is actually a bit different. The answer remains Detective Ryan Hanrahan O’Riley, but the motive is either Jealousy or Revenge. Either one works.
Question Five
The Countess was the primary mover behind the art forgeries. You can find this out if you witness the meeting between her and Watney Little in the Armor room, but I was never able to get that to work. The entire reason for her murder is also kind of a stretch - from what I’m told, if you question her she’ll admit to knowing that Dr. Carrington is a fake, and so the theory is she had to die because Watney and Ziggy both died. The main piece of evidence here is the handful of grapes near the Countess’s corpse. O’Riley only mentions loving grapes twice (once in his office in Act 1, and then a second time after Ernie dies) but it’s definitely there.
Fifth verse, same as the first four: Detective Ryan Hanrahan O’Riley, Cover Another Crime.
Question Six
This one is really easy, assuming you got past the beetles and didn’t assume they were an insurmountable deathtrap. The skeleton is Dr. Archibald Carrington III, who never made it off the Andrea Doria before being killed and replaced.
Question Seven
This one’s easy. We know it couldn’t be O’Riley because he wasn’t on the Andrea Doria. We do know, however, that Watney Little was impersonating Carrington and likely had all of his keys to the museum. The answer here is Watney Little. The game doesn’t ask what his motive is, because it’s not simple enough to fit on that menu.
Question Eight
I’m not entirely sure why they bother asking you this, especially since there’s no way you’d get the last question without having Watney’s police file. The answer is Watney Little.
Question Nine
Another easy one. We know that only three people knew that Dr. Carrington was actually Watney Little in disguise, those being Ziggy, the Countess, and O’Riley (the last one is implied by the existence of the note on Watney’s police file). While Ziggy and the Countess might have a motive to kill him, namely covering up the forgery scheme, O’Riley has a stronger motive - killing the only other person who knew for sure who stole the Dagger.
The answers are, again, Detective Ryan Hanrahan O’Riley and Cover Another Crime.
Question Ten
This is the first question where the game will start telling you if your answer is correct or not. If you’ll remember, the Dagger was stolen from its case without the case being damaged at all. There are only two people who had access to it: Dr. Carter and Dr. Carrington. Since it wouldn’t make sense for Dr. Carter to steal a dagger he considered to be his, the only person that really makes sense here is Watney Little, which is the correct answer. Watney originally hid the Dagger in the museum gift shop (where we found it in Act 2).
Question Eleven
We know that Watney Little had a note on his police file telling him to cooperate. The only person who could have had access to that is a member of the police - and only Detective O’Riley fits the bill there. No surprise that it’s him, then.
##Questions Twelve, Thirteen, and Fourteen
I’ve already detailed how this is figured out, but the answers are the Countess, Watney Little, and Ziggy, respectively. You might think the answer to the last one would be Ernie, given that he’s a fence.. but no, Sierra had to go make a stupid pun. You’ll see soon.
Question 15
This one’s a dead giveaway. You see Rameses Najeer’s face during the scene where Laura gets captured by the cult.. and then again when he asks her the riddle. I’m not entirely sure how you could get this one wrong unless you thought it was Dr. Smith.
Question 16
We already know this one is Ernie from the carbon paper and from the multiple conversations between him and Yvette. However..
Yeah, fuck that entire pun. Assuming you have the evidence against O’Riley and all of the questions answered correctly, you get a bonus scene. This is (I believe) the only place in the game or the manual where they tell you who Dr. Smith actually is (he’s the curator of the Cairo Museum in Egypt).
Once that scene ends, we move on to the actual ending.
I’m not sure what kind of police department relies on the speculation of a total outsider to determine who they charge with crimes, but okay. The End, right? … or is it?
: “…damned interfering Laura Bow…” "… thinks she can get away wi’ squealing on me, does she?.." : “…well, she’s got another thing coming…” : “Do you hear me, Laura Bow? You’ll pay for this…” : “…if it’s the last thing I ever do!”
Spoilers: Laura Bow gets thrown into the dustbin at Sierra mere days after the game is finished and is never heard from again apart from a very brief reference in Gabriel Knight 1 implying that she went back to New Orleans and is teaching classes at a college there.
… And, that concludes my LP of Dagger of Amon Ra. There is a short epilogue, but unfortunately due to the way the game handles transparency, I can’t get any of my screenshot tools to capture the text boxes. I’ll post what I have.. and in the style of the other LP of this game (which I did not know existed until sometime around when I finished Act III) I’ll just make up my own epilogue for the screenshots that didn’t take.
It was later returned to the museum in Cairo.
Okay, NOW I’m done. There’s also another romance scene between Laura and Steve I’m not going to show. I’d like to thank The Dark Id, whose LPs kind of pushed me over the edge into doing one of my own. I’d also like to thank all the people who read this - either as I was posting it or as a whole now that it’s done, because I really wasn’t expecting that anyone would. I apologize for screwing up the epilogue - at some point I’ll go back and record it, but I still think mine is better.
Thanks again for reading!