Headscratchers / Mystery Case Files

• Who exactly drew the sketches in Emma's diary in Ravenhearst? Especially the one of Charles about to kill her with a hatchet? It could be that the detective herself was the one who drew most of them, but there's no indication that she should have known that particular detail. Artistic license?
  • Fridge Brilliance: Escape reveals that ghosts can alter the appearance of objects, so maybe the "sketches" were blank paper until the Master Detective started reading the diary and Emma made the drawings appear.
• What use is it to track down and dispose of the cursed horn from Shadow Lake, if the rest of the demon skeleton is left lying around where anyone who snoops around the ruined prison could find it?
• In Escape, it's revealed that Victor went back in time at the end of Return and set up everything that happens in Escape. Why didn't he, say, prevent the Master Detective from solving the mystery in the original Ravenhearst? Or stop her from being born?
  • We don't know if it's possible to change history in this Verse. It could be that he went back just long enough to get a good look at the sites where Charles had been born, raised, and institutionalized, then returned at some point after the Master Detective had departed to set everything up. Certainly he didn't carry the actual buildings brick by brick into the present, as the asylum from Escape appears in Unlocked and in the bonus gameplay from Key, still intact and in operation.
  • Rewind reveals that Victor's control of the time machine isn't very good, and mucking around with the past can rip open temporal vortices which even Charles's wacko son understands to be bad news. At least, while he himself is at ground zero for one.
• Dire Grove has one that makes no sense at all. In the early parts of the game, the videos the detective finds clearly show that next to no one has any interest in Allison's theory about Dire Grove, and evidence crops up that the people leading the archaeological dig on the site think she's more or less out of her mind. Cut to the end, and she's giving her presentation to a packed auditorium; she's rewarded with thunderous applause and cheering. Are we supposed to believe that these people believe she went through all of that?
  • In Madame Fate and the first Ravenhearst game we see that the Master Detective has an in with the Queen and she collects a lot of evidence in her logs. And as a detective in the service of the Queen, any notes she collects can be proven as evidence and can vouch for Allison and the other three students. Her endorsement and reputation can lend legitimacy to Allison's talk.
  • The fact that a chunk of Britain verifiably did start to freeze for no meteorologically-explicable reason probably helped also.
• Fate's Carnival contains several references to "the Ravenhearst family home" or to Alister's endeavors to restore the Ravenhearst family to power. But "Ravenhearst" was Emma's family name, and Alister hated the fact that Charles abandoned his mystical studies to pursue her; indeed, later games reveal that Emma's ancestor, Lord Ravenhearst, was once Alister's bitter enemy! So wouldn't Alister want to restore the Dalimar family's power, and not give a damn about the mansion his son built for Emma?
• So for Fate's Carnival, if the detective had Dalimar's diary the whole goddamn time why the fuck was it necessary to complete that final puzzle in the game when we could've just stabbed the freaking thing with the silver knife without wasting so much time going over a fake?
  • Same reason why Harry Potter couldn't do the same thing a lot earlier in Chamber of Secrets: because the protagonist doesn't know that destroying the book they had would defeat the villain, or how the book could be destroyed, until much later.

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