Malcolm’s Revenge - You Remain My Power, My Pleasure, My Pain

Written by Michael

So, let me start off this post with some behind the scenes info.  See, while it looks like it’s just been a week or two I last posted, it’s been over a month since I wrote the last post.  I was working ahead on my games while I had some free time, but my progress was thwarted by this game.

It seems I can’t stay motivated for this title.

Obviously, this will all be appropriate discussions in the final rating, whenever that comes, but this game so far lacks the charm of the previous two, at least to me.  It’s doing the bare minimum to appear related to the previous titles. 

Don’t worry, I’m not giving up.  If I wasn’t playing this for the blog, though, I’d probably bounce over to a video longplay or just follow a walkthrough to see my $50 investment pay off somehow.

Maybe it will get better in the next chapter or section?  Once I find my way off this island?

In the Kyrandia criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate but equally important groups: the royal family, who have a great distrust of jesters, and the accused, who have a great mistrust of authority figures.  These are their stories.

Negativity aside; shall we get back to this?  I was exploring the land, trying to figure out the next step, and at some point I was caught trespassing on Kyrandian soil by Constable Herman.  Yes, the same Herman that repaired a broken bridge in the first game, and then was turned into a zombie hell-bent on destroying Brandon.

He’s now Brandon’s law enforcer.

I’m being sent to jail, and he tells me to put all my belongings into a box placed on the ground.  As I do so, he tells me not to palm anything.

Hmmm.  That’s a hint, but it didn’t lead to anything for me this time.  I start putting items in the box, but then pick up something and delay; Herman gets impatient and finishes the job for me, not noticing the item I have actively selected.  I’m then put in the dungeon jail, with a warden of sorts.

In this jail, in order to get released, I need to perform manual labor.  I mean me, the player, not just Malcolm.  I have to make some doilies, which is a multi-click process.  

Pull some thread from a machine

Use the machine to form the doily

Use the provided scissors to cut the connected string

Pick up the doily and place it into a slot across the room

The game actually makes me manufacture each and every one.

I wonder if there’s a specific item I could have palmed and used to avoid this, but I’m not checking now.  I’ll check a walkthrough at the end.

After that tedium, I’m released from jail, and can collect each of my items from that wooden box, and then I can finally get back to my game.  I think I might have dawdled too long on a screen, and that’s how I got caught.  So I saved my game more frequently from now on.  Remember, I was told previously I need a disguise, so that’s going to be a priority.

Maybe if I keep begging, he’ll roll over and play dead?

Down at the docks, I talk with the captain of the docked ship.  He says the ship is for circus employees only.  “I look like I belong in a circus, don’t I?”  I had forgotten that I had set the dial on my dashboard to “lie”, but my conscience told me I was on the right path: “That’s the way to do it... lie to these idiots!”

Everyone is just so glad to see me.

Remember that I needed to get some flowers to put on the grave in order to talk to the dear, departed queen?  The same one who thinks I killed both her and her husband?  Well, the flowers run away from Malcolm if he tries to pick them.  We learned that the last time around.  But if we use the broken beaker with the nice, jagged-edge to cut them, they don’t run away.  Makes no sense to me, but okay.  I get some flowers, and then place them on the grave.

The oldest excuse in the book.

Katherine appears to me, and tries to dismiss me, since I’m a murderer.  I tell her it wasn’t me, it was the enchanted knife.  She responds “Your hand was on the blade!” and I lose my patience too soon: “I was trying to stop it, you idiot!”

She shuts down the conversation at this point.  I handled this poorly.

So, I restore the game and change the mood meter to Nice rather than my usual lying self.  I say better things this time: “The last thing I wanted was for you or William to be hurt.”  As for my hand on the blade?  “I was honestly trying to stop it.  William knows.  Why don’t you ask his ghost?”

She tells me that “Only a Royal Séance can bring his ghost back now.”  Guess that’s another task I’ll have to do somehow, but that’s the first I’m learning of it so I have no clue as to the next step yet.

“You know, for kids!”

Exploring some more brings me back to the toy factory.  I discover some new things here.  First, there’s a couple of levers I can adjust on the machine, which will change which toy the machine will make.  But for the toy soldier we saw a silhouette of to this point, the raw material we need is a wooden log, which I had already grabbed one.  Inserting the log and powering on the machine nets me a toy soldier.  I can shift the gears around and make a wooden rocking horse as well.

Another item to be made is a leather ball.  Of course, I had to guess the leather part; I thought to try the old shoe as an ingredient and it worked.

I’m not sure what I need these for yet, but at least I have them.

In the back room apartment, I also discover something else in my dresser I missed before; I guess I only clicked on two of the four drawers before.  I found a “Nut-On-A-String”.  Hmm.

Also, somehow I didn’t click on the big hole in the floor next to the toy machine earlier.  If you do so, you’ll jump down the hole into the basement.  Any raw materials that fail to work for the toy machine get discarded down here, if you wish to reclaim them.  There’s a stream of water here, and a clay jar that’s too hot to touch.

Also, there’s a good glass flask, and a carpet.  There’s some bricks in the wall patching some kind of a hole, which may be a hint or puzzle of some sort.  While I’m here, I decide to fill the flask with water, although I don’t know why yet.  Just to try it, I suppose.

I was going to make my second Tim Robbins reference of the day, but instead I'll listen to some Huey Lewis music.

There are some steps leading to a door, but it doesn’t bring me back to the factory.  Rather, it brings me to the Kyrandia Town Hall, where there’s a statue of some kind of beast gently holding a wine goblet with just two fingers, and a submarine sandwich in the other hand.  If I’m meant to do something with this, or be inspired by it, at this point I’m unsure.  The game refers to it as “The Voice of Reason”.

He repeats this joke every single time he enters this room.

So, how to handle the dairy?  You need to attract the cows into the room, and I found the solution by trial and error, not by being given a suitable hint.  You need to combine a seed with a flask of water to create a small sprout.  Inserting this into the hopper on the left of the screen raises the number on the dial; when you have done this five times, the cows all arrive.

Yes, you need to do it until the cows come home.

At this point, they start milling around, and the automated equipment starts to collect their milk.  You need to puncture the collection basin with the bent nail, creating a hole for the milk to leak from.  Using an empty flask on the hole fills it with cream.

Two comments here:  First, I didn’t know I needed the cream yet, but will find out why in this post.

Second:  if you leave the screen for any reason, and then return, you have to repeat ALL OF THIS.  Creating the five sprouts, punching the hole, and so on.

Later on, I will decide I need more than one flask of cream.  And had to do this all over again. 

So, here’s what it looks like when we’ve done all that:

And putting a flask to the stream catches the cream.

At this point, I didn’t even know why I needed the cream.  I was just solving obvious puzzles, hoping something would advance my progress.

After leaving the same for a while, getting a good night’s rest, and returning, I figured out how to get into the bath house.  It was a cliché adventure game puzzle.

Combining the nut-on-a-string with the bent nail creates a... wait for it... makeshift fishing line.  Not unlike the one I needed almost every game I’ve played for the blog.  

Using it in the coin box, rather than fishing out a coin or something, it engages the mechanism to open the door.  And so we can enter.

Here’s another one of the puzzles where you need to set your mood-meter before entering the screen, and without knowing why until you get potentially dead-ended (or at least severely inconvenienced).  See, if you aren’t set for “lying” before entering the scene, the manager of the bath house will recognize you as Malcolm, and you won’t dispute it.  So, he asks you to leave, and trying to come back in with the bent nail doesn’t work anymore.  He apparently fixes the coin box after your first entry!  So, there’s probably another solution to get inside, but I chose to restore my game and change my attitude before entering.

Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar?

Malcolm stole the cookie from the cookie jar

Who me? Yes you! Couldn't be.  Then who?

After convincing the manager that I am not who he thinks I am, I notice some clothes hanging in the window of the bath house, and try to take them.  I’m immediately stopped, of course, so this means I need to distract the manager.  There’s a temperature dial on the nearby tree, and if we try to touch it, we also get noticed... unless we wait for him to look the other way for a brief second.

We can change the dial in both directions, but the correct one is clockwise -- to make the bath hotter.  The customers all run and jump from the facility, and the manager chases after them, trying to determine what spooked them.  We are able to grab the clothes from the window.

Still, I have no clue what to do next, so I keep exploring.  I try reusing the fishing line in places, and find that I can fish in the stream underneath the toy factory, and catch an eel.  I didn't know what I needed it for, but would soon find out.

A student of Marcel Marceau.

See, in the back of my head, I’m thinking that I need the mime for something.  Or at least get him to do something.  So, I try clicking things on him, and I luck out with one, that only works when he’s facing with his back towards the player: use the eel on him.

Malcolm puts it in the hood of his outfit (because, of course, a mime has a hood?) and he gets all grossed out from the smell.  He runs off to the baths, and from there, the solution is obvious.  We repeat EXACTLY what we did before with raising the temperature to steal the mime’s clothes.

This puzzle is not the only one reminiscent of Monkey Island 2 in this post, by the way.

This will definitely be an outfit to get us on the boat.  Or, at the very least, keep us from being captured again as Malcolm.

But I thought this guy was the captain, barking commands at the crew?

Let’s see about leaving.  I wear the outfit and head to the docks.  The crewmember at the entrance asks about the fish cream sandwich I had promised to bring him.  Oh, and yeah, it seems the mime is the boat captain.  Huh.

Guess I need to figure out that fish cream parlor now.

Subtle hint.

This one took me a while, but as I said, I get inspired by LeChuck’s Revenge.  In my travels, I go back to the dump, and notice the squirrel is still there.  I try to go fishing for him with a baited hook (remember, I put a nail on the string with the nut) but it works out a little different.

Considering my conscience is a part of me, this is considered self-love?

First, I’m told I’m not close enough.  But if I throw some seeds, he comes closer to me.  Then, I use the fishing line.  But instead, Malcolm uses the nut on a string to hypnotize the squirrel and capture him.

Okay, so hypnotizing a furry creature is definitely from the MI2 playbook.  But also is using a rodent to clear out a restaurant.

Um... pot... kettle.... black?

The hypnotized flying squirrel gets all freaked out in the cafe, and suddenly, the place is cleared out.

Could you describe the ruckus?

The clerk was apparently looking the other way when we cleared the room, and had no idea of what we did.  Behind him is the same fish cream machine that was here in Malcolm’s childhood, and although we’d like a fish cream sandwich, we’re told no, because they are out of ingredients.  I need to bring him an eel, sesame, and cream, and he’ll make us a sandwich.

Well, that means some more fishing.  So back down to the cellar below the toy factory.  But down there, I lucked upon another puzzle.  

I clicked on the magic carpet, and on the upper left of it, there’s a green apple that Malcolm says is glowing.  As opposed to the red one in the other corner.  Clicking on these sends me magically to...

Darn.  I mean, Darm.

...a magician from the first game, Darm.  Who sees me as some kind of DoorDash sandwich man.  Well, that’s another sandwich I’m going to need.

So, in true RPG style, let me grind out some stats, by repeating several steps to attract the cows to the dairy, get cream, fish for eel, and take some of those sesame seeds from the dairy.  I make a couple of sandwiches, and bring one back to Darm.

He’s on our good side, but I can’t seem to get anywhere with him.  I try all my inventory items, to no avail, and then think to try the jester’s staff on him.  It makes him laugh himself so silly, it causes him to need to use the restroom.  When he’s gone, I can then talk to the dragon.

It’s an interesting conversation; we learn that she makes Darm use portal potions for transportation because she’s lazy and likes him to think she’s too old to do it herself anymore.  “Even from him, whom I adore, I don’t enjoy being treated like a pony.”

So, when I try to get my hands on one of those potions, she calls me out.  She knows I’m Malcolm in disguise.  She doesn’t remember where they are hidden, but thinks it has something to do with the Festival of Mortar.  “He had his trowels out last week for some reason.”

This is where I chose to take a break.  I’m thinking the Portal Potion is an alternate way to get off the island, rather than the boat, but I may be wrong.  Maybe I need both?

Still, I think my next trip will be to feed the ship's first mate (I suppose he's his own best friend?) and just try to go on my way.  We shall see.

Session time: 1 hour 45 minutes

Total time: 3 hours 30 minutes