Lost in Time - Well, I’m on the Downeaster Alexa

Written by Michael

Parker is our suave but oddly-dressed game heroine, Jerry is our MacGuyver, and Mikey, well, all Mikes are cool to have around.

Synchronize swatches! We’re back home from a fancy meal and now it’s time to tackle some more puzzles in this game. I wonder, will we finally experience some of the danger from the man who “plotted to kill us before we were born?” Well, cheaters could skip down to the end of this post, but I hope you’ll stick along for the ride.

When last we wrote, I had just uncorked some cider in celebration of me finding the right items to click on the right other items. Let me step out of that basement crypt to the real world. Wait, if that’s a crypt, then how come all that’s in there is a treasure chest and some bottles of cider? It feels more like a messy garage than a place T. Charles Kingman would be in charge of.
So I step outside, and once more I look at the elevator. This railing is a clickable object, does that mean it can interact with one of my inventory items?

It turns out that I can attach the hose to it. I then try to press the elevator buttons, but the game warns me that I might get hurt doing that with the hose attached. So, what next? I check my inventory and find that an item appeared called the hose “end” that can interact with other things. If I walk to the well/garden area, that item disappears from my inventory, so I guess the hose doesn’t stretch that far. But I can walk over to the lighthouse.

Love in an elevator, living it up...

And the solution now seems obvious to me. I tie it to the door of the lighthouse, and then operate the hose, which busts the lighthouse door open.

“Hey, where do these stairs go?”

So now, we have a new place to explore. There’s a locked door, and some steps up. I try all the appropriate items on the door, to no avail. Not picking this lock, at least not now.

And then, there’s the first of a couple of things that made my blood boil in this playthrough session: the first hidden pixel hunt.

The pathway up was clogged

So, I happened to accidentally mouse-over, at some point, a wooden clog hiding on the steps. It’s the same damn color as the steps. I pick it up, and then at some point I look inside of it and find a key. So I immediately do the obvious thing, and unlock the door and follow it downstairs.

I couldn't find a screenshot, but I'm rather certain this was a scene from EcoQuest.

This leads me to a gated area that leads out to the ocean. The gate doesn’t open, and there’s no obvious puzzle there (no keyhole or handle). There’s a valve above my head to the left, and of course, it needs to be turned.

To every season...

Remembering the proper way to turn the valve, I apparently open a canal. I’m hoping this means I have water upstairs at the hose faucet, or at least in the well or something.

There’s also some algae on the right side wall, a clickable item I can’t do anything with yet, so I’ll have to come back to that.

Back upstairs, I follow the steps in the other direction.

Hemingway’s former office, where he wrote literary classics

What’s in this room? A lot of unclickable, decorative items, and a few useful ones. There’s a desk drawer, with a bit of literature to be enjoyed.

We read the contents out loud, but then it appears in my diary as a piece of evidence, so I can read it at my leisure.

Also in this room is a spyglass (labeled as a field glass), a window overlooking the sea, and a cupboard, of which the doors are unable to be opened by hand because the humidity has warped them.

Using the oar in a method not as directed by the manufacturer, I pry open the door of the cabinet to expose its hidden treasures to the world. It turns out that the treasure is a shaving razor.

I try to open the window, without luck, and also try to bust it open, but the oar isn’t as useful a tool as you’d imagine.

Using the spyglass, I look out the window. If I move the mouse around, I can pan and scan until I find what I’m looking for. Of course, I don’t know what I’m looking for until I do -- it’s the shipwrecked boat that I need to return to sometime in the past.

Recently, we learned that looking at old shipwrecks may be more dangerous than the games let on to be.

I’ll save myself from extra writing and blog padding, and tell you that I did not notice at first that I could look more directly at the ship to find a detail that looks familiar to me.

Just that art style reminds me of Gobliins.

This reminds me of the lock puzzle on the treasure chest, so as soon as I’m done exploring this house, maybe I’ll go check that out.

But for now, I’ll return to a gripe that will continue in this blog post. You see, when you explore inside various items, the video of you removing an item doesn’t make it clear that other items may remain, and sometimes, it looks rather empty. But the advice I’ll give anyone who is exploring in this game is to click on items multiple times, even when it makes no sense to do so.

I didn’t actually find this item until much later, when I had left, tried to do things, and reached an impasse and retraced my steps. But that doesn’t make for interesting blog reading. It turns out that the rather empty looking drawer, after all, wasn’t that empty. Clicking it again provided me with something useful.

Sadly the game doesn’t let me use it on the lock of the treasure chest, but since I’ve found the combo for it already (I hope), we won’t hold that against the game. After all, I already dissolved one lock with acid, but not this time.

Shall we go upstairs, via the ladder? (Based on the poor translation, I was slightly confused at first -- because the hotspot for the ladder says it goes up to the “LAMP”. And that hotspot is just pixels away from an actual lamp on the actual desk. I know the term LAMP is technically correct, but given the proximity to the desk lamp, a different term should have been used. Perhaps, “To the tower” or even “To the lens” or something like that.)

Would it be wrong, in a stereotypical male fashion, for me to state that I wish there was video footage of Dora climbing the ladder in that outfit?

Welcome to the guts of the lighthouse. There’s a lamp, that I can’t do much with right now, there’s a curtain, and a window looking out. And, found later, a hidden-pixel-search item on this screen: a bottle of kerosene.

Clicking on the lamp earlier, I’m told that the lamp runs on kerosene, but this bottle has no effect on it now. Perhaps it was just meant as a subtle hint to look for the bottle?

I can’t resist trying to deface the curtain with the razor, and I’m rewarded with a square of fabric for my crime. I use the rag on the lens glass, and I’m told that it’s much cleaner, but I suspect that’s just a sarcastic response for my enjoyment (I truly do enjoy the sarcasm, as much as I’ll give this game a hard time otherwise).

There’s seemingly nothing else to do here, so maybe it’s time to go back to the treasure chest?

Those skulls look rather long in the tooth.

So, this puzzle has shades of Insult Swordfighting in it. Just like when you challenge Carla, you have to adjust your responses for the challenge. So, while the ship showed a cannon, the treasure chest is opened with a pistol. And likewise for the other items, like the bullet and cannonball, or the knife and the sword.

Inside, I find the captain’s log for the Briscarde... wait, I’m going to be riding that ship in about negative-150 years or so! I think this might be interesting. Inside the diary is some fiberglass.

Again, this is what it looks like after it’s been added to my diary.

Well, I’ve (probably) exhausted the resources of this room for now, so let’s exit. I think I’ve turned on the water, so maybe I can take that hose and use it on the spout?

Just one problem with that. When I go to pick up the hose, I can do it, but I’m told that my using it as a rope to bust open the door damaged it. I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised. So when I connect it to the faucet, it’s unusable.

This is another start of a good dressing.

It took me some random item clicking to solve this, but because of my own ignorance. See, when I think of fiberglass, I’m thinking of the hard shell of a Ferrari, or a Jacuzzi on my back deck. I don’t think of anything flexible. I didn’t know that fiberglass was a common way to repair broken pipes.

Add some resin to waterproof it, and I have a working hose again. And the closest thing I can see nearby, appropriate to water, is the empty well.

Well, we can’t litter, can we?

And all I get for my troubles is the damn cork from the cider bottle I shot off earlier. This has got to be the most unrewarding puzzle yet.

Using acid on the grass. That sounds like something people did in the 1970s.

I suddenly have more inspiration. The muriatic acid removes... anything? So that loose moss that I can’t seem to get off, even though I have no clue why I’d want to do that?

That softens it up a bit, but I need a little help getting it the rest of the way off. I try the razor, but to no effect. I seem to be going in the right direction, but the game is making me jump through hoops to find the desired object instead.

I remember something from the recent past:

Where is it? I didn’t see it anywhere in the lighthouse. That’s because... it’s time for another pixel hunt!

Annie Lenox, eat your heart out.

Seriously, this game can’t decide between having inventory items be ridiculously obvious (like the battery in the tractor) or practically invisible (like the brown wooden shoe left upon the brown wooden steps).

Using this glass shard on the loosened algae reveals a “mechanism”. I decide that I need to manipulate it somehow, and land on the roasting spit.

“That’s what he said.” (Oh, wait, that’s my first Al Lowe joke of this post!)

Well, that’s an obvious hint, so the rust remover to the rescue.

Closed tight, except for the hole I made in the side to drain all the fine, aged rum out of it.

Opening the gate brings me to a rowboat (sans oars) that seems to have developed a moisture problem. I try to remove the water using things in my inventory, and it seems the best choice is the wooden clog. This exposes a hole in the bottom of the boat, which seems like a perfect puzzle to use a cork from a bottle on. But it doesn’t fit perfectly, it’s a little loose.

If I put the cloth in the hole first, and then the cork, it works. (I tried to add the inventory items together first, but that didn’t work. I was almost dissuaded.)

Using the oar with the boat, Dora decides the trip is going to be hard, but doable, and she dumps her inventory at the gates to lighten the load.

You land in front of a fisherman’s cabin. The cliff to get back to your manor is too hard for you to climb, so we’re stuck here for the time being. Let’s go inside.

Admitting you have a problem is the first of 12 steps to solving the problem

It’s time to go full-on adventure gamer in this room, and grab anything. Note that, by this time, I’d mostly learned the lesson about clicking things multiple times even if there was no apparent reason to, and with the exception of the bread basket, I didn’t have to come back.

But to summarize, in this room, there's a cabinet containing a ship in a bottle and some Nuoc Mam. I had to look that up, because generally, here in the states, it is mostly sold and referred to only by its translated name: Fish Sauce.

As the notebook appears in your diary afterwards

There’s a chair, with something under the leg. It’s a notebook that belongs to someone named Melkior. Of course, Doralice at this time hasn’t met him yet, because it will happen in the past.

Inside the basket on the table is a handkerchief and a nail. But wait... there’s more! There’s also some bread. Clicking some more actually tells me that “I have everything I need from the basket.”

There’s a chandelier hanging above the room that looks interesting, mainly because it’s a clickable object, and I find them all interesting. I can’t reach it, but clicking on the chair moves it underneath so I can climb.

It’s attached securely with a chain to a bracket, but using the nail breaks that security.

Ingenious and convenient.

Looking at the chandelier breaks it apart to the base ingredients it was apparently made from. An anchor would probably work as a repelling grip for the cliff, no?

How can you determine its gender without undressing it first?

There’s something on the roof I didn’t notice earlier. It appears to be a buoy.

In the reverse, of sorts, of a puzzle stolen from the future Grim Fandango, the solution is to get a bird to knock it down for you. But if you just try to do the job with the bread, that’s not enough. You’ll have to replace the bread, apparently there’s more in the basket where it came from.

Wow, the sarcastic narrator became flat-out mean.

No, the birds here only believe in haute cuisine, so you’ll need to douse it in fish sauce first before throwing it up there for them.

Since there’s no mouth icon, I hadn’t considered that solution yet.

It’s knocked down, and a use for the razor, which wasn’t too heavy for me to take on my overseas boat trip. The buoy is useless, filled with holes, but I already know what I want the rope for.

So will this.

Tying the rope to the anchor, I’m able to scale the Cliffs of Insanity (even without Fezzik to assist), and I have returned back to my manor. And like that, I will retire to my chambers as well, until our next session.

(Oh, yeah, in answer to the question at the start of the post: we don't seem to be in mortal danger yet.)

Session Time: 1 hour
Total Time: 2 hour 30 minutes

Inventory: Razor blade, copper wire, handkerchief, acid solution, ship in a bottle, floats, kerosene, small pipe, wooden shoe, and the cigarette carton, containing a matchbox.

Game Completed: 37%

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There’s a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no points will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. Please...try not to spoil any part of the game for me...unless I really obviously need the help...or I specifically request assistance. In this instance, I've not made any requests for assistance. Thanks!