The Stack

So everything I speculated about in my previous post has turned out to be true. Fixing the camel wash was in fact just a matter of finding a hard-to-notice useable — hard to notice in part because it was part of a tree, rather than a discrete object in itself. This didn’t lead to cleaning the statue in the way I thought it would, but it did lead to cleaning the statue. I’ve seen the Pharaoh, who’s depicted as a comical despot along the same lines as Kuzco in The Emperor’s New Groove (a film that precedes Ankh, but not the game it’s based on, so who knows if there’s influence there). He didn’t fix my curse, though. He just sent me through a trap door into Chapter 2 (out of goodness knows how many) without even hearing me plead my case. I have another lead now, to go see the priests at the temple of Osiris instead, which is going to require tricking my way past another guard. This game sure likes its guards.

Somewhere along the way, the task “ID_TODO_05b” got added to my task list. Whatever that was, I seem to have accomplished it.

My one big complaint about this game at this point, apart from the exoticizing premise, is that there’s so much walking around. This is really my main complaint about point-and-click adventures in general, and the reason I so seldom have the patience for them any more, but it’s made even worse when some of the rooms are on the other side of an expanse of desert. You can’t even run! The game does provide one shortcut: from within the desert, there’s a button that takes you back to the ferry dock. So once you’ve taken the time to trudge out to Giza, you can get back to Cairo pretty quickly. But it does provide an incentive to not leave Cairo. I know I have one more task out there on my list, but I have no reason to believe that I have the means to do it yet.

Back in Cairo, I do at least have some ideas: I need to get past that guard; conversation with the guard leads me to believe that I can trick my way past him if I can provide some music for him to dance to; I have a flute. Unfortunately, I cannot play the flute. Maybe I need some NPC help? This chapter also introduces a captive damsel, possibly the Elaine Marley of the story given her feisty attitude, which is what got her locked up in the first place. Strangely, her rescue isn’t on my task list, but it’s clearly something I’m supposed to at least believe I’m supposed to do. Much of my opinion of this game as a Monkey Island imitation will depend on how that turns out.