Pharaohs' Heir

I thought this game was both innovative and challenging. It definitely seemed original and I like a lot of the ideas, but I struggled with some of the execution.

This is a choice-based game focused on interrogation. You are a suspect being questioned by the police after being caught in Versailles (I think) and you have to explain what happened.

There are three parts of the story that you can pick up: in the library at the beginning of the game, at the King's bedroom, and in the basement under (I think, again) Versailles.

You try to construct a plausible explanation for what happened, but if you pick the 'wrong' thing, the interrogator calls you out and you start over (kind of like Spider and Web). But, information carries over, so doing something in one thread lets you perform new actions in another.

This was a fun concept and I think the core of the game is very solid. I ran into two issues:

1. I think the 'timeout' for doing things wrong is too harsh. It felt like almost any action I tried would reset me back to the beginning, making you have to click back in and redo it all. This goes away during the very last puzzle (where, ironically, I might have preferred easier resets).
2. The very last puzzle broke things into a few too many steps. I would have preferred it if we could (Spoiler - click to show)color things immediately after washing them instead of putting them back in the box and selecting them from a list again.

I think the puzzles and concept here are neat, and most of the execution works for me. I also liked how the inconsistencies in the statements resolved themselves in the end.

This is a short, lighthearted puzzle game in which you play as Layla, the so-called assistant to star archaeologist Herbert Tapioca (who is actually useless on his own). You are being questioned after apparently breaking into Versailles and engaging in some property destruction in pursuit of ancient Egyptian artifacts hidden there. (The lack of direct tomb-raiding and the fact that Layla is half-Egyptian herself seem like an effort to make this classic adventure-archaeologist tale reasonably guilt-free—your claim to go messing about with these artifacts may not be impeccable, but it’s better than the late French royals’, probably.) Amusingly, the police only seem concerned with whether you are giving an internally consistent account of your actions and not whether that account exculpates you in any way (it doesn’t); you've just got to get the right events in the right order.

I had a bit of difficulty getting started before realizing the central conceit; that the (Spoiler - click to show)time travel elements are treated as a twist at the end is a slightly awkward decision given that you can’t make progress without figuring out that there must be some, and I wonder if flagging that a little more specifically up front (without giving all the details away, of course) might be helpful for people.

Once I got to grips with the way the game worked, though, I had fun figuring out the secrets of Versailles/the pharaohs. The puzzles weren’t too hard but provided satisfying “aha” moments, and the game employs a few tricks to make them brute force–proof that I think make sense under the circumstances. I also appreciated the way the interrogators’ comments point the player towards segments where there are unsolved puzzles remaining. There were just a couple of pain points:

In general, though, I had fun with the puzzles and the little interactions between the hapless Herbert and bold and clever Layla, and I found this a nice little diversion!

One likes to think of oneself as an independent thinker whose opinions are all entirely rational and timeless, standing athwart the tides of history unmoved by their eddies and undertows. But alas, even (especially?) those who proclaim that their views are unbiased and objective are downstream of crass, material considerations like marketing. Thus, as someone who was born in 1980 and experienced a certain series of promotional pushes during my formative years, I can tell you that to me if adventure has a name, it must be Indiana Jones. The fantasy of delving into lost tombs, solving puzzles steeped in archaeology and mythology, and punching-out Nazis is fantastically compelling to me. The one fly in the ointment, of course, is that one line, three movies deep, about how all these artifacts belong in a (Western) museum doesn’t do much to lampshade the awkward tradition of colonialism and antiquities-looting into which said fantasy fits.

Pharaoh’s Heir manages to neatly avoid the trap, however. This short choice-based romp has you solving a bunch of Egypt-themed puzzles and raiding secret chambers, but you’re not actually marauding through Giza with capacious pockets and a dodgy export license: instead, you’re uncovering the secrets of Louis XIV and plundering your way through Versailles, on the theory that he was somehow involved with a legacy of Pharaonic mysticism. This is historically risible, missing the actual French Egyptological craze by a century or so, but it sure does defang the plundering-the-East issue, since you wind up raiding the tomb of someone who raided the tombs of the actual Egyptians.

The fact that you’re playing the female “sidekick” also helps avoid the problematic patriarchal politics of the genre (let’s not dwell on how old Marian was meant to be when Indy had his first fling with her) – you play as Layla, assistant to so-called “intrepid archaeologist” Herbert Tapioca, but his brains are of a piece with his surname. Oh, he’s pleasant enough, and can even be helpful in his bumbling way, but you’re the one actually responsible for unveiling the various secrets on offer.

The other novel element of Pharaoh’s Heir is its nonlinear nature. The story is told in flashback, as a police official questions you about your role in destroying some national treasure or other; in your replies to him, you can jump back to a morning consultation with Herbert, a later visit to Versailles, or the climactic moment when you breach the hidden sanctum, and recount your explorations to your interrogator. These start out fairly straightforwardly, with only a couple of choices each, but they intersect in a nonlinear fashion: there are clues in Versailles that help you make sense of what to try in the morning, for example. None of the puzzles are that complex – there’s a lot of pointing mirrors and putting things in holes in the right order – but the fact that you’re unbound by chronology helps lend an extra air of intrigue to proceedings.

As for those puzzles, they’re fun enough to solve, though I admit that I still don’t really understand how the last one is meant to work, despite having found all the clues and looked at the walkthrough that lays out the answer; you need to correlate two separate lists of objects, but I can’t quite figure out the logic for the order in which you’re meant to do so. That final puzzle is also sufficiently involved that trying to solve it in a choice-based interface, where it takes a dozen or so clicks each time you want to make an attempt, wound up a bit frustrating (thus the recourse to the walkthrough). But up until that point I was having a grand time; again, this sort of thing is my jam, and the writing is zippy enough to keep things moving, with the police inspector livening up proceedings with the occasional arch comment as well as oblique hints as to which time period to which you might want to focus your attention. That time-hopping is eventually explained with a minimum degree of diegetic plausibility, which helps prevent proceedings from feeling too gamey as well as pointing toward potential sequels – if there are more Layla Roccentiny games to come, sign me up, albeit given precedent I might get a bit worried come installments four and five.