30 years late, but I need help because this game is diabolical.
I just reached Cairo, 1924, and now I don’t know how to progress because the sun kills me and I can’t figure out how to keep it from doing that. I’ve been consulting a guide and I still couldn’t figure it out.
Thank you!
Which part of the walkthrough are you on? Are you using the one on the IFDB site? If you can pinpoint it, I might be able to textdump part of the game to see if I can find anything relevant. I beat it once many years ago with that walkthrough, so I know there’s some kind of workaround, just can’t remember what..
Yeah it was the one on IFDB. At right where it says (Cairo, 1924)
These are the only relevant messages I can find:
The burning sun overhead is starting to make you sweat.
The sun is becoming unbearable.
You’re almost ready to pass out.
You collapse in the desert, weak with exhaustion. It is a slow and painful death.
The sun overhead makes the area extremely hot, but while wearing the suit you don’t seem to even feel warm.
The walkthrough mentions a suit, but I can’t find it anywhere!
It’s also telling me to travel west before exiting the time machine, which is impossible. I can’t tell if I’m missing something somehow.
Normally I’d say that there’s no way that someone wouldn’t have noticed an error in the walkthrough by now, but with this game being what it is I don’t think that’s a guarantee. I’ll look around and see if anyone’s mentioned this before. Barring that, I might just need to write a new walkthrough…
David Welbourn has scans of his notes for TATCTAE - https://plover.net/~davidw/scans/t/timea96.pdf Maybe there’s something in there?
I tried replaying to that point but forget to save and got stuck in a non-undoable situation. Can you share your save file? If you want to.
The good(?) news is that there are certainly some shortcomings with the current walkthrough, the bad news is that I haven’t gotten anywhere near close enough to figure out what’s going on in Cairo 1924. Soon…
The extremely tightly wound nature of so many puzzles and sequences here means that while a turn-by-turn walkthrough allows the player to proceed, it doesn’t teach them much, and if they need a prod on one command, it’s much less useful, or it’ll end up spoiling a dozen other commands.
I found it! It’s a minor issue in the walkthrough.
You need to PRESS WEST WALL in the machine either before or after the first time jump to reveal a secret passage that holds the suit and another item.
Thank you for your help… this game is crazy.
Not to worry. Eventually, I hope to have a slightly more digestible walkthrough/guide and hintbook. There’s fun here, just… of a very certain sort.