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Review
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:
(Spoiler - click to show) 1. Doing the medallion puzzle multiple times (as I did not take the medallion the first time) felt like a lot of tedious clicking—there’s nothing more to figure out at that point, it’s just busywork. Since the game clearly has enough state-tracking to support this, it would be nice if you didn’t have to go through all the motions again after doing it once.2. Unless I missed something, it didn’t seem like there were any hints towards the bed canopy thing in the king’s bedroom. You can lawnmower it but it’s not very satisfying to open the shutters fully just because you haven’t done that yet and then examine everything in the room to see if that did anything, compared to actually feeling like you drew a logical conclusion based on information.
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!
