Search for the Lost Ark

The time has come to return the Ark of the Covenant to its caretakers. By which I mean of course “its rightful place on the altar in the local church.” From Josiah’s cave deep in the Temple Mount to Chartres Cathedral flourishing in its Scholastic heyday, millennia of mystery culminate in, naturlich, a jaunty bit of sleuthing for a seminarian.

This sleuthing revels in the simple joys of text adventuring, as par for Garry Francis’ indefatigable output, but Search for the Lost Ark presents perhaps his most vibrantly themed escapade yet, with several thematic puzzles that sizzle like quips. Favorites include Father Matisse taking his secret to the grave, so we dig him up, and having to defeat Father Alucard, replete with sharp canines and a Romanian accent, by showing him a crucifix. By so tightly connecting the colorful exuberance of the puzzles into the overarching scheme, rather than the sterilized laboratory logics of disjointed brainteasers, we get a committed whimsy that makes the church grounds a vivid playspace to explore. Most importantly, the cartoony silliness melds with a lighthearted intentionality that prevents the antics from veering into sacrilegious superciliousness. Jokes stay Sunday safe: “Q: Who was the fastest man in the Bible? / A: Adam, because he was first in the human race.” Moreover, the twist ending sidesteps some of the more charged implications of the Ark, electing instead for a cutesy satisfaction: “Oh, wow! Your eyes are dazzled by the brilliance of the gold-covered object in the chest. It’s the Ark of the Covenant! It’s not the real thing, but a one-fifth size replica. Even so, it’s just as beautiful as you imagine the real Ark to be and you immediately understand why the Church Council wants it to be recovered.” Somehow I found this reveal kind of heartwarming, settling neatly into the provincial devotional vibes and helping to modulate the tonal dissonance to where “That will look good on your resumé when your training is complete” feels like an adequate denouement. And I’m sure it has spared Garry from having to brush up on his Amharic as he navigates a deluged inbox.

What contributes most to keeping the puzzles contiguous is the themed scavenger hunt at the heart of the game about discovering inscriptions of verses from each book of Torah, then using these to solve a five-digit combination lock. The solution, where each verse includes a number that goes into the combination, is satisfactory enough, although I perhaps overthought things and ended up with a much more baroque answer: the verses, Genesis 1:9, Exodus 31:18, Leviticus 16:1, Numbers 35:13, and Deuteronomy 15:1, all contain one number other than 1 or 3, or the three-in-one, yielding a combination of 98655, which is anachronistically Christian sure but certainly within the “blend between Indiana Jones and Father Brown” Garry evokes.

Demonstrating, of course, that despite the increased commitment to setting, the true lifeblood here is neoclassical adventuring: “When you look under the bed, you find a ladder. That’s a strange place to keep a ladder, so you pull it out.” And, as anyone might expect, it’s pleasant, fun, and funny, so what more could you want, the Ark of the Covenant?