Season pass includes the fancy cake and tea set plus a sailor’s outfit. LOL!
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I was going to suggest setting it here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westward_Ho!
But not sure it’s a Christmas destination…
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Maintain a good relationship with Frank and Rory and encourage the engagement .
Anyone else put any thought to the fact that we’re throwing a lavish party with massive feasts, elaborate contests, and other large displays of wealth in 1931-32? In the heart of the Great Depression?
Not making any kind of point, just feel kind of Bourgeois.
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I can certainly see where you’re coming from. At the same time, those are all themes of P.G. Wodehouse’s work, which Gower is emulating.
It’s also a portrayal with some foundation in real life - at least to the extent that, even in a recession, most people who can afford to carry on as before will do so. Although it’s inconceivable that someone in Aunt Primrose’s position wouldn’t also be heavily involved in charitable giving. (Both because there’d be a very strong social expectation that she do so, and because it would be one of the very few creative outlets available to a woman of her class.)
I suppose it’s difficult for the reader to avoid putting a novel set in the 1930s in its proper historical context, even when that’s detrimental to their enjoyment of the story. And tales of utterly self-absorbed wealthy people obsessing over frivolities would soon lose their charm if juxtaposed with scenes of the desperate poverty brought about by the Great Depression and rising extremism across Europe. For one thing, the scenes where Aunt Primrose’s gardener and maid are threatened with unemployment would very quickly lose their comic value.
From a modern standpoint, the other thing that stands out is how ephemeral the way of life depicted in Tally Ho will be. Within a few years of the events of the story Rory, Figs, Colonel Firesnuff and a male protagonist will all be enlisting to fight the Germans and Japanese. And quite a lot of them won’t be coming back. A few years after that, Britain will elect its first socialist government, which will make it its mission to break up landed estates by jacking up inheritance tax. The characters of Tally Ho don’t know it yet, but the 1930s are their swansong and life will never be the same.
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Oh no, I know what he’s going for, and I know this does in fact have a basis in reality. The Waldorf-Astoria opened in 1931 at a cost of 42 million while half the storefronts in NYC were shuttered from bankruptcy.
I’m not complaining, I love the game. One merely must pause to acknowledge when one is being bourgeois.
And you have just given me a delightful image of a ww2 sequel.
“One second madam, I shall fetch your morning croissants for you just as soon as I have properly disposed of this Abwehr agent.”
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Really well put; that is why autumn is such a pronounced theme in the game.
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I only just now realized that the guy whose marriage proposal blocks your path at the train station is Professor Hickory.
Layers upon layers in this game.
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Wait, what? How did you discover that one?
The man at the train station has ginger hair, Professor Hickory has ginger hair in his book’s cover photo, and when you meet Frankincense at the hunt, s/he mentions that Hickory was going to come, but had “some sort of incident at the train station” and decided against it.
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Oh my, so that’s problably the Professor alright. But that’s weird, seeing that he doesn’t go even if you manage to drop the quotation without him noticing. Maybe he got married to that girl on a whim?
I can confirm that that is indeed Professor Hickory. There was going to be some follow-up on the whys and wherefores of what happened to him later in the story, but it ended up on the cutting room floor!
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This game is like an onion. I love onions.
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Sequel Material 
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I guess there’s no harm in spoiling the joke I was going to do, since whatever I do in the future with the character will need a totally different setup anyhow.
I was going to have Professor Hickory show up in Chapter 8 at the carnival, and there would have been a scene in which the player would have been deceived into thinking it was Figs again walking around in costume, which would encourage a scene in which you attempt to pull the beard off, or speak in familiar tones to him, or kick him in the rear, or something like that.
Then after outlining it, I realized that it was a little too similar to a joke I did in Midsummer, so I decided to axe it.
There was also originally going to be a bit where, if you knock the ring out of Prof. Hickory’s hand and it bounces away, you find it later in your pocket, having bounced into it. But it, too, was a plot loop that I cut to make chapter three’s structure work better.
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I just have one… issue. Truffles are NOT chocolate. Truffles are mushrooms. >.< Maybe Rory really doesn’t know- but still~~~Truffles don’t taste like chocolate. -_-’
There are a few other little things- such as characters showing up that the game seems to have expected me to already know when I did not, in fact, follow the plot in a way for that to be the case… or having expensive aromatic herbs I left in the boat and never got a chance to use during the race; but even so, I had a lot of fun playing the game.
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There are chocolate truffles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolate_truffle
When you get a chance, could you let me know which bits have characters expecting you incorrectly so I can fix that?
Regarding the herbs–if you leave the bunch of herbs with the peacocks in the boathouse, they eat them, and they gain the benefits thereof.
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Fair.
Sure- some of the things that seemed to be inconsistencies. I went on the mission to Dr. X’s. Got in to the party, recieved the suitcase ‘just like that’, and gave it to the kid to burn. The game treats this burning attempt as unsuccessful, but doesn’t make it fully clear that the suitcase was not burned. Later in the story, the contents appear as an expose novel, when I thought they’d been burned. At the part where I take the peacocks to the boathouse, having given a full 30 money to Mopsie the night before, I ran into the cook from the nearby house who I had never come across before in the story, though the story treated it a little like I was running into her again or, at least, knew quite well enough who she was. Perhaps MC does… but I didn’t. Anyway- I was given a pouch of expensive aromatic herbs for the boat race, and chose to put them in the boat. During the race, there was no mention at all of them- I don’t even know if they were in my own boat or someone else’s. Won the race, though. You say the peacocks ate them… but there was no clue in the playthrough of that happening. I don’t know what may have been different to if they had not eaten the herbs- and wouldn’t have known they had if you hadn’t told me here on the forum. They went off to India. Oh, right, and that. The peacocks themselves; the game treated my character as knowing their names, though I’d never come across them before they appeared in MC’s bed. Perhaps MC knows their names, but as a player I had no idea quite what was going on until later.
Thing is, I like the game. I just get a feeling like the game expects me to have had information at some points that would have been from a different route.
Has anyone gotten the peafowl to choose them yet? If so, how?
Thanks for the notes. I will take a look at the Trina/briefcase/burning thing and see if there’s a bit of misplaced code. If you gave it to Trina to burn, it should have been burned.
I’ll also look at the language when you meet the cook in the boathouse. You are right to say the MC knows her, but I don’t want the player to be confused. I’ll tweak that a bit.
As far as the peacocks’ name, you hear them in chapter 3:
"“My pride and joy,” says Aunt Primrose, looking at her birds indulgently. “Sanchi-San, Galatea, and Orlando are my entrants into the Exotic Animal Show…”
But it makes total sense that you might not remember that all the way in chapter 7!
Much appreciated!
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