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Something about this little convoy is suggestive of the military.
Ha! Found it.
long ramble about Cleo + CH4 comments
I admit I wasn’t too sold on Cleo back on CH3; @Urban has already pointed out most of the stuff that resonates with me, but I’ll add that I also felt like she wasn’t being honest. Cleo wore a perfect mask the whole chapter; unblemished, no cracks showing, which made every exchange with her super frustrating to me because I felt like I wasn’t talking to a real human being, but a super pretty statue. My thing is analyzing characters and finding what makes them tick, and with Cleo I couldn’t do that which resulted in me being unable to connect with her as an individual with goals, dreams, and fears, and not being invested enough with the character to care about her problems.
Now, on CH4 we have the opportunity to actually tell her, “Hey, I’m not dumb; I know you’re hiding things from me even when I’ve been nothing but open with you, and I think that sucks,” and I 
Thank you! No kidding, that part was a favorite for me.
And Cleo admitting it was pretty dumb on her part? Hello? Is that a real person I’m seeing, and not a collection of carefully chosen traits? Suddenly I cared about her. So kudos for making me change my mind about Cleo in two sentences, Prof.
I also loved the “Why didn’t we try to contact each other?” chat, and how my not-in-the-slightest professional dude was like, “work will always come first.” Shut up, you liar. Shut your lie hole. I don’t even care that it takes a chunk out of my precious stats, that’s the answer I’m giving Cleo. Way better than admitting that he is and will always be in love with Maria Garcia Perez and that fact is eating him alive.
And speaking of the thorn in our side: the world stops whenever Maria Garcia Perez makes a badass entrance and I would read a whole game of her just stepping out of cars and looking cool.
Also, Maria knew Cleo! That part was awesome and had me gasping out loud (and probably had my dude going: …did she ask you about me?)
When Maria and Cleo are roasting each other, one of the choices is “Get a room”, which made me laugh before being like, “nope.” Knowing Cleo, she ends up being a super lover and stealing my lady away. Not going to push my luck, thanks 
One small request: when choosing how to bring down Vicent; my dude is a shit shooter but really charismatic, can we have a choice to talk to Vicent while Jeff shoots him?
About the sex scene, I don’t know why you were nervous; it’s very good. Also, thanks for giving me the option to tell Cleo we were just having fun. Very much appreciated.
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Could there another opportunity to raise stats this chapter, because most of my main stats were still to low. Cleo keeps dying.
Also an incredibly uncomfortable/disturbing thought, I’m surprised Vincent didn’t mention putting a female MC and/or Cleo in the Kennel.
Managed to somehow make it through with Cleo alive, my favorite line: "Cleo smiles at you encouragingly. “There you go. I knew my honey had the smarts!” I love her.
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Thanks! I’m happy you like Cleo more this chapter (my next big job will be fixing her in Chapter 3), and good thinking on the distraction thing. Will add it in when I get the chance.
@Cantthinkofone , thanks for the comments! I did consider the Kennel thing, but I worried that that might be too messed up, even for this chapter, which is pretty messed up! I’m reluctant to give a stat boost this chapter (you had two in Chapter 3), but I would consider making some of the checks less difficult. Did you find that your stats were too low in general, or just in the Cleo in danger bit?
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Yeah it would have been, I was just surprised he didn’t even mention or threaten them with sending them there if they resisted or something.
Most of my main stats were at 6 like fisticuffs, athletics and gunplay. I couldn’t get there in time to save her, or shoot the guys attacking her, or even hit the guys in truck driving towards the gate. I eventually got past it by having Jeff with me and the guy on the machine gun, but Sam got hurt instead alive though.
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Ah yes, those are both tough checks. Maybe I could make the save Cleo stuff easier - although if you kill enough bad guys earlier in the siege, that scene won’t even trigger , so there are still other ways around it! I think for most checks this chapter 6 would be enough to pass, though.
This must be completed!
The adventure, the romance ,the fascist killing (my favourite part) love it all.
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Excellent update! Glad you used my favorite Indiana Jones line in the interlude!
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Just finished playing through the demo! It’s incredibly fun, and I’m enjoying the meditations on archaeology and colonialism. I’m liking the ability to return artifacts to where they belong — it’s a bit of wish fulfillment, but it’s nice to de-romanticize the otherwise brilliant “it belongs in a museum” line.
Relatedly, the pop culture and esp Indy jokes are great.
Also a big fan of the supernatural vs rational aspect of the game, also very satisfyingly Indy.
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Okiedokie, big-ish update just uploaded, an update which I’ve been wanting to do a while now but I got snowed under with real work … again (this semester can just F right off now!). Most of it is an attempt to rework Chapter 3, to take into account the very helpful issues identified by @Urban a little higher up in the thread. I’ll put what I’ve done to address Urban’s issues in a big spoiler tag below, because it’s wall-of-texty and I don’t want to inflict it on anyone who isn’t interested. But just before the wall of text, I also made a couple of smaller changes: 1) I bumped down the difficulty on some of the checks in Chapter 4, as requested; 2) I changed some of the text in Chapter 4 to relate to some of the changes I made to Cleo in the new Chapter 3!
Chapter 3 wall-o-text coming up; before I get into it, thanks again everybody for your feedback, it all helps and every change or redraft makes it better!
Chapter 3 Changes
So I took four main issues from Urban’s comments. Here’s what they are in turn, and what I’ve done:
1. Cleo is too central to the plot, and the MC too peripheral.
This itself is made up of two sub-problems: a) Cleo is too perfect; and b) Cleo drives the plot much more than the MC. Both good and true observations. I tried to solve the problem in the following way:
a) I reimagined Cleo as if she were an MC. In other words, she’s good at three things and bad at the rest. I decided that she should be good at close combat, charm and subterfuge, and bad at the other skills. So now, if the player fails a check at one of her good skills, she can help out, but she can’t help out if the check involves one of her weaknesses. And you actually get to see her being a sucky athlete, and she tells you that she’s bad with guns, which you witness in Chapter 4, so she’s no longer a perfect machine! I also reworked some of the dialogue to bring out what I consider to be her character flaws more prominently, and to give the player the chance to call her out on her arrogance, if they want.
b) I reworked the plot to make the MC more central to the investigation. Now it is the MC who makes the connection between the boot-print and the factory, not Cleo. The MC is now essential for the escape from the cellar, because of changes I made to the last scene (see below). And now the MC, and ONLY the MC, can make the “Winton is illiterate” connection - in other words, if the player doesn’t make that connection, it doesn’t get made. So now the player is just as important as Cleo to moving the story forward, and the investigation feels more like a collaboration between two talented people than that the MC is Cleo’s sidekick, I hope.
2. The villain is an idiot at the end
I’ve made him less trusting. Now, he takes one precaution against poisoning (which fails). He also has one of his Klan boys in the cellar at the end, as a further protection, and it is the MC (the only person with their hands free) who has to take him down. Hopefully he looks less like a trusting fool now, and more like someone who’s taking at least basic precautions.
3. Too much politics / platforming .
Sorry, that’s just staying as it is. It’s too essential to the project to cut out. However, I will make sure that, when it goes on sale, it carries a warning that it’s not pure escapism, and that it does deal with real-world problems, historical and contemporary, so that people who do just want pure escapism will know that it’s not for them. That’s fair, right?
4. Fighter builds suck
To an extent, unavoidable. As I say, each chapter is a different kind of story, and not all builds will be equally good in each chapter. Fighter builds can’t really complain: they get six chapters, and their builds will be really powerful in five of them, there’s just one that’s telling a story that doesn’t have too much fighting in it, so they can’t say they aren’t being catered for overall! However, I have added a couple more opportunities to use the Gunplay skill, and crucially it now is possible to shoot Titus O’Shea in the swamp. Which I really like, actually, because this whole game is a kind of tribute to Indiana Jones, and shooting O’Shea in the swamp is really reminiscent of this classic scene from Raiders.
Anyway, I hope it’s clear that I’ve taken this feedback very seriously and put a lot of thought into it, and I really hope these changes help to address the main problems with Chapter 3. My plan now is to leave this for a bit and press on with 5, but I’m always open to re-revisiting things if people feel like Chapter 3 still isn’t working. Thanks again for the thoughts and guidance!
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I usually just quietly play demos, but I enjoyed this update so much that I had to think of some words to leave here. I really appreciate the lengths you took to respectfully portray African-Americans as well as the Efe. Great care was clearly taken to immerse the MC in the culture and history of each location, which is ideal since the MC is supposed to be well-traveled, but still. And I agree with @Iello in that it’s wonderful to have the choice to give the artifacts to their rightful owners. This game turned out to be more politically sound than I expected it to be from its initial demo, which is a great thing in my opinion, and yet it still retains the thrills of what I assume could be likened to Indiana Jones (not familiar with the franchise) - freeing enslaved miners and women AND commanding a small army with barely a moment for the MC to breathe in between! Overall, this was a joy to read and play through, and thank you for updating this!
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Thanks so much for the comments, I’m really happy you like it so far!
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Where are the other relics located?
If you’re asking about future chapters, I’ll tell you, but under a spoiler tag:
In chapter 5, the relic is from India, but you find it in London, because yay colonialism!
In chapter 6, you find the relic in Hong Kong, which at the time was under British rule (again, yay colonialism), and it’s an ancient Chinese treasure.
Back then, the British were like a fungal infection: they got everywhere!
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A line comes to mind: “The Sun Never Sets in the British Empire.” That was true then. And thank you for sharing!
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The sun never sets on the British Empire, because God doesn’t trust the British in the dark.
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When do we see Esme again? (Haven’t had the chance to play through Chapter 4 just yet).
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Next update, I promise!
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heck yeah
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Will Cleo be there for the rest of the game if we’re dating her, and when is she gonna save me from torture? Also does Esme still sleep with her butler as well while dating you if your together and vice versa if your with him?
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