Titanic: Adventure out of Time

Story

The game begins in April 1942, when the main character (his name is Frank Carlson) is caught in an air raid during the London Blitz in World War II and is sent back to 1912, where he has the opportunity to change history. In 1912, he was a British secret agent on the RMS Titanic who must obtain a priceless copy of Omar Khayyám's Rubáiyát and now has a second chance to complete his mission. The open gameplay allows the player to either follow the story by solving puzzles or simply explore the spaces of the ship. The player's first mission is to find and retrieve the Rubáiyát. It turns out that it was stolen earlier in the year and is now believed to be in the possession of Zeitel, a German colonel who is traveling on the Titanic to inspect embassies in the United States and Central America. Traveling with the colonel is his young protégé, Willi von Haderlitz. It turns out that the colonel has made a deal with an art dealer from London named Sasha Barbicon to trade the Rubáiyát for a seemingly unimportant painting in which war plans stolen by the British government are hidden. Both operate through a middleman, a stowaway Serbian passenger named Vlad Demonic. In addition to the Rubáiyát and the painting, the player also learns that Willi is a spy for the Russians and has a notebook with the names of leading Bolshevik politicians. The notebook must be handed over to the Ochrana in order to execute communist rebels and thus prevent a threat to the tsar. Barbicon is also in possession of a stolen diamond necklace, which is used to finance a Serbian military group called the Black Hand. During his mission, the agent also gets involved in several subplots that have nothing to do with the central mission or even the winning conditions of the game. An important subplot starts with the encounter with the ship's gossip, a wealthy middle-aged spinster named Daisy Cashmore, who hands the player a note saying that he should meet with Andrew Conkling, the owner of Conkling Steel. Conkling asks the player to retrieve a business document that was stolen by Shailagh Hacker, an Irish maid who worked at his house in London. Other storylines include meeting and helping the Lambeths, a wealthy couple whose marriage has fallen apart, and meeting other passengers, including Leyland Trask, a psychic from Boston; Reverend Edgar Troutt, a religious preacher from Sunapee, New Hampshire, returning from an African mission in Nyassaland; and Max Seidelmann, an American freelancer from Philadelphia, who provides a backstory and insights of varying value. From time to time, the player is assisted by his colleague Penny Pringle. The number of objects the player finds before escaping from the ship influences the final scene and the progress of the story. If the player succeeds in finding all four objects, history is changed and World War I, the Russian Revolution and World War II do not take place - without the Rubáiyát and/or the diamonds, the Black Hand is not funded and its plan to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria (which would have triggered World War I) fails. The painting Barbicon wanted to trade to Zeitel was actually painted by Adolf Hitler, and its fame, after it is recovered from the sinking, makes Hitler a famous artist and prevents World War II (the war plans hidden in it are actually useless, and so whether they are found or not is irrelevant to the story). The notebook with the names of the Bolsheviks reaches the Tsar, and the Russian Revolution never takes place. Since the world knows peace and prosperity, the character retires to a world of peace after a successful career. Depending on what items the player does not collect, the story changes, but certain wars or revolutions still take place: There are alternate endings in which Germany conquers Russia and the United Kingdom or the Soviet Union conquers Europe, to name just two.