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Review
Adapted from an IFCOMP25 Review
I think if we spent too much time thinking about the randomness in our lives we might collapse of existential improbability. There was a 15-minute window during a crowded happy hour where I met the coed that introduced me to my wife. In the course of investigating a mysterious lung blood clot, we tripped over an unrelated cancerous nodule that had not yet started its dark work, putting the prognosis DEEP on the good side of the normal curve. Lifelong friendships forged literally by the drawing of names from a hat during freshman orientation. Aahh, the abyss, the abysss, its full of stars…
Woah! Pull back! Let me examine a much safer, lower stakes accident of history. The timing of my re-engagement with IF (itself a whole Rube Goldberg machine of serendipity), ensured I would first encounter Lady Thalia in her third adventure. I had thoughts. When you first engage any property, regardless how deep into its run, it is, definitionally, NEW TO YOU. There is a power and pitfall in this. The power is that your reactions are untainted by history, discourse or consensus. The work gets a fair shake on its own merits, unburdened by prior expectations. Is this a power though? Or is this the pitfall? Particularly for serialized entertainment, at some level is it not intended to be experienced in the context of its whole? Why else would you serialize it?
Having now completed CoC, that expanded context made a fool of me is my takeaway. Every one of my quibbles, specifically around the character of our protagonist, was roundly refuted here. Last time I initially found Lady T a bit much, her uber-competence tiresome and off putting before being redeemed by subsequent plotting. Talk about an accident of random timing. Had my engagement landed this year, none of those observations would be relevant, and I’d openly question the sanity of anyone who asserted so. In this episode, Lady T has foresworn her thieving ways to form a detective partnership (and more?) with her former adversary.
I do LOVE me a series that actively pushes its protagonist into new settings, letting their life evolve in wild ways rather than resolutely trapping them in the milieu that introduced them. The latter is not necessarily bad, I could ply the spaceways with Galaxy Jones forEVER, I just find the other more surprising. The gold standard for me has always been the Fletch novels, and Lady T definitely travels that road.
Watching Lady T adjust to her new life, with its bureaucratic cruft and new challenges was a joy of a setup. The fact that the detective work so often resembled thieving was the best of both worlds: acknowledging the skills that made her formidable but forcing her to fire and adjust into her new endeavor. She instantly established herself as a wonderful protagonist to inhabit. The plot this time around - foiling a series of robberies that intersect a Victorian Occult Society as well as a NEW thief trying to steal/soil her good name was a joy to navigate. Conversational puzzles, light B&E, personal stakes at every turn, a blossoming romance, there was (almost) no new element that did not win me over. And all of it built on the protagonist’s character - the element of the previous work I least appreciated!
How much of this flip flopping could have been avoided with a different roll of the cosmic dice? Engaging this series a few years earlier, or a few later? To acknowledge the capriciousness of the Fates, I should observe there were two elements that I preferred in the earlier work. With Lady T’s change in station, her former gadgeteer and gal-behind-the-screen (maybe a changing screen in deference to the setting?) Gwen is no longer a wry, stealth-scoreboard presence. She is a colder, more perfunctory scoreboard. Similarly, her social camouflage husband was a wonderful character creation of oblivious privilege and self-overestimation that nevertheless charmed in his cluelessness. Their mutual, mismatched affection was also a high point last time. Here, their back and forth seemed less warm, more transactional and diluted by their diverging preoccupations.
These are totally narratively justified, by the way. When life branches in different directions, not everyone can or should stay stagnant. They both legitimately had lives of their own to pursue. I did miss those character dynamics though. See, had dice broken differently I may not have even KNOWN to miss them!
If you forced me to identify a new element that didn’t enchant me this time around, I would reluctantly have to say the budding romance between our gentlewoman (former) thief and her partner. Based on everything we experienced in this entry, Lady T is a CATCH. This episode did not successfully establish why our protagonist might be so smitten. Schooled as I am by my contextual blindspots, I am not going to belabor or put much weight on this point. No all-caps multiple-punctuation hysterics here. Given these authors’ track record I would likely be eating crow on that in episode 5.
I haven’t discussed the gameplay much. It is choice-select, foregrounding dialogue tree puzzles where HOW you engage NPCs is important to get maximum info. It did seem to me that the gameplay was… ‘deceptive’ is not the word I’m looking for. Smoky/Mirrory? Providing the illusion of agency? It seemed like even if you chose badly, you were not blocked from progress, NPCs just got snippier. I suspected last time that it was not possible to ‘fail’ and here my impression was that this was even less well disguised (if true). (To be fair, subpar play did get reflected in your score, so it wasn’t that choices were consequence-free.) I don’t think that’s a meaningful criticism of the series in any case. You are here to participate in Lady T’s adventures, not key in a magic sequence of responses. The story is the point, and it’s a pretty great story. Special kudos to the new antagonist - not the implacable thinking machine of the previous case, but cleverly challenging Lady T in a whole new way: via her pride. I was engaged from start to finish, often questioning what the hell 2023-me was thinking.
Played: 11/11/25
Playtime: 1.5hrs, score 29/33
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging/Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete
Artistic/Technical ratings:
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
