Let's Play Mystery Legends: The Phantom of the Opera, Part 2
There’s a lot of picking-up-random-things-that-will-be-useful-later stuff in this section, so I might not remember where exactly everything is (feel free to correct). Also, I accidentally didn’t screencap a couple of the hidden object games, and one of the puzzles-sorry! I need to put my screencap hotkey in a better place. And now on with the show!
Part 2: BLUE MANAGER NEEDS ABSINTHE BADLY
One of many “close enough to a musical quote that you’ll get it, but not so much that RUG can sue us” lines in the game.
As you’ve no doubt noticed by now, the graphics in this game are effin’ gorgeous. A lot of work has obviously gone into creating a place of faded elegance and decayed splendor, and the resulting atmosphere is nice and spooky. One of the hallmarks of a lot of the great PotO adaptations is that you see relatively little of the Phantom himself but his presence infuses every inch of the story, and I think this game has captured that. This place really looks haunted, doesn’t it?
The auditorium door is impassable, so our options are the two corridors. Let’s try the left.
Really? You’ve been spirited away from your parents by God only knows what unholy means and imprisoned inside an abandoned building by the tormented spirit of a mad genius who wants to make you his bride, and you’re worried about slipping on an icy patch? I would think that would be an acceptable risk for the ultimate goal of, you know, finding a damn exit, but hey, it’s your game. Right corridor it is. (Maybe there’s some rock salt lying around somewhere…
Pick up the crest half in the statue’s hand. Straight ahead is a dead end, so let’s go right again.
Evelina notices the remarkable resemblance between herself and her mom, for those of you who didn’t pick up on it during the intro scene. (What would have been really cool would be for the painting of Christine to be the only undamaged and well-preserved object in the midst of all this decay and destruction. Just a thought.)
This is the part of every puzzle adventure game where you go around picking up stuff that currently has no discernable purpose but will of course prove vital later on. Totally Random But Essential Object #1: the urn back by the door. TRBEO #2 is currently stuck behind the window at left, so let’s check out the lock on the office door:
There’s two puzzles like this in the game (three if you count bonus level)-on each one you have to push back the springs in the right order. As of yet I haven’t figured out any logic behind the order, but it’s pretty easy to do trial-and-error.
Pick up absinthe bottle (TRBEO #3) from the statue on right, check out absinthe poster in the back, hear Kylie Minogue saying “I’m the Green Fairy” in the back of my head. The chessboard needs chess pieces, which we do not have, and the desk needs some illumination. I told you not to get rid of that flashlight so soon! Luckily we still have a light bulb, so in it goes to the lamp and on we go to our next hidden object game:
There’s something essentially eccentric and sadistic about puzzle games-which is why I think Erik makes a great antagonist for one. I mean for cryin’ out loud, I’m supposed to find a toothpick in this mess? It’s not even the quest item-that would be the second crest half.
And hey, wait a second-there’s a gun over there on the top shelf! To Hell with these jars and puzzle pieces, give me the God-damn weapon! (Okay, there’s some pretty clear indicators that supernatural forces are at work and conventional weapons probably won’t do much good, but Evelina doesn’t know that. If I were locked in a building by someone obviously intent on making me his love slave, I’d be grabbing anything that could shoot, stab, or bludgeon my way out of the predicament.)
Moving the picture frame aside gives us TRBEO #4, a “symbol card.” The door to the library ahead needs a key, and the hands of the clock are frozen at 9:20. The odds that these two things are not connected are surprisingly infinitesimal. But let’s head left into the conservatory hallway for now.
Not much here but a bag of sand (which will probably come in handy for that apparently insurmountable icy hallway) and a wilting plant. On to the conservatory.
Pick up a bucket-because hey, who doesn’t need a good bucket?-and make note of the flute-playing statue for later. There’s a hidden object game at left, but we’ll come to that later. Let’s get this gate open.
I’ll bet it was a pain fitting these two crest bits in every time they had to open this thing.
Alas, there’s no escaping via the snowbound forest which is of course a memorable feature of the Paris metro…wait, what?
And yes, we are in Paris and not, as I first thought playing through this, in some random opera house inexplicably built out in the woods somewhere-there will be some very clear indicators to that later on. So how did we somehow end up in the middle of nowhere next to a random roadside cemetery? The only explanation that I can think of is that we’re not in the actual Opera at all, but a domain in Ravenloft (isolated and apparently inescapable setting, check, possible Darklord, check, said Darklord tormented by deepest desire, double check…).
Pick up a piece of the branch (TRBEO #5), check out the gravestones, and head on down the road.
Everyone remembers the famous cottage scene from Phantom of the Opera, right?…No? Okay, I really have no idea what this is supposed to be. But there’s a well we can draw water from and TRBEO #6 in the form of a thermometer in the window. Which tells me it’s freezing (as do Evelina’s periodic brrr’s) so let’s go inside and get warm.
There’s a recipe book on the floor, and a hidden object game at right (one of the two I missed the grab for). You get the screwdriver at the end of it, which Evelina notes can be used to pry up a loose stone in the Conservatory. Obvious hint is obvious. And hey, what’s this on the stove?
Wow, the managers have their own illegal still back here! My mistake-this isn’t Ravenloft, it’s Thunder Road! (“And there was absinthe, absinthe to quench the devil’s thirst! The law they swore they’d get them, but the Phantom got them first!…”)
So yeah, now we have the all-important task of brewing up a fresh batch of absinthe. Luckily the recipe was in the book we picked up:
At least some of the Totally Random Objects are becoming less random. Wood and a thermometer we’ve got already, and an absinthe bottle once we’re finished, now we just need a worm, some booze, and some anise. Sounds like we need to go back to the conservatory.
Prying up the stone with the screwdriver gets us the worm and-a rock. I got a rock. While we’re here, might as well do the hidden object game:
If you hover over one of the object names with your pointer, a silhouette of it will appear in the hint mirror. Which is nice, because a) you can sometimes infer where something is by its position and angle and b) there are some things where you wouldn’t have the foggiest idea what to look for otherwise. I mean, how else am I going to know what cardamom pods look like?
So now we’ve got garden sheers, which I guess means it’s time to water that plant.
This stuff works surprisingly fast-maybe there was Miracle-Gro in the well? Snip off a bit with the garden sheers and yay, we have our anise! Still need a bottle of spirits, though. Hey, Erik, you’re a spirit now, would you mind-
“All Paris shall feel my wrath!”
I’ll take that as a no, then. Guess this means I’ll have to break into the library. Let’s see, there was a clock in the manager’s office…set the hands to 9:20…
Odd place to hide a key, but hey, at least it’s not some crazy puzzle lock. On the way to the library and hey, I’ve got a rock to throw through this window now:
*sings* Someone left a canopic jar in the ra-er, snow…
Egyptian gods? Can’t see how that might possibly tie into this canopic jar I just picked up (or the second jar by the back wall), no siree…
Snuffing the candles at right gets the first chess piece for the manager’s office, and the hidden object scene (which I didn’t grab but has a very creepy mime wedged in with the books) gets us the other book needed for this next puzzle:
The solution for this puzzle is the date from the Don Juan poster in the lobby-03/25/1896-which I guess is supposed to be the date when all the shit hit the fan in the original. The Masquerade ball was on Shrovetide (ie. Fat Tuesday), which is usually February-ish…factor in the time for Christine and Raoul’s secret engagement…yeah, that’s actually a pretty fair guess for timing.
Also got a nice little kick out of the book titles…
Yay, booze! I bet Evelina could use a drink right about now….what, she has to use it to brew absinthe? Go easy on the poor girl, she’s had a rough day….oh, fine. Back to the still we go.
Not so much a puzzle as a little mini-game-you have to keep the anise from clumping together by “stirring” the buds with your pointer. (The red buds are the ones too close together.) Keep them apart for long enough for the mixture to turn green, and voila!
Now can Evelina have a drink?…What do you mean, she needs to give the absinthe to the statues in the manager’s office? Okay, I’m sure there’s a weight issue in here, but surely the statues don’t care if it’s absinthe in their hands, right? A bottle filled with water should work just as…no? Oh, you’re no fun. Fine, let’s go back to the-hey, why’s the conservatory HOG sparkling? Didn’t I do this one already?
Took me forever to find the black-eyed pea. I just couldn’t find anything in the scene that looked like Fergie.
Finishing the game nets a mop-“This will be useful for cleaning up spills” Evelina notes. Gee thanks, because I never would have figured that much out on my own. Just go give the office statues their absinthe, would you?
And now we see why it had to be absinthe-because putting them in their proper places causes the Green Fairy poster to fall down and reveal the safe, obviously.
Okay, pretty self-explanatory-find the five numbers that occur only once on the board. As passwords go, my dear managers, that’s not very secure. Haven’t you guys heard of “at least eight characters including upper case, numbers, and/or special characters” principle? Oh well, there’s just another urn in the safe so it’s not like it’s a big deal if someone breaks in.
Having exhausted the possibilities on this particular wing, let’s backtrack a bit to the dining salon:
There’s a second chess piece on the table, and a third urn behind the chair. Looking at the mantle unlocks the next HOG:
The “fossil,” which is at bottom left, looks like nothing of the sort to me. Okay, I can kind of see fish bones if you lean in and squint, but still, no fair.
Four urns down, we need one more. Time to go spread some sand in the icy corridor to pick it up, and come back to the mantle (which I failed to screencap). Basically what we’ve got here are five funerary urns, which correspond with the information given on the gravestones on the cottage path:
Now, I know what you’re thinking: if these guys were cremated and their ashes put in these urns, why do they have grave sites?* The answer, of course, is so Evelina can use the symbols on the urns to determine who they belong to, place them above the proper death date on the mantle, and in doing so unlock the glass case in the hearth and take the black rose therein. I love puzzle game logic.
It’s not sorrow, it’s dye.
We’ve got our rose, now we just need a Phantom to give it to. Time to explore the other corridor, starting with the ballroom:
Well let’s see, Evelina. There’s the Phantom embracing your mother, and there’s your father bound and gagged watching helplessly behind them. Not only that, the Phantom says “Raoul will die” when you look at the puppets. You don’t need to be Robert Langdon to figure out the symbolism at work here.
This is probably my favorite room in the game, just because of how sinister and creepy it is. Stuff like this really shows the extent of Erik’s obsession; the care he takes to create the illusion of his desire reflects his determination to bring it about in reality, no matter what. (As Gerik and his Barbie Dream Opera proved, it’s not easy to get this sort of thing right.) Eerie as it is, there’s not much to do here now-the organ grinder’s monkey wants something we don’t have yet. Backtrack to the powder room.
The face in front of the wash basin blinks and looks around the room-freaky! Electricity periodically arcs across the puddle from an unseen short, explaining why we can’t just get our feet wet. Remember that mop that will be so helpful for cleaning up spills? Let’s give it a shot…
Huh, apparently the mop cleans up spills and makes Opera Ghosts appear in the mirror. Okay, here’s your rose, but first let me grab these-nail clippers? Seriously? I mean, I know TSA thinks they’re tools of the devil, but I’d still rather have a gun or…okay, okay, the nail clippers it is. TRBEO #7.
Oh yeah, right, the rose.
Is it just me, or does Erik look like he’s going to get into an epic rose battle with Tuxedo Mask here?
Each cutscene (using the term somewhat loosely; it’s more like a cut-tableau) starts off with one of these “find 20 music symbols" games-mostly various notes, although accidentals and clefs show up too. A nice change of pace, even if it can be a pain to find the last one or two symbols.
At first I thought it was odd for Erik to harass the management in person, but then I remembered he gatecrashed Debienne and Poligny’s retirement party, so there is precedent for it. At least now we know how he managed to blackmail the two of them-he must have found out about the illegal absinthe distillery they were running in the back.
In the next section, we will explore the backstage area and discover a very time-consuming way to play music.
~LCD
*Okay, part of my grandfather's ashes are interred in a military cemetery. I have no idea how common this would have been in 19th century France.
Part 2: BLUE MANAGER NEEDS ABSINTHE BADLY
One of many “close enough to a musical quote that you’ll get it, but not so much that RUG can sue us” lines in the game.
As you’ve no doubt noticed by now, the graphics in this game are effin’ gorgeous. A lot of work has obviously gone into creating a place of faded elegance and decayed splendor, and the resulting atmosphere is nice and spooky. One of the hallmarks of a lot of the great PotO adaptations is that you see relatively little of the Phantom himself but his presence infuses every inch of the story, and I think this game has captured that. This place really looks haunted, doesn’t it?
The auditorium door is impassable, so our options are the two corridors. Let’s try the left.
Really? You’ve been spirited away from your parents by God only knows what unholy means and imprisoned inside an abandoned building by the tormented spirit of a mad genius who wants to make you his bride, and you’re worried about slipping on an icy patch? I would think that would be an acceptable risk for the ultimate goal of, you know, finding a damn exit, but hey, it’s your game. Right corridor it is. (Maybe there’s some rock salt lying around somewhere…
Pick up the crest half in the statue’s hand. Straight ahead is a dead end, so let’s go right again.
Evelina notices the remarkable resemblance between herself and her mom, for those of you who didn’t pick up on it during the intro scene. (What would have been really cool would be for the painting of Christine to be the only undamaged and well-preserved object in the midst of all this decay and destruction. Just a thought.)
This is the part of every puzzle adventure game where you go around picking up stuff that currently has no discernable purpose but will of course prove vital later on. Totally Random But Essential Object #1: the urn back by the door. TRBEO #2 is currently stuck behind the window at left, so let’s check out the lock on the office door:
There’s two puzzles like this in the game (three if you count bonus level)-on each one you have to push back the springs in the right order. As of yet I haven’t figured out any logic behind the order, but it’s pretty easy to do trial-and-error.
Pick up absinthe bottle (TRBEO #3) from the statue on right, check out absinthe poster in the back, hear Kylie Minogue saying “I’m the Green Fairy” in the back of my head. The chessboard needs chess pieces, which we do not have, and the desk needs some illumination. I told you not to get rid of that flashlight so soon! Luckily we still have a light bulb, so in it goes to the lamp and on we go to our next hidden object game:
There’s something essentially eccentric and sadistic about puzzle games-which is why I think Erik makes a great antagonist for one. I mean for cryin’ out loud, I’m supposed to find a toothpick in this mess? It’s not even the quest item-that would be the second crest half.
And hey, wait a second-there’s a gun over there on the top shelf! To Hell with these jars and puzzle pieces, give me the God-damn weapon! (Okay, there’s some pretty clear indicators that supernatural forces are at work and conventional weapons probably won’t do much good, but Evelina doesn’t know that. If I were locked in a building by someone obviously intent on making me his love slave, I’d be grabbing anything that could shoot, stab, or bludgeon my way out of the predicament.)
Moving the picture frame aside gives us TRBEO #4, a “symbol card.” The door to the library ahead needs a key, and the hands of the clock are frozen at 9:20. The odds that these two things are not connected are surprisingly infinitesimal. But let’s head left into the conservatory hallway for now.
Not much here but a bag of sand (which will probably come in handy for that apparently insurmountable icy hallway) and a wilting plant. On to the conservatory.
Pick up a bucket-because hey, who doesn’t need a good bucket?-and make note of the flute-playing statue for later. There’s a hidden object game at left, but we’ll come to that later. Let’s get this gate open.
I’ll bet it was a pain fitting these two crest bits in every time they had to open this thing.
Alas, there’s no escaping via the snowbound forest which is of course a memorable feature of the Paris metro…wait, what?
And yes, we are in Paris and not, as I first thought playing through this, in some random opera house inexplicably built out in the woods somewhere-there will be some very clear indicators to that later on. So how did we somehow end up in the middle of nowhere next to a random roadside cemetery? The only explanation that I can think of is that we’re not in the actual Opera at all, but a domain in Ravenloft (isolated and apparently inescapable setting, check, possible Darklord, check, said Darklord tormented by deepest desire, double check…).
Pick up a piece of the branch (TRBEO #5), check out the gravestones, and head on down the road.
Everyone remembers the famous cottage scene from Phantom of the Opera, right?…No? Okay, I really have no idea what this is supposed to be. But there’s a well we can draw water from and TRBEO #6 in the form of a thermometer in the window. Which tells me it’s freezing (as do Evelina’s periodic brrr’s) so let’s go inside and get warm.
There’s a recipe book on the floor, and a hidden object game at right (one of the two I missed the grab for). You get the screwdriver at the end of it, which Evelina notes can be used to pry up a loose stone in the Conservatory. Obvious hint is obvious. And hey, what’s this on the stove?
Wow, the managers have their own illegal still back here! My mistake-this isn’t Ravenloft, it’s Thunder Road! (“And there was absinthe, absinthe to quench the devil’s thirst! The law they swore they’d get them, but the Phantom got them first!…”)
So yeah, now we have the all-important task of brewing up a fresh batch of absinthe. Luckily the recipe was in the book we picked up:
At least some of the Totally Random Objects are becoming less random. Wood and a thermometer we’ve got already, and an absinthe bottle once we’re finished, now we just need a worm, some booze, and some anise. Sounds like we need to go back to the conservatory.
Prying up the stone with the screwdriver gets us the worm and-a rock. I got a rock. While we’re here, might as well do the hidden object game:
If you hover over one of the object names with your pointer, a silhouette of it will appear in the hint mirror. Which is nice, because a) you can sometimes infer where something is by its position and angle and b) there are some things where you wouldn’t have the foggiest idea what to look for otherwise. I mean, how else am I going to know what cardamom pods look like?
So now we’ve got garden sheers, which I guess means it’s time to water that plant.
This stuff works surprisingly fast-maybe there was Miracle-Gro in the well? Snip off a bit with the garden sheers and yay, we have our anise! Still need a bottle of spirits, though. Hey, Erik, you’re a spirit now, would you mind-
“All Paris shall feel my wrath!”
I’ll take that as a no, then. Guess this means I’ll have to break into the library. Let’s see, there was a clock in the manager’s office…set the hands to 9:20…
Odd place to hide a key, but hey, at least it’s not some crazy puzzle lock. On the way to the library and hey, I’ve got a rock to throw through this window now:
*sings* Someone left a canopic jar in the ra-er, snow…
Egyptian gods? Can’t see how that might possibly tie into this canopic jar I just picked up (or the second jar by the back wall), no siree…
Snuffing the candles at right gets the first chess piece for the manager’s office, and the hidden object scene (which I didn’t grab but has a very creepy mime wedged in with the books) gets us the other book needed for this next puzzle:
The solution for this puzzle is the date from the Don Juan poster in the lobby-03/25/1896-which I guess is supposed to be the date when all the shit hit the fan in the original. The Masquerade ball was on Shrovetide (ie. Fat Tuesday), which is usually February-ish…factor in the time for Christine and Raoul’s secret engagement…yeah, that’s actually a pretty fair guess for timing.
Also got a nice little kick out of the book titles…
Yay, booze! I bet Evelina could use a drink right about now….what, she has to use it to brew absinthe? Go easy on the poor girl, she’s had a rough day….oh, fine. Back to the still we go.
Not so much a puzzle as a little mini-game-you have to keep the anise from clumping together by “stirring” the buds with your pointer. (The red buds are the ones too close together.) Keep them apart for long enough for the mixture to turn green, and voila!
Now can Evelina have a drink?…What do you mean, she needs to give the absinthe to the statues in the manager’s office? Okay, I’m sure there’s a weight issue in here, but surely the statues don’t care if it’s absinthe in their hands, right? A bottle filled with water should work just as…no? Oh, you’re no fun. Fine, let’s go back to the-hey, why’s the conservatory HOG sparkling? Didn’t I do this one already?
Took me forever to find the black-eyed pea. I just couldn’t find anything in the scene that looked like Fergie.
Finishing the game nets a mop-“This will be useful for cleaning up spills” Evelina notes. Gee thanks, because I never would have figured that much out on my own. Just go give the office statues their absinthe, would you?
And now we see why it had to be absinthe-because putting them in their proper places causes the Green Fairy poster to fall down and reveal the safe, obviously.
Okay, pretty self-explanatory-find the five numbers that occur only once on the board. As passwords go, my dear managers, that’s not very secure. Haven’t you guys heard of “at least eight characters including upper case, numbers, and/or special characters” principle? Oh well, there’s just another urn in the safe so it’s not like it’s a big deal if someone breaks in.
Having exhausted the possibilities on this particular wing, let’s backtrack a bit to the dining salon:
There’s a second chess piece on the table, and a third urn behind the chair. Looking at the mantle unlocks the next HOG:
The “fossil,” which is at bottom left, looks like nothing of the sort to me. Okay, I can kind of see fish bones if you lean in and squint, but still, no fair.
Four urns down, we need one more. Time to go spread some sand in the icy corridor to pick it up, and come back to the mantle (which I failed to screencap). Basically what we’ve got here are five funerary urns, which correspond with the information given on the gravestones on the cottage path:
Now, I know what you’re thinking: if these guys were cremated and their ashes put in these urns, why do they have grave sites?* The answer, of course, is so Evelina can use the symbols on the urns to determine who they belong to, place them above the proper death date on the mantle, and in doing so unlock the glass case in the hearth and take the black rose therein. I love puzzle game logic.
It’s not sorrow, it’s dye.
We’ve got our rose, now we just need a Phantom to give it to. Time to explore the other corridor, starting with the ballroom:
Well let’s see, Evelina. There’s the Phantom embracing your mother, and there’s your father bound and gagged watching helplessly behind them. Not only that, the Phantom says “Raoul will die” when you look at the puppets. You don’t need to be Robert Langdon to figure out the symbolism at work here.
This is probably my favorite room in the game, just because of how sinister and creepy it is. Stuff like this really shows the extent of Erik’s obsession; the care he takes to create the illusion of his desire reflects his determination to bring it about in reality, no matter what. (As Gerik and his Barbie Dream Opera proved, it’s not easy to get this sort of thing right.) Eerie as it is, there’s not much to do here now-the organ grinder’s monkey wants something we don’t have yet. Backtrack to the powder room.
The face in front of the wash basin blinks and looks around the room-freaky! Electricity periodically arcs across the puddle from an unseen short, explaining why we can’t just get our feet wet. Remember that mop that will be so helpful for cleaning up spills? Let’s give it a shot…
Huh, apparently the mop cleans up spills and makes Opera Ghosts appear in the mirror. Okay, here’s your rose, but first let me grab these-nail clippers? Seriously? I mean, I know TSA thinks they’re tools of the devil, but I’d still rather have a gun or…okay, okay, the nail clippers it is. TRBEO #7.
Oh yeah, right, the rose.
Is it just me, or does Erik look like he’s going to get into an epic rose battle with Tuxedo Mask here?
Each cutscene (using the term somewhat loosely; it’s more like a cut-tableau) starts off with one of these “find 20 music symbols" games-mostly various notes, although accidentals and clefs show up too. A nice change of pace, even if it can be a pain to find the last one or two symbols.
At first I thought it was odd for Erik to harass the management in person, but then I remembered he gatecrashed Debienne and Poligny’s retirement party, so there is precedent for it. At least now we know how he managed to blackmail the two of them-he must have found out about the illegal absinthe distillery they were running in the back.
In the next section, we will explore the backstage area and discover a very time-consuming way to play music.
~LCD
*Okay, part of my grandfather's ashes are interred in a military cemetery. I have no idea how common this would have been in 19th century France.