Picking up where we last left off, we wrap up our adventures with The Shapeshifting Detective. Were we able to successfully save Ellis Munro from certain death? And were we able to catch the killer and solve the murder of Dorota Shaw? Tune in to find out!

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I’m more than a little disappointed that I got the same killer a second time, but at least we were able to get the best possible outcome.

From what I gather, my whole speculation about us taking over other people’s bodies is just flat out wrong. In scenes where the player accuses the wrong person, they get a chance you use their shapeshifting powers against the killer to disarm or neutralize them, including the option of impersonating the killer while they’re in the same room. That said, it’s clear that we are a supernatural entity of some kind, so why not a traveler.

I’m always down to play an FMV murder-mystery game, and hopefully stuff like this and Contradiction continue to come out.

Along with the new Elusive Target, IO also included a new mission in Hokkaido to celebrate the upcoming Snow Festival in Japan.

The prizes for this one include a new melee weapon and a new suit, so you better believe I took the time to give it chance.

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First off, I’m really glad I got the freaky incident in the bathroom on camera, because I don’t think anyone would believe it otherwise. It even made it’s way onto Kotaku’s Highlight Reel!

This one is similar to the holiday mission where getting Silent Assassin is notable, but ultimately pointless.  It’s more important to complete the challenges and perform the various kills in the environment to see what kind of possibilities exist.

As I talked about briefly during the stream, these kinds of bonus missions are great for giving new and returning players easier ways to obtain level mastery, and the extra unlockables are a strong incentive to try them out even if you’re already fully mastered.

I hope they add more of this kind of content as they continue to support the game, because it’s great to have reasons to keep coming back.

We’ve waited over 5 years this. At long last, a project I didn’t think would ever get finished… is complete.

(The full Closure Alert playlist can be found here.)

First off, I want to thank Aldowyn and anaphysik for agreeing to come back for this. All of us have mostly grown and moved on, and it was hard to carve out enough time to record, but we somehow managed it despite life tugging us in so many different directions.

In many ways, Endgame is a phenomenal section for all of the many different permutations of it that exist. Even though we went into a lot of detail about how the scenes involving our chosen handler, Scarlet, Mina, and even Yancy/Leland can differ wildly depending on how the rest of the game goes, we barely scratched the surface. You could start looking up different ending possibilities and still not get them all.

That said, in many ways, it’s also a microcosm of Alpha Protocol as a whole, including all of its downsides. Anaphysik was right to point out that a large amount of it, especially once we’re above ground, feels largely like throwaway, filler content. The fights with Darcy and the Helicopter are large unnecessary. In Darcy’s case, his character feels more static and shallow than anyone else, because none of his segments change at all with his reputation (which is pretty much locked in the moment players leave Saudi Arabia, since he isn’t involved with any of the big hub plots even in a background capacity).

The other thing I want to draw attention to has less to do with Alpha Protocol and more to do with me. If there’s anything I have taken away from this experience, going back to finish what the three of us started so long ago, is that I have grown into such a different person than I was back then. It’s reflected not just in my commentary (which anaphysik noticed that Aldowyn and I had wildly different point than we did back in Disclosure Alert), but also in my attitude. The person who joined those two way back in the way feels so alien to me. He didn’t realize how rude he was, or how much he didn’t know. In many ways, I’m glad we didn’t finish back then because it gave me a chance to try again, and partly make up for my past ignorance.

This was more than just another Let’s Play. This was a deeply personal work, and I’m glad to have finally seen it through.

Another Elusive Target, another chance to show off my stuff. This time, we return to the Isle of Sgail to assassinate… “The Appraiser”!

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This was a pretty basic assassination, without a whole lot of frills. All it required was a bit of scouting and forethought to arrange a lethal accident to kill the target. Since the notebook was right next to her, the secondary objective didn’t add much risk.

Remember, during an Elusive Target, the attempt is locked in once the player has completed a single objective. Normally, there’s only one: To kill the target. Here, obtaining her notebook was a secondary objective. The intent is to increase the danger by forcing the player to perform additional tasks once the challenge is complete, but proper planning can mitigate (and, in our case, nearly eliminate) that risk.

That said, having to deal with the security footage afterwards reintroduced that element of danger. There were several close calls that, while probably not big enough to risk a mission failure, could have compromised my Silent Assassin rating. You can see that even with the mission finished, I wasn’t 100% sure I was going to get SA until the challenge unlocked.

It got tense towards the end, but I’m happy with the results.

Over the past few years, there has been an upsurge in FMV games. Though they aren’t as big as they were back in the old days, they’ve begun to carve out a comfortable niche.

The Shapeshifting Detective takes many cues (and a few of the actors) from 2015’s Contradiction: Spot the Liar, and adds in a few new, cool ideas to form a compelling murder mystery experience.

Obviously, being part of the title, the most important mechanic in the game is the protagonist’s ability to change their form and voice to match that of any other character, gaining valuable insight and information by talking to others in their guise.

Not only are players able to ask questions that they couldn’t get away with normally by asking them “as” another character, but they can even play upon established connections to manipulate others to do what they need to in order to help solve the case. We saw a bit of this when he guided Oscar to investigate Browyn’s room, both by encouraging him as Chief Dupont, and using Browyn’s face to get him into position. Playing on, establishing, and or manipulating relationships forms a very important aspect of the game.

But the other, more subtly important, is the ability to throw away questions or responses. One of my viewers on Twitch asked why one would want to do that, since most players are trained to exhaust the question tree before moving on (something that I still do a lot of in this game). The trick is that, just like in real life, it is sometimes better to avoid interrupting someone and just let them keep talking with an uninterrupted train of thought.

Alternatively, if the player suspects a question will do more to hurt their reputation or compromise their investigation than it would to help, then it might also make for sense to throw it away than it would to ask it. This options adds a whole new layer to conversation that is refreshing to see, and breathes new life into the dialogue trees we’re all so familiar with.

I’m glad I was able to show off this game, because it’s one that’s super easy to overlook, but still a great game.

And with that, our adventures in Rome have come to a close and we’ve hit the endgame. This is exactly as far as Aldowyn, anaphysik, and I were able to progress before Disclosure Alert met its untimely demise at the hands of our various schedules.

Thanks to streaming and post-production laziness, we’re now in a place where crossing the finish line is no longer an impossible task.

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While I am disappointed that we weren’t able to goad Marburg into a fatal duel, anaphysik is right in that we were able to do so in the original Disclosure Alert recordings. You may wish to check out those old videos if you want to see that, though I must issue a Content Warning as some of our jokes and comments are very insensitive in a way we didn’t realize they were back in late 2013.

A lot of people will tell you that having a coincidence, especially one of this magnitude, in a plot is bad storytelling. Those people are wrong, especially when coincidences like the ones that pile up around Madison Saint James create very interesting dynamics between important characters. Admittedly, it sucks that she gets killed and/or kidnapped, and later disregarded by the story in order to this work, but there the relationships we get through her provide some excellent setup for the final mission.

• Marburg has been working with Parker and Leland to destabilized global politics and establish a new cold war. To that end, he kidnaps Madison Saint James, who has formed a connection to Thorton, in order to use her as leverage against him so that their operation in Rome goes on successfully.
• As Madison’s father, Alan Parker genuinely cares about her. However, he has no way of knowing that she is working for the VCI/Deus Vult, and isn’t aware that she is being put in danger (and possibly killed, as it happens in our run) as a direct result of the plans he has set in motion. Furthermore, though we didn’t get into it, Parker is the reason why Deus Vult was originally shut down, cutting Marburg loose.

Y’know what they say, when in Rome, do everything you can to viciously antagonize an old man, waste a poor fool running a gelato shop, and knock out a bunch of CIA agents.

Wait. What?

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This is one of the episodes where I don’t really have a lot more to add to what we discussed in the recording. This usually happens at some point in any Let’s Play, and I’m only surprised it took this long.

Part of that has to do with the fact that we didn’t talk much about why we made many of the comments that we did. For example, I called Madison Saint James “one of the biggest coincidences in the game”, mentioning that she just kinda stumbled onto Alan Parker’s old workstation. That’s part of it, but no where near approaching the whole story.

Same with Marburg. He go into some detail about his role in Alpha Protocol, and who he works for, but we haven’t talked about his plans for Rome, and what we’re going to try to stop.

Hopefully next session, we’ll get far enough in where we can talk about that in more detail.

And here we are, at the Grand Finale. Despite a rocky start, I’m extraordinarily proud of both of this mission and the run as a whole.

I can’t imagine how many people will watching and shout at their computers “The crowbar is just to the left! Why aren’t you going left!?”. That said, I have to admit that I’m glad that it went down in this way, because I got to see an aspect of Hitman that I normally don’t.

And even once I found the crowbar, so that I could find the dagger for the Janus Mission Story, we had an incredible moment where I couldn’t stop getting bodies discovered. It was remarkable the way all the systems seemed to be conspiring against me, and it felt awesome to just change outfits and walk away as if nothing happened.

Even more incredible is that despite the extraordinary level of carnage on display, the rest of the run went smoothly, and I never felt the kind of suspicion or danger you might expect from a security force where a large amount of their co-workers suddenly got murdered by one man. I was genuinely surprised at how resilient the system was in this case, and how everyone went back to their routines after the “danger had passed”, allowing me to continue play normally.

And as for the kills, they were ungodly satisfying. I didn’t realize how badly I wanted a genuinely deserving callback to the funeral in Blood Money until it happened in this recording. They used Ave Maria towards the end in Absolution that felt unearned and out of place. This is not that at all. I couldn’t be happier that I was able to do that on stream.

The other one was excellent too, thought more for the person I was impersonating than for the actual assassination itself. Hearing the constant scare him out of voting in favor by saying that “It’ll be communism” was one of the most darkly hilarious conversations I’ve eavesdropped on in a video game. Even better was evacuating the Constant without any difficulty after leaving the blood to dry. As a said, very few things can evoke that same feeling on complete control in the way that finale march out of the Isle of Sgail did.

Thank you to everyone who took part, either here or on stream. The fact that you all choose to spent your free time here with me is so incredible impactful, and I hope I live up to your expectations. We’ll still be doing all the future Elusive Targets, and expect other games/streams as we move into 2019! 🙂

And now, our Improvisation Run moves from the slums to the suburbs in Whittleton Creek. Separating from the ICA to pursue his own agenda, Agent 47 is out to finish what he started as a little boy.

Now that the game’s save system is back online, we can safely continue the Improvisation Run. We return to Mumbai to finish what we started.