Pepper’s Adventures in Time – One Taste & You Get It.

 

by Will Moczarski

Welcome back to Pepper’s Adventures in Time! Last time we managed to make Ben Franklin lose his no-good hippie ways by taking him along for the kite/key experiment. It worked like a charm: lighting struck, and Ben is back to his own self again. Thus, act 4 begins, and the hot tub is...let’s just say it reminded me of this:

Source

I manage to salvage quite a lot of items from this mess: Ben’s backscratcher, his fan, a lever, a stepstool that seems too big for Pepper to carry around, and his paddles. His book of “Hindu Meditations”, unfortunately, is ruined. Being primed by the well-hidden item in the previous act I keep on pixel-hunting for a while before I re-enter the Franklin Mansion. 

The objectives of this act are to 

•  find proof of General Pugh’s dishonesty,
•  rescue poor Richard.

Not a long but a tough to-do list. But as I wrote before it’s really all smooth sailing from here on.

As soon as I re-enter the house, Pepper notices some kind of bird up in the attic, nudging me to finally find my way up there. I place the stepstool at the bottom of the ladder and am now able to skip the broken rungs at the bottom. In the attic there’s a carrier pigeon in a cage. When I examine it the game tells me that it seems very agitated and unhappy. I’d better set it free then. Opening the cage is not enough because the bird only flies around the room. There’s a window, too, and with an animation lifted straight from Loom the bird is heading for Penn Mansion. After a very short and unremarkable cut scene we are back to controlling Lockjaw who’s still stuck in Ima’s horrible bedroom. 

The pigeon has not yet arrived and I’m still left to my own devices. I spend the time examining the surroundings, picking up Ima’s room key and a butcher’s bone (or “outcher’s bone”, as the game insists). Lockjaw’s paws are too uncoordinated to unlock the door so I guess this will be another in a long list of games requiring me to slide a key underneath a door. Well, at least I never did it as a dog, right?

Here lies Daredevil Jim McDow, hand of steel, leg of wood..... 

Jim took every risk he could, A life of action, that was Jim's, 

Too bad he ran out of limbs.

I walk north through the secret door again to see if anything has changed there. There’s a room with lots of dog collars hung on a wall in the shape of a gravestone. I think I told you about it last time but neglected to tell you about the epitaphs that can be read next to each of the collars (how Lockjaw manages to do that is an entirely different question, of course). They remind me of the crypt in Monkey Island 2 but in terms of funny writing this round goes to LucasArts, I’m afraid. The limericks and little poems are kind of cute but they didn’t leave me all that impressed. 

Is it just me, or are the proportions of that dog a bit off compared to the furniture?

When I crawl back into the fireplace I notice that the fire is now out, leaving an opening to check out the study. I do what every good doggie should do and ravage the General’s slippers first. Lockjaw involuntarily hides under the desk while chewing and I witness General Pugh pulling away a large painting of himself and his daughter, revealing a wall safe. How the General manages to not hear a growling dog under his desk a mere four feet away, I don’t know. Maybe he is lost in his Scrooge-McDuck-like moment of taking a bag of tax money (I assume) from the safe and throwing it up in the air to let it rain on his head. 

Money like ocean currents

He is interrupted by his loyal underling Percy and, as usual, General Pugh has nothing but abuse for the poor man. Percy delivers a letter from London wherein the King states that the Stamp Act has not yet been passed but probably will be in the future. This is, of course, more interesting to us than it is to Pugh because the letter is a document that proves (by the hand of the King, no less) that the General is a lowdown, stinking, rotten liar. Now how do we get our paws on it? 

To be fair, the letter does concern him, just not the way it should.

We also learn that “Poor Richard” is imprisoned by Pugh’s men, awaiting execution in the “usual holding place.” And WHAT A FORTUNATE COINCIDENCE: General Pugh can’t remember the password and asks Percy to tell him once again. It’s “Blooey.” 

Not you, kid. (Source)

The General then remains at his desk and Lockjaw has exactly one move to escape the situation. I try walking out from under the desk (although it’s probably not the right course of action) and promptly get caught by Percy. 

No Open Gore Policy

The next time I decide to bite General Pugh, and that feels kinda good. He jumps up and out of the room, cursing me but also leaving me alone with the important letter from the King. I quickly pick it up and get the hell out of there, knowing that my action probably caused the carrier pigeon to arrive at Ima’s window. It’s an adventure game, after all. By the way, why would there be an established path of communication between Ima’s room and Ben Franklin’s attic? 

I see a duck hatching a steel egg.

Pepper is now informed that the Stamp Act of Philadelphia was a ruse and has got the letter to back it up, too. Also, General Pugh seems to have written down the password (“Bluey”, remember?) on the letter. We are making serious headway here. As long as I’m up in the attic I try out various ways of ringing the bell but none of them works. I don’t even know why I’d want to ring it right now, though, so maybe it’s too early anyway. That seems like all there is to do in the attic so I head back down to talk to Ben about my latest discovery. 

I find him in the living room engaged in a conversation with his daughter Sally. Ben is worried because Deborah hasn’t come home yet, and Sally tells him (with a smile on her face, strangely enough) that her mom wanted to go out and “set this town straight” which sounds like a dangerous idea with or without context. Ben looks suitably concerned about the “bull-headed woman” while Sally remains all smiles throughout her knitting project. 

Pepper also seems to think that the old man is cracking a joke.

Unfortunately, while Ben is worried sick about his wife he simply won’t acknowledge the letter we’ve obtained. We’ll have to go investigate her (and likely Poor Richard’s) whereabouts first. 

Good thing that we were imprisoned right at the beginning of the game so we already know where that usual holding place might be. On the way there I notice that the tree at the crossroads looks a bit different from the way it did earlier. A heart is carved into it, previously hidden behind the General’s tax notice. Upon closer examination the initials B.F. and D.R. are revealed – it’s probably no coincidence that Pepper is able to stumble upon the heart of Saturday Night...sorry, the heart carved into the tree right now. 

"New York is cold but I like where I'm livin'"

I figure out quickly that the heart is actually a heart-shaped secret door behind which I find an old-fashioned puzzle box. In the spirit of unnecessarily prolonged game time I actually have to solve the bloody sliding block puzzle in order to open the damn box. If this were a job it would suck right now.

Welp!

Fortunately, there’s a help button at the bottom of the screen, and while I don’t notice it at first I am really relieved when I do. I hate sliding block puzzles, and I suck at them. Opening the box reveals a bundle of love letters from Ben Franklin to Deborah. Now where might Deborah be? The house I was once held prisoner in is now guarded by the two redcoats who were earlier to be found in front of the Pugh Mansion and later in front of Ben Franklin’s mansion. They didn’t exactly hone their cognitive skills in the meantime. I show them the King’s letter and pretend to be “The King’s Own Questioner” (get it?) but while they laugh about that claim they can’t find an explanation why I would know their password. To quote a Sith Lord much wiser than me: “This is too easy.” 

We're the knights of the question-mark-shaped table (aka Examelot).

Poor Richard is pacing up and down inside, and he’s quite angry at Ben Franklin, blaming him for the mess he’s in. Pepper tries to convince him that Ben was much better now but he won’t have any of it. Of course, we have been suspecting for a long time that Poor Richard is actually Deborah in disguise, so it’s kind of easy to figure out that handing Ben’s recently obtained love letters to him/her will help her think more kindly of her husband. 

You should see him when he’s high as a kite!

Now that we have established that Deborah is in fact Poor Richard, we can give her the bag of clothes we found earlier. Out we walk, Pepper with the honourable Mrs. Franklin in tow, leaving behind two confused (and slightly limited) redcoat guards. When they question her, Pepper insists that she had arrived with Mrs. Franklin and after a little back-and-forth they actually believe her. Poor Richard is saved from the gallows, and the family reunion of Ben, Debby and ever so creepy Sally is finally upon us. 

Sally seemed happy no matter what.

Thus ends act 4, and all that’s left is the quiz. As usual, we pass with flying colours and next time we will finally wrap up the game. Apologies for the long gap preceding this post – we have a new household member, and a needy one at that, so it took me a while to get back on track with the usual sleep deprivation and all. The next post(s) will be coming along much sooner!

Session time: 30 minutes
Total time: 4 hours 50 minutes