Lady Thalia and the Case of Clephan (N. Cormier and E. Joyce)
Played on: 27th September
How I played it: On the IFComp ballot via Firefox
How long I spent: 1hr 30mins for one playthrough scoring 28/33
Lady Thalia and the Case of Clephan is a very good game which I’m not going to do a useful job of reviewing. For a start, the Lady Thalia series has passed me by so far, so I can’t evaluate how it builds on its prequels. Because I was going speedily to make sure I finished in time, I didn’t think to copy-paste any interesting passages from the game. Also, I got distracted halfway through and played Silksong. (I found the secret bossfight against the First Sinner, and spent quite a bit of the day struggling with them.) So, sorry. I can tell you the game’s good.
I did at least grasp the basics. Lady Thalia, gentlewoman thief, has retired to become Theadora Knight, gentlewoman secretary at her former Scotland Yard rival’s detective agency. It’s dull work but her interest is piqued when a theft at a pottery shop proves to be the work of one Lady Thalia. Each of the game’s four Acts has a rhythm to it: you, as the real Thalia, assess where the copycat burglar may strike next, case the joint, plan a counter-heist, and then debrief with Mel, your rival-turned-partner-turning-into-something-more???, and the rest of the cast.
The central character arc is shared between Thalia and Mel as they negotiate a romance, and it’s a delight. Thalia is a lot of fun as a narrator, relatively professional and strait-laced but given to fits of pride (her chief objection to the fake Thalia seems to be that she’s so amateurish that she’s making the real Thalia look bad). Frequent parenthetical asides about Mel in the text show Thalia’s more romantic thoughts creeping into her mind and pulling her focus away. Those asides might break the flow of the text in places (not that I should be throwing stones from my glass house), but they sell the awkward fumbling romance between the pair very well.
A few minor characters are a lot more one-dimensional and cartoonish, but this is to facilitate the conversation system. Many sequences in Case of Clephan require you to manipulate characters through a dialogue tree, with a choice of being friendly and buttering them up, being straightforward with them, or asking them questions to lead to what they want to tell you. The minor characters have to be flat in order to hint at what the correct approach is – the guy who’s itching to tell you a rumour probably needs to be asked leading questions, for instance. They’re not difficult, and in fact I think it’s pretty hard to truly flub them even when you’re trying – I futzed with one or two of the higher-stakes late-game conversations after my full playthrough, and it looks like the game generally keeps you on course and lets you bail yourself out in certain situations. They’re not puzzles so much as ways to make what would otherwise be paragraphs of expository dialogue more involving. But they work! They are especially delightful in the back half of the game, when Mel gets in on the action and we see the same conversation narrated from two different protagonists who each pick up on different things, like a simultaneous Rashomon. It’s good stuff, and a good flex of character writing skills.
A running gag in this simultaneous narration is that Thalia frequently gets distracted with people’s fake accents, so that Mel ends up being more perceptive in practical terms. It’s a funny bit, but it also touches on a central thread in Case of Clephan (and, I assume, the previous Lady Thalia games, so I’m sure I’m not saying anything new in what follows). Thalia is a former actress moonlighting as a master thief moonlighting as a secretary, so she’s frequently preoccupied with matters of performance and disguise (another reason why the character is so compelled and annoyed by her imitator). The emphasis on performance is mirrored in the game’s structure, which is split into Acts and which finishes by saying “we hope you enjoyed the show”. The embrace of play and performance by both characters and writers is very enjoyable, but there’s a more sober undercurrent here: Thalia is gay and, unless I’m very badly mistaken, is living in Victorian London, a time and place when homosexuality was criminalised. Thalia lives in a sham marriage with a gay man and his “assistant”, Oscar and Yorkie (who have their own side story going on in this game), providing cover for all of them to be their true selves. There are some pretty clear variations on a theme here, exploring the joy and liberation of performance in both serious and ridiculous contexts. Good stuff!
I don’t know where to work my comments about the puzzles in, so I’ll jam them at the end here. The Case of Clephan has puzzles, but they’re not especially difficult – as with the conversations, I think it’s difficult to truly screw up, and you’re only playing for points here. My favourite puzzle came in Act I with the dual locking mechanism, but they sort of taper off after that. I could have missed the clues but some scenes like the séance in the Order Of The Guys I Forgot The Name Of feel like guesswork, and it’s not always clear how much of a timer you’re on – sometimes you need to confront the fake Thalia but you have all the time in the world, other times you’re cut off while casing a joint (as with the backrooms in Act II, which gives you exactly enough time to check every room so that any misclicks will cost you). It’s not a serious issue when you’re only playing for scores, not progress, and you have a generous save system to abuse. Just slightly bothered me, is all.
Anyway, very pleasant game! I’ll certainly put the other Lady Thalias on my to-play list, at a time when I’m not rushing through games to meet judging periods in between real-life obligations, and when I’m not distracted trying to do this goddamn Bilewater runback and boss fight in Silksong, good grief