Lost in Time - My Heart Will Go On

By Michael

Now that introductions and wagers are out of the way, let’s talk game history.

Just one year before Lost in Time was released, a brand new software company named id Software revolutionized first-person games, with the shareware publication of Wolfenstein 3D through Apogee Software. The next year, Coktel Vision would make an adventure game in the same perspective, but without the smooth motion animation or, I guess, enemy soldiers running to shoot you while shouting “spy!” in German.

Spion! Spion!

So far, I’m not impressed from a technical standpoint, when a shareware game released on a single 3.5” floppy felt more powerful than this game. Wolfenstein included even a few spoken words, which wasn’t that revolutionary -- a 1991 adventure game did the same thing on floppy disks as well.Another unusual feature lacking -- support for the MT-32. Sierra had been championing the system for years at this point, and all of their games from the SCI0 engine until they went Windows-only supported the device, and many games had phenomenal soundtracks. So, I find it a little odd that they didn’t require support for the device when they published the game on behalf of their subsidiary.

Okay, so perhaps it sounds like I’m nitpicking here. Don’t worry, I’m just letting off some meaningless steam before I pick on the game content a little. You see, the game started to annoy me in small, minimal ways almost from the start, and I’m hoping it doesn’t continue through the rest of the story.

When I finished my last post, I had found a nail on the underside of a stool, and, conveniently, Doralice was carrying around a pair of pliers, so it was easily extracted.

This is the only decoration in the holds of the ship

On the far wall is a poster, and looking at it tells you it is dated 1840... but it’s currently 1992, so why does it look new and in good condition?

Perhaps a hint of what to do next?

I tried to click the poster again, to perhaps better read it or take it for my inventory, but instead, it tells me that you hear sounds from behind it. Is someone there? It won’t let me take the poster, so I’ll have to find a way to remove it probably. I try all the things in my inventory on it, but nothing seems to work against the strong, 1840s-quality paper.

There’s also an empty bucket in the view, but you can’t do anything with it right now.

By moving the mouse cursor to the sides of the screen, it will change to arrows going either left or right. As it turns out, you stand still, and each move just turns your viewing direction around the circle for this room, more or less. So, I look left.

Land of Confusion

I want you to remember the last three words on the screen, because I will refer to them later in one of my complaints. But for now, let’s look around the screen to see what we can do here.

I see a couple of barrels, and a locked chest. Looking behind one of the barrels, I find a lantern. That will probably be useful. Looking at the chest (or box, as they call it) brings up a lock.

I tried to level up my lockpicking skills, but it was snot to be.

So, this is my first lock I’ve encountered in the game, but she’s acting as though I’ve been doing this all game long. Is this bad scripting, or meant to be a hint at something she’s done in the past?

I try my entire inventory on the lock. The nail gets a sarcastic response “As if it would work...”, the pliers are an “..excellent idea, but it doesn’t work”, the acid solution isn’t strong enough, and the pipe and lantern also do nothing. I was so expecting the nail to work. After all, that’s how MacGuyver would have done it.

I have a moment of inspiration: can I use inventory objects on other objects? Yes, but the interface is a little annoying to get used to. Let me explain: The quick way to access your inventory is to click your right mouse button. But, doing that drops any item you are currently holding. So, while I’d already got in the habit of using the mouse button, I had to use the menu icon for this task instead. I was wondering, could I do something to the nail to make it work for the lock?

I right-click to bring up the inventory, and then select the pliers. I then bring the mouse cursor to the top of the screen, find and select the inventory icon, and click the pliers on the nail. It bends the nail for me.

Is this the person she is referring to?

So it doesn’t work in the lock. I try to combine it with other things, like using the pliers to hold it, but to no avail. I really, really hope that I did not just ruin a nail that I’ll need later just now, because if this is a dead man walking scenario, I will be so annoyed.

Doralice, at my beck and call, continues left (or, counter-clockwise, if you prefer).

This is a barrel of fun so far

Here’s a scene where the game really started to bug me. So far, she doesn’t know where she is. How, then, does she know at this point that she is on a ship, and that this specific ship has been wrecked in the past?

I’ll spoil something from later in this post -- she will ask someone if this is a boat. So, her knowing this information already in this view is, again, lazy scripting. She can’t know information she hasn’t learned yet.

Back to the scene, when you try to check out the barrels, the game comments that it’s “real dark back there”. So, let’s try clicking our trusty lantern on the barrels, and we can look behind them now.

Green? That had better not be mold.

I found a sponge there. I’m sure it will be useful, when I’m caught on the ship and have to swab the decks.

Guess they’ve been using it a lot.

In front of those barrels is a bucket. Looking inside, there’s water.

Water, water everywhere.

If I click on the water, I’m told that I see a reflection of myself, but the image shows nothing. Am I a vampire then?

Again, inspiration, just because. I have no specific use in mind, but what happens if I use the sponge on the water?

Yet another Dad joke.

That worked. What else can I dip in the water? Apparently, the pipe. So, the pipe must be closed at one end, because now I have a pipe filled with water.

So, looking around some more, and ignoring the hole going down for a second, I click on the support beam in the middle of the room, and I’m treated to a view of a hatch.Once again, I’ll ask: how does she know that’s the way out? She says it so confidently.

There’s another puzzle to solve, then. Making the beam less slippery so you can climb it. Looking in my inventory, I see the acid, but that has no effect. Nor does scratching it with the nail, or any other items, so I’ll come back to it.

Since I’ve now walked around this entire room, I’ll take the pathway down.

“Down there”? Don’t you mean “Down here”?

Look! More barrels!

The one in the middle smells of rum, but nothing I have can open or manipulate the barrel. The one on the right has treasure inside, however. It’s open, on its side, and contains a bottle.

I hope it’s not partially hydrogenated.

I’ve found a bottle of palm oil, mostly full. Personally, I’d prefer olive oil, but if we need to sauté something, I’ve got this game solved. But again, your young lady is concerned with the wrong things. She’s woken up with a headache, doesn’t know where she is or what to do, but picking up a bottle of oil, she remarks: “It’s from the Island of St. Cristobald. Where could that be? The date on it is 1840... It’s nearly full!”

Except, again, in an Al Lowe game.

Moving further right are some chains attached to the wall, but there’s nothing I can seemingly do with them right now.

I found a sump pump from the 1800s.

I found a pump, and even though I don’t have a reason to use it, it’s there, so I have to play with it. But it won’t work, so I try my tool on it.

We need time, love, and tenderness.

We have some cooking oil with us, but oil is oil, so let’s try that instead.

I saved the ship from sinking from the water, but isn’t it going to be shipwrecked anyway?

Nothing else to do down here, the pump did its job, and I still can’t open the barrel of alcohol to get me through this game, so I’ll go back upstairs and work on one of my other puzzles. I have new inventory items (the oil and the wet sponge), which are useless for the lock, but, out of desperation, do either of them do anything to the poster?The nail can’t damage the poster, the acid won’t work either, but bring an old sponge that’s damp, and the poster disappears. Oh, okay. That makes perfect sense.

This is knot what I expected to find here.

A knot in the wood, and it’s soft. That makes me think we can open it up somehow, drill it out, something. I try the obvious inventory items, nothing works. So I’m stuck. I quit the game, walk outside for a while, and then regroup and search everywhere, top to bottom.

Of course it was in the last place you looked! Once you found it, you stopped looking!

I hadn’t thought to look at the chain downstairs again after I had drained the water, I guess. So here’s a corkscrew. Thinking it has drilling properties, being a twisted nail, essentially, I tried it on the barrel of rum. Nope. Then I tried it on the lock.Now, I’m mad. It looks like it might work, but the game is telling me not to worry about opening the chest now. Why couldn’t you have told me that ages ago?

At this point, I’m just clicking things on other things, because logic is already gone. So going back to the knot in the wall, even though the nail and pliers failed, let’s try the corkscrew.

I’d whine about this, but it would be cheesy.

And so a hole has been revealed. And here comes some major plot exposition, along with more game inconsistencies.

I’ve waited for a hole lot of time.

Looking through the hole, you spot a slave that has been shackled to the floor. You have a long conversation with him. Instead of transcribing it, I’ll post the screenshots, so you can see the artwork. In some of the screens, the art was animated, such as the fire in the screen that is engulfed by it. I really do appreciate the attention paid to little details like that.So we’re learning a lot about the game story now. You’ve met a slave named Yoruba, a man of Egyptian descent, who is tasked by family lineage to guard a treasure. “It must be the box with the Egyptian sarcophagus.” Where? Where did we see a box with such markings? When we look at the treasure chest, we aren’t given a description, just a closeup of the lock.

“We are on a ship, aren’t we?” This is the line I was referring to before. She didn’t know she was on a boat at all, until now, so how did she know the specific boat she was on earlier, and that it would be shipwrecked?

The ship belongs to a man named Jarlath de la Pruneliere. Wait... isn’t that Doralice’s last name? If you remove that ‘e’ from the end, I mean. Hmm.

“Jarlath? I am here because of him!” Um, wait, again, so far from what the game has told us, you don’t know how you got here or, until just now, where you were. So, how could you know this?

“...because I have a knife!” Which, in that picture, is being held by another actor. Because suddenly, the deep color of the Black slave is now a bright white, for this picture. Oops, they used the wrong actor for this photo.

And soon after, even though Yoruba is shackled to the ship, many feet away from the hole he made to talk to you, he can walk over to hand you the knife?

Speaking as an average man, I can tell you there are certain places we would NEVER store a knife. (Image © 2015 by Alex, from his TAG playthrough of Police Quest 3. Used without permission. No rights reserved.)

Impressively, he hands you the knife handle first. I have over 20 years of restaurant management in my background, and every single employee needs to be taught this over and over.This seems like an excellent time to pause the gameplay, because this entry is getting a bit long. I’m only 6% done? Hmmm. The gameplay time isn’t right, however, that’s just since I last started the game, so I’ll have to manage that the old-fashioned way. (I had saved and quit to take a break, and then returned. The time is from when I returned.)

Session Time: 23 minutes
Total Time: 25 minutes

Inventory: Lamp, Wet Sponge, Twisted Nail, Knife, Corkscrew, Acid Solution, Pliers, Water (actually, the pipe filled with water, but that’s how they list it)