The latest entry in our Love Letters to Adventures project has been my favourite.
Friend-of-the-blog Darkshoxx and I kicked off this collaboration in January. Our mission is to play a classic or obscure point-and-click release with a title starting with each letter of the alphabet, and It has been a rather strange journey so far.
After playing Atlantis: The Lost Tales at the beginning of the year, I don’t think I’m going to go back to the series any time soon. Bad Day on the Midway in February was better, if an incredibly surreal experience that didn’t always make sense. And I’m sure that underneath the convoluted gameplay in last month’s Chronomaster lies a release which would be popular with adventure fans if it was to be remade today and refined.
There were several choices for the letter ‘D’ in April (the stream for which was unfortunately postponed to the beginning of May due to illness). As all three of the potential games were on my to-play list and Chronomaster had been my choice, Darkshoxx had the pleasure of selecting our latest title. We’re both fans of detective narratives and full-motion video (FMV) so The Dame Was Loaded by Beam Software seemed like a great pick.
Players step into the worn shoes of Scott Anger, a 1940s private eye complete with a love of overthinking, alcohol and the ladies to match the old stereotype. When sweet Carol Klein turns up at his office one day with a plea for him to track down her missing brother Dan, he’s hardly going to turn her or her money down. Anger then has three days to solve the case before his partner Ralph sends him on a train to New York to trail a crooked lawyer – so there’s no time to lose.
After watching the FMV introduction, and considering the style of more recent releases in the genre, it’s a little jarring to be greeted with a still screen when talking to non-player characters (NPCs). The controls are clunky too and I found it difficult to easily put items into the inventory without accidentally clicking on an existing object. You do become used to them after a while, but I’d still recommend picking up the GOG version and keeping a copy of the user manual close by if you decide to play this title.
There are five locations to visit at first using the map found in the glovebox of your car. Further locations will open up as you interview people and find out what they know about the elusive Dan. Be careful though, because if you ask them about the wrong subject or show them an item they don’t like, you’ll end up being kicked out. For example, your ex-girlfriend probably won’t take to kindly to being shown a photograph of the woman she found you in bed with…
Some of these interviews rely on timed sequences which can be slightly frustrating. If you get caught doing something you shouldn’t, that investigation path will be closed off to you for several in-game hours. It’s difficult to save-scum your way out due to the way that time works (explained below) and the ability to only save in your office. Although the gameplay relies heavily on gathering clues, there are some light puzzles and you can expect standard detective activities such as cracking safes, retrieving physical evidence and even playing poker.
One of the highlights of The Dame Was Loaded for me was its atmosphere. Sure, there are plenty of stereotypes on display – the shady poker player who doesn’t want to reveal his real job, a cop who’ll help you if you give him a donut, the femme fatale who’s clearly hiding a secret. But these tropes work together with the hard-boiled dialogue, moody lighting, gangster accents and jazz soundtrack to create a vibe which instantly makes you feel like you’ve stepped into a noir film.
The acting in FMV games is generally hammy so you know exactly what to expect. But it serves to amplify the atmosphere here and the actors do a really good job. Their comedy timing is great and we found ourselves regularly laughing out loud. Strangely though, it was the NPCs with the smaller parts that we loved the most. Meg is never pleased to see you when you arrive at her diner, where every meal looks like scrambled eggs. And Copy Boy seems so happy to be working at the newspaper office, even when he can’t find any results in the archive.
The fact that everything happens against a clock is both the title’s selling point and its biggest flaw. You’ve only got a certain amount of time to solve the case for Miss Klein and the minutes fly by each time you drive to a different location (or receive a punch to the face). Each NPC is only available during certain points in the day and if they decide to throw you out of their establishment, there’s a good chance you won’t be able to return to that particular path in the investigation until its far too late to be a success.
This gives me the impression that The Dame Was Loaded was designed to be a game that you can’t complete on the first try. It lends itself more to players who are prepared to play several, if not many, times with a notepad close at hand, as each playthrough will reveal more of the optimal order in which to visit NPCs and obtain clues. Unfortunately, I’m tight on spare hours nowadays due to work and study so I settled for completing it while closely following a guide.
But I really wish I’d known about this game back in the day and had the chance to experience it when it was released in 1996. With limited internet and scarce walkthroughs when I was a kid, I think I’d have been much more likely to persevere with it without any help. I can understand how satisfying it would have felt to reach the conclusion and discover what had happened to Dan using your wits alone, and how much more immersive the final choices in the title would have been.
The Dame Was Loaded has been my favourite game so far in our Love Letters to Adventures collaboration. I guess that isn’t too much of a surprise for regular visitors seeing as I’m a fan of both detective narratives and FMV, but it’s because of more than that. It’s the atmosphere, characters and humour that make this a release a memorable one. It might have only received average reviews when it was published 28 years ago, but it’s aged like a fine whisky – and I think Scott Anger would approve of that.