The Stack

I took a couple of days off from this game, discouraged by lack of movement in the plot. I’m still in the story’s early stages, i think. The strange thing, though, is that I’m not tempted to cheat. That’s because I keep on discovering new things to do in the game. Little things, like I find a new inventory item, or make a little headway in the B plot. Just not things that are directly helpful in advancing my main goals.

I can skip ahead somewhat. I know that at some point, once I’ve tracked down the villains and recovered William de Peuple’s will, I’m going to have to take it to Paris and find the appropriate authorities to receive it. And I can go to Paris and try to solve the puzzles around successfully navigating the city, which you apparently can’t do without a local to guide you, but I know I ultimately won’t be able to do anything useful there until I get unstuck were I’m stuck. Oh well, at least I can eliminate inventory items from consideration this way.

So, here’s where things stand: My primary task is still to hunt down this blue-cloaked assassin. He was headed towards St. Quentin, and possibly thence to Holland, but was struck with food poisoning on the way and stopped at a monastery in Amiens for medical care. I need to disguise my manservant as a monk to investigate further (Geoffroi has facial hair that prevents him from passing as a monk himself), which is one of those “Find the Three Things” quests so common in point-and-click adventures. I’m having difficulty finding one of the three things.

Meanwhile, the aforementioned B plot: wooing the fair Juliette back in Rouen. This is a pro forma romance; neither Geoffroi nor Juliette shows much real interest in the other, but they’re willing to let things play out regardless. This part of the game is an exception to the pattern I noted before about always moving forward: Juliette sets you tasks that can only be met by visiting other cities and returning to her. My last major breakthrough was finding a way into the tavern in St. Quentin (which, much like the blacksmiths and tailor shops, is almost identical to the tavern in Rouen, but makes different bits of the scenery clickable). There, I found none other than Alexandre Dumas himself, despite his birth being several centuries in the future, and convinced him to write a poem in Juliette’s honor so I could present it to her as my own work. Now she wants flowers. These two deserve each other.

And there are assorted other things in Rouen that I don’t know what to do with. One Michaelangelo da Vinci potters about at the edge of town. I had to solve a puzzle to be able to talk to him, but he runs out of things to say pretty quickly. There’s a bunch of little things drawing my attention to the fact that there’s a souvenir stand directly between the Musketeer headquarters and the cathedral, where it keeps getting hit by errant musket balls, but I have no idea where it’s going with that.