History VideoGame / TheMysteryOfTheDruids

This 2001 PC game is largely remembered for its [[MemeticMutation meme-worthy]] [[ContemptibleCover box art]], but that hilarious image doesn't even begin to cover the bizarre plot and even more bizarre puzzles.

* ContemptibleCover: Let's face it, that box art is probably the only reason ''anyone'' remembers this game even exists today, and most of those people have almost certainly never played it or even seen any gameplay footage of it.

* EvenEvilHasLovedOnes: Evil as he is, Serstan seems to have a soft spot for his brother Maglor, as he's the only surviving member of the household, and the only reason both Halligan and Turner are even alive was that Serstan was feeling inclined to oblige Maglor's wish. [[spoiler:All of this goes flying out of the window when Maglor attempts to escape with Halligan, however, as Serstan's spell orb seems to be aimed at him instead of the detective.]]

** A puzzle not long after involves stealing someone's fishing rod. To do so, you have to wait for a nearby cat to pass by, catch it with your bare hands and a cloth, then chuck it at the man's bucket of bait to knock it into the water so that he's forced to leave and go buy more, at which point [[RefugeInAudacity Halligan helpfully volunteers to watch his beloved fishing rod to make sure nobody steals it]].

* ImAHumanitarian: [[spoiler:The reason for why the murder victims are stripped down to their skeletons is because the druids ritualistically consume their flesh, which they see as the source of life force, [[TheAgeless explaining why they've been around for so long]]. When Halligan gets captured and [[NoMrBondIExpectYouToDine forced to dine with The Circle]], he eats human flesh, making him susceptible to The Circle's brainwashing, though puzzlingly, the game is vague on whether this is before or after his brainwashing hits.]]

* ArtisticLicenseChemistry: An early puzzle involves the effects of [[ItMakesSenseInContext drinking cups-worths of ethanol]], which in this game simply knocks the recipient out. In real life, laboratory-grade ethanol has methanol as an impurity, and it only takes about 10ml of methanol to render someone permanently blind, and only 25 ''to kill them.'' And no, mixing it with apple juice isn't going to prevent that from happening. The game does show Halligan making sure he uses ethanol instead of methanol, so there was some awareness of this, but the writers seem to be unaware that commercial ethanol is adulterated with deadly methanol to prevent people from circumventing alcohol distribution laws.

* ArtisticLicenseChemistry: An early puzzle involves the effects of [[ItMakesSenseInContext drinking cups-worths of ethanol]], which in this game simply knocks the recipient out. In real life, laboratory-grade ethanol has methanol as an impurity, and it only takes about 10ml of methanol to render someone permanently blind, and only 25 ''to kill them.'' And no, mixing it with apple juice isn't going to prevent that from happening.

* SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome: At one point early into the game, one of the {{Moon Logic Puzzle}}s requires Halligan to knock out a beggar with a spiked drink and steal his money to make a phone call. In an average adventure game, this would be nothing more than just one of many inconsequential acts of jerkassery that a typical adventure game hero commits over the course of their journey. Therefore, it may come as a surprising [[SubvertedTrope subversion]] to many players when this action is later brought up by Halligan's boss, who says that the beggar contacted a police department and, since Halligan [[IdiotBall actually brought up his name to the beggar]], they were able to find the culprit quite easily. This gets Halligan a [[WhatTheHellHero thorough chewing out by his boss]] and a stern warning that any further morally dubious actions on his part will get him in serious trouble.

* AsYouKnow: Averted in a way that illustrates why the trope exists. Halligan first meets Melanie when he wants her to use her expertise to examine a bone from a crime scene. At this point, the game switches so that you're now controlling her, but since this is the first time you're playing her you know nothing about her job. If you try to talk to Halligan during this segment, she refuses to give him any details about the process that ''she'' knows but the player doesn't. While the puzzles of this segment are basic, figuring out your ''goal'' is a hurdle in itself.

** A puzzle not long after involves stealing someone's fishing rod. To do so, you have to wait for a nearby cat to pass by, catch it with your bare hands and a cloth, then chuck it at the man's bucket of bait to knock it into the water so that he's forced to leave and go buy more, at which point [[RefugeInAudacity Halligan helpfully volunteers to watch his beloved fishing rod to make sure nobody steals it]]. To make it worse, you need the fishing rod for something that's five feet away from where the fisherman was keeping it, and you never need it again. There was no reason you needed to actually steal the thing.

* KleptomaniacHero: Like most adventure game protagonists, you need to help yourself to whatever you can to get through certain puzzles. Unlike most such protagonists, Halligan stands out because his office workers ''already know about this'' and hate him for it.

* IdiotHero: While not the excuse for most of his behavior, Halligan has never heard of Ethanol and can't begin to figure out what the druid water symbol is supposed to represent, despite being one of the most basic and intuitive iconographic symbols. While it's good to not have the character know too much and leave the ''audience'' confused, Halligan's lack of information about certain topics makes certain puzzles needlessly confusing for the opposite reason.

* TakeYourTime: With the exception of the cat puzzle, the game never cares how long you're on a screen, even when someone is about to die in the distance, breaking down the door, or an evil ritual is about to reach fruition (which is a good thing, since the latter two in particular are resolved by infamous puzzles). Perhaps the most notable example of this, however, is the initial crime scene. It's available from the start of the game, is never relevant again, but can be visited ''unchanged'' until the PointOfNoReturn. Somehow in the days that have passed over the course of the rest of the game, no one has cleaned up the crime scene and news crews are still interviewing the same people just beyond the police tape.

* TakeYourTime: With the exception of the cat puzzle, the game never cares how long you're on a screen, even when someone is about to die in the distance, breaking down the door,, or an evil ritual is about to reach fruition (which is a good thing, since the latter two in particular are resolved by infamous puzzles). Perhaps the most notable example of this, however, is the initial crime scene. It's available from the start of the game, is never relevant again, but can be visited ''unchanged'' until the PointOfNoReturn. Somehow in the days that have passed over the course of the rest of the game, no one has cleaned up the crime scene and news crews are still interviewing the same people just beyond the police tape.

* TakeYourTime: With the exception of the cat puzzle, the game never cares how long you're on a screen, even when someone is breaking down the door, about to die in the distance, or an evil ritual is about to reach fruition. Perhaps the most notable example of this, however, is the initial crime scene. It's available from the start of the game, is never relevant again, but can be visited ''unchanged'' until the PointOfNoReturn. Somehow in the days that have passed over the course of the rest of the game, no one has cleaned up the crime scene and news crews are still interviewing the same people just beyond the police tape.

** At one point the game even gives an ''anti-''hint involving an elusive hotspot. You need to get a bird to move from its nest. If you use the worms directly on the conpicuous bird, Halligan will refuse because he has no reason to move the bird, likely prompting you to think you're missing something. As it turns out, the problem isn't that he has no reason to move the bird, it's just that he'll only do so if you use the worms on a small, inconspicuous section of the roof instead.

* PixelHunt: Even some of the more straightforward puzzles in the game are made difficult because the hotspots to trigger the proper or obvious solution are tiny, out of the way, or otherwise just plain not obvious. At one point the game even gives an ''anti-''hint involving an elusive hotspot. You need to get a bird to move from its nest. If you use the worms directly on the conpicuous bird, Halligan will refuse because he has no reason to move the bird, likely prompting you to think you're missing something. As it turns out, the problem isn't that he has no reason to move the bird, it's just that he'll only do so if you use the worms on a small, inconspicuous section of the roof instead.

* StupidityIsTheOnlyOption: A rather glaring instance occurs when Halligan finds the Amulet of Transformation and takes the ferry back to England. When he arrives at his cabin, the player has to hide it someplace in the room out of fear it's going to get stolen with no explanation as to why Halligan can't just keep holding onto it like he's been doing. Sure enough, a quick scene transition later, his room has been ransacked and the amulet is missing.

* PixelHunt: Even some of the more straightforward puzzles in the game are made difficult because the hotspots to trigger the proper or obvious solution are tiny, out of the way, or otherwise just plain not obvious. At one point the game even gives an ''anti-''hint involving an elusive hotspot. You need to get a bird to move from its nest. If you use the worms directly on the conpicuous bird, Halligan will refuse because he has no reason to move the bird. A random, inconspicuous, small section of the roof can also be interacted with, however. If you use the worms ''there'', Halligan gladly feeds them to the bird.

** A puzzle not long after involves stealing someone's fishing rod. To do so, you have to wait for a nearby cat to pass by, catch it with your bare hands and a cloth, then chuck it at the man's bucket of bait to knock it into the water so that he's forced to leave and go buy more, at which point [[RefugeInAudacity Halligan helpfully volunteers to watch his beloved fishing rod to make sure nobody steals it]].

* MoonLogicPuzzle: So, so many. One of the most JustForFun/{{egregious}} involves finding the Amulet of Transformation. This is done by going to a pier, finding and capturing a cat, throwing it at a fisherman's bait so you can steal his fishing rod and a bucket to scrape coarse salt off the side of a ship. Then, heading to an old druid castle's ruins, you slip by a locked gate with a file folder to get to a nearby mausoleum, grind the salt into something finer on a gravestone, then you throw it at the mausoleum, ''and the mausoleum'' '''''[[StuffBlowingUp explodes.]]''''' Inside is an [[InexplicableTreasureChests inexplicable treasure chest]] with the amulet.[[note]]The ship captain does tell you about how the old castle was brought down via a druid's spell, but no details of the spell are explained beyond the fact that throwing salt was involved, and regardless Halligan is not a druid, so we have no reason to think he could use the spell, and of course, the mausoleum's significance is never hinted at either.[[/note]] What makes it even worse is that you can accidentally [[{{Unwinnable}} softlock]] yourself by going to the castle too early, preventing the correct dialogue option from appearing and making it impossible to get the salt.

A series of brutal murders leave Scotland Yard stumped. When Detective Brent Halligan gets assigned to the case, he bumbles his way through ordinary activities and eventually discovers the murders' link to a conspiracy by a neo-pagan cult. When he teams up with a second playable character, anthropology professor Melanie Turner, their investigation into the British Order of Druids takes them on a trip through time itself.

* BatmanGambit: Halligan's last major plan at the end of the game to stop Sinclair [[spoiler:involves an ExactWords word of honor contract with Serstan by proclaiming "neither Melanie or himself may be hurt."]] It ''works'' by [[spoiler:[[LoopholeAbuse stabbing Melanie and proclaiming the deal was violated]]. Serstan, inhabiting Sinclair's body, [[SlashedThroat is forced to reign his side of the deal.]]]]

** Most of Halligan's coworkers are totally uninterested in helping him solve the case, including Chief Inspector Miller, who demands immediate results. The critical path of Halligan simply phoning up a bone expert and doing a database search on modern druids would have taken mere seconds compared to the hoops the player has to jump through in chapter 1 and 3, respectively. (His office phone can't make outgoing calls because apparently he's over-used it in the past, but still.)
** Then later on, a librarian resolutely refuses to help Halligan look up a book, and refuses to let him check it out once he finds it.

* ContrivedCoincidence: Melanie Turner ends up in the plot because she's the only one present at the Anthropological Museum to help Halligan out regarding a particular forensics investigation, and she just so happens to have been reading an Arthur Blake magazine article that discusses the particular historical context as to why she's found gold shavings matched to druidic sickles for rituals. Then we go to [[MrExposition Mr. Blake himself]], whereupon he lays out the ''entire plot of the villains'' in full, overly-elaborate detail, because he happened to be studying inscriptions describing them at that particular moment in time.

** An early puzzle requires getting change to use a payphone. The solution to get it involves getting ethanol, mixing it with apple juice, and offering it to a homeless man as apple schnapps in order to knock him out and steal his hat full of spare change.

** In the game's climax, [[spoiler:the solution to stop the ritual is to have Serstan's promise of having neither you or Melanie getting hurt be broken, which is done by ''[[LoopholeAbuse stabbing Melanie in the gut yourself]]'']].

* DudeNotFunny: The main reason Halligan is shut out from a good deal of Scotland Yard's resources despite it actively hindering him is because when Princess Diana died he put out an arrest warrant on her widower, Prince Charles, as a joke. Lowry really grills Halligan for having done it, especially since now it's made the office bureaucracy to get any work done even more restrictive.

** A rather extreme and inexplicable case later in the game. [[spoiler:As soon as Halligan and Melanie end up in the past, two soldiers come by and knock them out thinking they're Danish spies, though while Halligan's put in a cell, Melanie's simply wakes up in their kitchen as the soldiers lounge in the other room expecting her to make them something to drink. The opportunity to knock them out with [[SlippingAMickey an herbal sleeping drink]] is practically given for free.]]

* GreaterScopeVillain: Serstan. Despite Lord Sinclair being the BigBad, he and his fellow Inheritors are still ultimately a pawn in Serstan's grand scheme of magical immortality and total world domination via his TykeBomb plot.

* ImprovisedParachute: To escape the [[spoiler:druid's monastery]] later in the game, you take a bedsheet, burn a small hole through it using a candle, and leap out a window with it (the game skips some steps since in the cutscene that follows, he hangs onto ropes attached to it that appear from out of nowhere).
* {{Infodump}}: The game is ''really'' bad with this, with many long-winded passages of {{Exposition}} [[LeaveTheCameraRunning with characters standing in place for rather lengthy periods of time.]] Halligan's first meeting with Mr. Blake about druids and the Amulet of Transformation takes about 12 minutes to get the pertinent information.

* LimitedAnimation: Even by the standards of the time this was made, it's a bit threadbare in the animation department, particularly when any humans need animating. Which is probably why many close-ups of Halligan using items are just the item floating around in space doing their own thing (like flying hedge clippers clipping the fence).
* LoopholeAbuse: The basis for how [[spoiler:the Inheritors' plan is foiled: when in the past, Halligan only gives Serstan back his magic staff on the condition that [[ExactWords "nothing will happen to either me or Melanie afterwards."]] Serstan obliges, and in the present day during the final ceremony, Halligan ''fatally stabs Melanie himself'', leading to meaning that Serstan broke his promise, causing Lord Sinclair and the other Inheritors to uphold his end of the deal by vanishing, and the ritual stopped. The terms are made even more confusing when Melanie gets healed back with the healing mistletoe shortly afterwards.]]

* MoonLogicPuzzle: So, so many. One of the most JustForFun/{{egregious}} involves finding the Amulet of Transformation. This is done by going to a pier, finding and capturing a cat, throwing it at a fisherman's bait so you can steal his fishing rod and a bucket to scrape coarse salt off the side of a ship. Then, heading to an old druid castle's ruins, you slip by a locked gate with a file folder to get to a nearby mausoleum, grind the salt into something finer on a gravestone, then you throw it at the mausoleum, ''and the mausoleum'' '''''[[StuffBlowingUp explodes.]]''''' Inside is an [[InexplicableTreasureChests inexplicable treasure chest]] with the amulet.[[note]]The ship captain does tell you about how the old castle was brought down via a druid's spell, but no details of the spell are explained beyond the fact that throwing salt was involved, and regardless Halligan is not a druid, so we have no reason to think he could use the spell, and of course the mausoleum's significance is never hinted at either.[[/note]] What makes it even worse is that you can accidentally [[{{Unwinnable}} softlock]] yourself by going to the castle too early, preventing the correct dialogue option from appearing and making it impossible to get the salt.
* MrExposition: Arthur Blake is the source of many {{Infodump}}s regarding the druids and their possible plans. [[spoiler:Maglor fulfills the same role when Halligan and Melanie end up back in time.]]
* MultipleEndings: The game has one of the "early bad ending" variety: [[spoiler:If Melanie gets caught outside Lord Sinclair's manor, she'll be brought in where a {{Brainwashed}} Halligan will invite her as a "guest of honor" for dinner. [[NonstandardGameOver Following this is a black screen of text]] that reports that a few days afterwards, her skeleton is found in a forest, Halligan is declared missing, and was last seen leaving Scotland Yard.]]
* NoMrBondIExpectYouToDine: When Halligan gets caught by Lord Sinclair and his henchmen, Sinclair repeatedly stresses holding him captive but then inviting him to dinner as a guest of honor. [[spoiler:After briefly escaping but then passing out in shock at discovering their gory human sacrifice, he wakes up finding himself at the dinner table eating the victim's flesh as part of [[BrainwashedAndCrazy a brainwashing ritual]] to indoctrinate him into The Circle.]]
* ObstructiveBureaucrat: Scotland Yard requires a ''much'' higher level of security clearance to get anything done than usual, and the need to get the appropriate paperwork completed is an issue Halligan must work around at certain points. [[LampshadeHanging The game is aware of this]]; apparently, security increased [[NiceJobBreakingItHero ever since Halligan put out a search warrant for Prince Charles after Princess Diana's accident as a joke]].

* RedHerring: The burnt grass from the initial murder scene is nothing more than a dead end of a lead if you bring it up for forensics, and a useless item that exists in your inventory for the rest of the game after you pick it up. Nothing ever explains why the grass was burnt, either.

* StupidityIsTheOnlyOption: A rather glaring instance occurs when Halligan finds the Amulet of Transformation and takes the ferry back to England. When he arrives at his cabin, the player has to hide it some place in the room out of fear it's going to get stolen with no explanation as to why Halligan can't just keep holding onto it like he's been doing. Sure enough, a quick scene transition later, his room has been ransacked and the amulet is missing.

* TykeBomb: The five Inheritor children are Serstan's idea of this, being granted immense power via a druidic ritual that also gave them virtual immortality, so that they can bring about total chaos and world domination a thousand years later in his stead.

* UltimateJobSecurity: According to his boss and colleagues at Scotland Yard, not only is Halligan a sub par detective, but he also constantly loses and/or damages other people's stationery, rang up astronomical telephone bills until his external call privileges were cut and once put out ''an arrest order for Prince Charles after Princess Diana's death as a joke''. With all these transgressions, it's a miracle he wasn't fired.

* WellIntentionedExtremist: Halligan can talk to the beggar he drugged previously, where the latter is [[WhatTheHellHero understandably pissed off.]] Halligan's response crosses this line when he justifies it as necessary for his work, implying that his eccentric and sometimes cruel actions are entirely in-character as his way in getting the job done.
* WholePlotReference: Halligan's office shenanigans are heavily inspired by ''VideoGame/GrimFandango'', which came out a couple years earlier, as he must put up with a demanding but unhelpful boss, has to forge his boss's signature to move the plot forward, deals with a "golden boy" rival that never seems to actually work, and so on. The difference is Manny's D.O.D. was corrupt while Halligan has, through his own actions, utterly wrecked his reputation to the point nobody wants to help him.

* SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome: At one point early into the game, one of the {{Moon Logic Puzzle}}s requires Halligan to knock out a beggar with a spiked drink and steal his money to make a phone call. In an average adventure game, this would be nothing more than just one of many inconsequential acts of jerkassery that a typical adventure game hero commits over the course of their journey. Therefore, it may come as a surprising [[SubvertedTrope subversion]] to many players when this action is later brought up by Halligan's boss, who says that the beggar contacted a police department and, since Halligan [[WhatAnIdiot actually brought up his name to the beggar]], they were able to find the culprit quite easily. This gets Halligan a [[WhatTheHellHero thorough chewing out by his boss]] and a stern warning that any further morally dubious actions on his part will get him in serious trouble.

* MoonLogicPuzzle: So, so many. One of the most JustForFun/{{egregious}} involves finding the Amulet of Transformation. This is done by going to a pier, finding and capturing a cat, throwing it at a fisherman's bait so you can steal his fishing rod and a bucket to scrape coarse salt off the side of a ship. Then, heading to an old druid castle's ruins, you slip by a locked gate with a file folder to get to a nearby mausoleum, grind the salt into something finer on a gravestone, then you throw it at the mausoleum, ''and the mausoleum'' '''''[[StuffBlowingUp explodes.]]''''' Inside is an [[InexplicableTreasureChests inexplicable treasure chest]] with the amulet.[[note]]Part of this was hinted at by the ship captain's story of how the old castle was brought down using salt through a druid's spell, but the game still never explains how the spell even worked aside from chucking salt at buildings, nor what the mausoleum's significance is.[[/note]] What makes it even worse is that you can accidentally [[{{Unwinnable}} softlock]] yourself by going to the castle too early, preventing the correct dialogue option from appearing and making it impossible to get the salt.