Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis – My Big Fat Greek Dreading

Written by TBD

Indiana Jones Journal Entry #4: I'd previously used my ship rib to expose a mural of Atlantis' Greater Colony. This time I used my rib to dig for hidden Atlantean treasure and expose two secret doors. I love my trusty ship rib. Oh, and Sophia helped too.

Sophia Hapgood Journal Entry #2: Using our archaeology skills we found an Atlantean moonstone and entered the Greater Colony, which also seemed to be the basis for the story of the Minotaur in the Labyrinth. I made Indy admit that Nur-Ab-Sal was a mighty king and single-handedly found the map room. Oh, and Indy helped too.

When we last met our heroes Indy and Sophia, we had gotten ourselves an Atlantean Sunstone that, together with a Moonstone, would give us entry into Atlantis' Greater Colony, and we found evidence that the greater colony might be in Crete.

CRETE

Apparently Crete's airport is a jetty

After climbing up to the foreground we can go right or left. To the right is another platform and spindle for our Sunstone. We try our luck, and Indy tells us what I already suspected.

So it's off to the left. The left contains a number of ruined buildings – I can enter a lot of rooms but find nothing of interest in them.

Over a wooden bridge I find a surveyor's transit. I have no idea what it does, but fortunately the professional archaeologist does.

So... an extremely cumbersome set square?

I take the transit and continue exploring. Apart from the rooms, there are also clickable piles of rubble on the ground. One of the stone piles tells me it's loose. I pick up the stones revealing a statue.

I can't pick up the statue, so I continue exploring, and in one of the rooms find a mural.

I assume these are directions to the nearest steakhouse

The mural shows a bull's head, horns and tail. And the lines on the mural converge on a circle that Indy guesses could be a stone disk. I wonder at the intelligence of carving a mural into stone that directs you to an extremely portable object, but as I'm controlling two archaeologists and they seem convinced it makes sense, I'm not going to argue.

I use the transit on the bull's head statue, and am given a simple interface where I can move left or right, with fine tuning controls in the centre.

When I move the view to where Sophia is standing, she waves like a tacky tourist. I don't know why, but I found this funny.

When I centred the view onto the left horn, the game left the transit interface and I saw a black and white line draw itself, while an X moved across the screen following it. I assume this is Indy's mind translating what the transit told him. I try doing the same with the right horn, but it doesn't work. I do some more rubble examining and find that another rubble pile contains a bull's tail statue. I use the transit again, this time with the right horn to match the mural, and after the same animation with the line and the X, I've found the point where the two lines converge.

X never, ever marks the spot.

I use my trusty ship rib to dig on the X, and find the stone I want.

If a moonstone had been buried here, shouldn't there also be a portal to Britannia?

Going back to the pedestal, I re-read Plato's Lost Dialogue, and find that I need to have 'the noon sun riding above the full moon'

For some reason it bothers me that whenever a secret door opens, the subtitle deliberately misspells “CLICK”

We enter the Colony, and Indy finally admits that the legend of Atlantis might be real if the legend of a labyrinth under Knossos is also true.

In the first room, there are three Greek God statue heads on a stone platform. As I pick up each one, the door closes slightly. If I pick up the third it closes completely, so I put the third head back on the platform and enter the door. After entering I can still see the statue from the other side, so I'm guessing that will be useful info later.

Chekhov's Zeus head?

I explore the labyrinth, hoping to do it without mapping, largely because I find mapping boring. It's simple enough that I can keep track of where I've been and where I haven't been, with some entrances taking me to rooms I've already been to.

In 1939 Indiana Jones invented the water slide

In one room we find a large minotaur statue. When I look at its head, Indy comments about its stability.

Yes, but is it wibbly-wobbly

I use my whip on the head, and if comes off and rolls onto a platform on the ground, which depresses slightly. Sophia and I get on the platform, which goes down, as a kind of primitive elevator.

Note the two Atlantean stones which are about to be crushed by the platform.

We get off the elevator, which goes back up, and look at the skeleton on the ground.

I'm seriously wondering about the timeline of this game. I would have thought maybe a week had passed since we saw Sternhart in Tikal. But he's already a skeleton?

Like all dead people in video games, Sternhart helpfully left a note detailing what he was looking for and what he'd found.

I didn't pick up on this until much, much later than I should have

The next room just contains a door we can't open yet. I take Sternhart's staff and the Worldstone he took from the tomb we found in Tikal, then I climb the elevator chain I found hidden behind the waterfall to get back to the minotaur room.

Convenient secret door is convenient

I explore more of the labyrinth, this time without Sophia as she didn't want to climb the waterfall chain. I go back to the first room, and have an idea about how to get a third statue head.

Whipping the statue head makes it come into this room before the gate closes. If the statue head was really light enough for this to work, I feel I should have been able to swap it for my magazine.

I use my three stone heads on a different platform inside the labyrinth, opening a different closed gate so I can explore other areas. I find an area with a shaft. I can use Sternhart's staff to remove a chock which frees a counterweight.

That's good, because I didn't bring any cash with me

This doesn't help me pass over the shaft, but in a different, lower room, I find the bottom of the shaft next to a giant statue head. I shove Sternhart's staff into the statue's mouth, which causes the platform to rise, allowing me to take the item that was on the other side of the shaft. It was a small lead-lined box with two orichalcum beads underneath it. I take them all.

During all this exploring, I've been randomly using my amber fish-on-a-string which Sophia had found in the Algiers dig site. When I use it it swings around in a circle and Indy says, “It's not pointing anywhere”, but now when I use the fish instead of spinning it points straight at me.

Fish don't have hands – how can it point?

Plato's Lost Dialogue mentions that amber is a means of finding orichalcum. The amber fish-on-a-string is an orichalcum detector and now that I have two beads it points at me.

I quickly figure out that if I put the beads in the lead-lined box and close it, the fish goes back to not pointing anywhere. It appears my amber fish has the same weakness as Superman's X-ray vision.

I'd also been noticing that whenever I used the fish while I'm with Sophia it points at her necklace. I had the idea of putting her necklace in the box so I went back to her and tried to do so.

But IT BELONGS IN A MUSEUM!

And this is where I was stuck. I had no idea what to do next. I kept exploring for a while using the fish in random places but couldn't find anything.

My next step would be to do what I'd been avoiding – make a map. I thought I'd been to every room in the labyrinth but as I hadn't been mapping it I could have missed a room. I also thought that perhaps I needed to use my orichalcum detecting amber fish in every single room in hopes that one of them contained something I couldn't find with my eyes alone.

Before doing all that, I thought I'd have one more try getting Sophia to allow me to put her necklace in my box – I figured Sternhart must have known what he was writing about when he mentioned that an orichalcum detector would have helped him from where he was. I HAVE an orichalcum detector, but when I'm in the areas Sternhart could reach, it kept pointing at Sophia's chest.

It didn't work. I tried talking to her in case there was some way to convince her. Eventually I had to give up and resign myself to brute forcing a solution. Before leaving I let Sophia know it was hopeless

If there's any way you can help us Sophia, NOW is the time to speak up.

Okay, looks like my observation skills aren't what they should have been. The hole is pretty obvious now that I knew it was there. Now I have the option to suggest boosting Sophia up so she can crawl through. After having a few conversations that result in nothing useful, I keep trying the options that hint that I'm calling her fat, using the theory that if in doubt, call your female companion fat until she angrily agrees to help you to prove you wrong.

Theory... busted!

I apologise and she forgives me. I try to cater to her ego this time, by asking if she's too afraid that there might be bugs. Then she points out that I'm the one that's too afraid in case there are snakes, which I agree is true. I'm not sure if it's just because I've exhausted all the possible options, but she finally works out that we're going nowhere until she agrees to go through the hole.

Now that we're through, we find there's not many places to go so I once again try to convince Sophia to lend me her necklace. This time I get the option to ask her about putting Nur-Ab-Sal in a box.

She seems awfully sensitive about it for someone who was recently attempting to convince an audience of Nur-Ab-Sal's mightiness by using a crappy home made ghost prop.

She does agree to help as long as Indy says, “Nur-Ab-Sal is a mighty King, and his Eyes See Through.” I say it, and, while she still won't give Indy the necklace, she agrees to take the box and put the necklace in it.

Apparently boxes WILL hold him!

In the next room, I try my fish detector, which points towards a blank wall. I inspect the wall and find it's a bit crumbly. I use my ship rib on the wall

At this point I think I can safely say that a ship rib is the most useful item in the universe.

The rib exposes a secret door, beyond which I find another orichalcum bead and the entrance to another room. This next room contains a scale model of Atlantis. At the centre of the model is another platform and spindle for my stones. I put them on the spindle and follow the Lost Dialogue's instructions.

Again with the KLIK!

This time we get an animation of a statue circling the city map before the door opens. As for why it does that, or where the other three doors in the room lead, or why this stone puzzle takes us to the Colony's exit rather than an entrance like all the other stone puzzles, I have no idea.

I go through the door, but am surprised when Sophia doesn't follow. My nemesis, Kerner, walks in, tells me he has Sophia and threatens me.

When I refuse to give him the stones to call his bluff that he'll kill me, he kills me.

At least I get to share my first death screen with Kerner!

Reloading, I insult him for fun, then give him the stones. He seals the door, locking me in forever. But what Kerner didn't know was that, while he took my magic stones, they were by no means the most important item I had in my inventory.

No stone will survive the wrath of SHIP RIB!

Ship rib opened another secret door for me, and as I left I got to see a cutscene with Kerner and Sophia trading insults on top of a submarine.

Kerner will always regret that his high school English teacher never taught him the English word 'lady'

After the cutscene, Indy pushes another secret door (he did it offscreen but I assume he used the rib) to get back to ground level.

What's a Nazi U-boat doing at the airport?

I go down to the U-boat and open the hatch. The captain climbs up to question me (his first mistake), then he follows me after I run away (his second mistake).

Indy beats him up (with no help from me – it was a cutscene) and gets in as the sub starts moving.


UNDER THE SEA

Is there a reason we had to travel in a zigzag pattern? Is the u-boat being driven by an airport taxi driver?

The sub arrives at the underwater location of Atlantis (I assume) and I get control of Indy again and go down the ladder. Indy starts down the ladder but quickly changes his mind.

In the conning tower I start in is a lever, which I try to move but break instead, and an intercom.

I send all crew to the bow, having no idea if that means front or back, and also having no idea if the front or back is to the left or right.

Either way, the sailors are no longer in my way so I can go down. If I try to get down to where Sophia is, she calls my name in surprise, which makes the guard look in my direction. I quickly go back up, and she says it was just her imagination. If I go down again, Sophia doesn't give me away, but the guard hears the noise I make instead.

With nothing else to do here, I go aft (left) which takes me to a galley. I take some meat and bread and make a submarine sandwich. Moving further along are a few more submarine controls and a torpedo. There's also a bunch of wires, but Indy won't touch them.

Aw, they've named their torpedo. How cute... and morbid.

The lower level contains an old leaking battery. I use my clay jar on it to get a jar of battery acid, which looks 'pretty corrosive'. Further on I get to the wall behind Sophia and I can talk to her without the guard hearing. Sophia intelligently pretends she's hearing her old friend Nur-Ab-Sal.

I get a bit of fun out of pretending I don't know what she's doing by asking her what Nur-Ab-Sal's saying. After a bit of back and forth she gets frustrated.

Well, I thought it was funny!

Then I ask her where the stone disks are.

Well, it seems I'll need to rescue Sophia first. She agrees to distract the guard so I go back up and around and, while he's distracted, attempt to use my whip on the guard. Indy walks toward the guard instead, who starts questioning me.

How can I turn down the 'fine leather jackets' option?

Mental note: turn down the 'fine leather jackets' option.

I reloaded and choose the option that contains the word 'pail' and Sophia grabs the pail from the ground next to her and hits the guard on the head.

Either of the 'bucket' options has Sophia do the same thing.

With the guard out of commission, Sophia tells me that Kerner's got the stones in his office. I take a plunger because it's there, and move around to behind Kerner's office. Kerner's safe conveniently backs into the small room, so I use my acid filled clay pot on it.

Does anybody else question the security of a strong box backing into a room that's open to allcomers?

The safe also contains a small key that unlocks a wheel near Sophia. I can push the wheel, which shows me a new screen with the wheel and the submarine. I can control the direction of the sub with the wheel. After unsuccessfully navigating for a while, I check out the other controls I'd found. Attempting to move each one puts another control up on that screen so I check them all out. The lever on the conning tower doesn't work, and I for once discovered that a ship rib can't do everything when I couldn't use the ship rib with the broken lever. I could use a plunger, though, so I did that. Now I had all controls working I could control the sub and try to get it into Atlantis.

The controls are a bit fiddly and it took me 5 minutes to manouevre into the hole. It felt like longer.

And with that, we've found Atlantis. The manual told me that the WITS, FISTS and TEAM paths converge when I reach Atlantis, so I'll finish up for now. Join us next time as we find out how I get to Atlantis by ditching Sophia and attempting to use Indy's WITS alone.

Atlantis is pitch black. I am likely to be eaten by a grue.

Session time: 2 hours 5 minutes

Total time: 6 hours 25 minutes

IQ Points: 315 of 347

Nazis killed: 1 (U-boat captain left unconscious on the submarine deck when it submerged) - total 2