The face that launched a thousand memes!
"HALLIGAN! WHERE ARE MY SCISSORS?"
— Lowry
A series of brutal murders leaves Scotland Yard stumped. When Detective Brent Halligan gets assigned to the case, he bumbles his way through ordinary activities and eventually discovers the murders' link to a conspiracy by a neo-pagan cult. When he teams up with a second playable character, anthropology professor Melanie Turner, their investigation into the British Order of Druids takes them on a trip through time itself.
This 2001 PC game is largely remembered for its meme-worthy box art, but that hilarious image doesn't even begin to cover the bizarre plot and even more bizarre puzzles.
This game contains examples of:
- Abnormal Limb Rotation Range: An unintentional example; Janet is animated rather interestingly and pivots in her chair awkwardly whenever she faces Halligan.
- Age Without Youth: The Inheritors, the primary antagonists, may have seemingly-endless lifespans but they're a bunch of decrepit old men in modern times.
- Anti-Frustration Features: After first solving The Maze in the druid monastery in the past, the game automatically skips you past it from then on if you need to go between the entrance and the exit again.
- Arbitrary Skepticism: The game often flip-flops as to how accepting Halligan and Melanie are of the crazy things going around them. A particularly hilarious instance is when Melanie questions whether going to Twelve Bridges can stop the druids' plan, dismissing it as "just a myth, a fairy tale!" as they're in front of Mr. Blake's blown-up house, it being blown-up just moments before by the druids with them completely present, along with the ethereal voice of Lord Sinclair warning them about their actions.
- Artistic License – Chemistry: An early puzzle involves the effects of drinking cups-worths of ethanol, which in this game simply knocks the recipient out. In real life, laboratory-grade ethanol has methanol as an impurity, and it only takes about 10ml of methanol to render someone permanently blind, and only 25 to kill them. And no, mixing it with apple juice isn't going to prevent that from happening. While medical ethanol (which is what Halligan is explicitly using) can theoretically be used to treat methanol poisoning, in reality a lot of medical ethanol actually contains methanol due to poor QC and the fact that oral ingestion is not its intended use.
- Artistic License – Linguistics:
- The druidic texts in the game are written using Germanic runes instead of ogham.
- It's rather fascinating how Halligan and Turner can even converse with the English soldiers and the inhabitants of Serstan's keep, considering how radically different Middle English is to the modern language used in the 21st century. At least in Turner's case, she should be able to read some of their books due to her profession, but Halligan should only be hearing gibberish when trying to converse with either Serstan or Maglor.
- As You Know: Averted in a way that illustrates why the trope exists. Halligan first meets Melanie when he wants her to use her expertise to examine a bone from a crime scene. At this point, the game switches so that you're now controlling her, but since this is the first time you're playing her you know nothing about her job. If you try to talk to Halligan during this segment, she refuses to give him any details about the process that she knows but the player doesn't. While the puzzles of this segment are basic, figuring out your goal is a hurdle in itself (it doesn't help that the room is packed full of Red Herring equipment and points of interest).
- Award-Bait Song: "The Kiss", playing during the credits following The Big Damn Kiss.
- Bag of Spilling: Averted. Not once does Halligan lose all of his inventory throughout the game, leading to Halligan carrying a majority of items that are no longer (or never were) useful to the finale.
- Batman Gambit: Halligan's last major plan at the end of the game to stop Sinclair involves an Exact Words word of honor contract with Serstan by proclaiming "neither Melanie or himself may be hurt." It works by stabbing Melanie and proclaiming the deal was violated. Serstan, inhabiting Sinclair's body, is forced to relinquish his side of the deal.
- Be as Unhelpful as Possible:
- Most of Halligan's coworkers are totally uninterested in helping him solve the case, including Chief Inspector Miller, who demands immediate results. The critical path of Halligan simply phoning up a bone expert and doing a database search on modern druids would have taken mere seconds compared to the hoops the player has to jump through in chapters 1 and 3, respectively. (His office phone can't make outgoing calls because apparently, he's over-used it in the past, but still). It is understandable in most cases, as Halligan is shown to be a clueless jerk who has made all of their jobs harder, owes pretty much all of them but Lowry a fair amount of money, habitually steals their stuff, and never bothers to explain stuff like how visiting an expert on druids actually connects to the murders.
- Then, later on, a librarian resolutely refuses to help Halligan look up a book, and refuses to let him check it out once he finds it. Unlike with his coworkers, the game doesn't give a reason why the librarian is so aloof.
- Big Bad: Lord Sinclair turned out to be this, being responsible for both the troubles that dogged Halligan and the recent skeleton murders. While Serstan is the one who started the events of the game, being an ancient threat makes him the Greater-Scope Villain for Sinclair.
- The Big Damn Kiss: The game ends with Halligan and Melanie kissing after foiling the druids' evil plan.
- Brainwashed: When he ends up captured by Lord Sinclair and his henchmen, Halligan gets brainwashed and inducted into The Circle. It doesn't last long, as one blow to the head with a skull by Melanie the next morning gets him back to normal.
- Chekhov's Time Travel: Halfway through the game, Mr. Blake mentions the Twelve Bridges, a sacred, but dilapidated site made by ancient Celts that were supposedly created for attempts to travel through time. Once Mr. Blake is killed and Sinclair's actions end up locked in motion, Halligan and Melanie decide to travel there and make use of it in order to stop The Circle's plans retroactively.
- Complexity Addiction: One particularly infamous puzzle requires Halligan to acquire some sea salt. To do this, you have to capture a cat, use the cat to knock over a fisherman's bucket of bait, convince him to leave his ultra expensive fishing equipment with you while he goes to buy some more bait, and then use the bucket and the fishing rod as a makeshift tool to scrape some of the sea salt off the ship that you arrived on. Not once does Halligan even consider that perhaps a much more sensible course of action would be asking the captain of the ship about the sea salt.
- Contrived Coincidence: Melanie Turner ends up in the plot because she's the only one present at the Anthropological Museum to help Halligan out regarding a particular forensics investigation, which he only went to because the Yard's actual forensic expert happened to know her father and suggested Halligan talk to him, and she just so happens to have been reading an Arthur Blake magazine article that discusses the particular historical context as to why she's found gold shavings matched to druidic sickles for rituals. Then we go to Mr. Blake himself, whereupon he lays out the entire plot of the villains in full, overly-elaborate detail because he happened to be studying inscriptions describing them at that particular moment in time.
- Cruelty Is the Only Option:
- An early puzzle requires getting change to use a payphone. The solution to getting it involves getting ethanol, mixing it with apple juice, and offering it to a homeless man as apple schnapps in order to knock him out and steal his hat full of spare change.
- A puzzle not long after involves stealing someone's fishing rod. To do so, you have to wait for a nearby cat to pass by, catch it with your bare hands and a cloth, then chuck it at the man's bucket of bait to knock it into the water so that he's forced to leave and go buy more, at which point Halligan helpfully volunteers to watch his beloved expensive fishing rod to make sure nobody steals it. And in contrast to the change which you can naturally not get back out of the phone, you never return the fishing rod once you got what you needed.
- Later, Halligan is tasked to find a specific book at the Oxford Library for Blake so he can translate a scroll. Finding the book is difficult, but there is a computer Halligan can use to find it more easily. Unfortunately, an old man is occupying it and refuses to let Halligan use it, but also makes the mistake of telling Halligan the location of his car and that it has an alarm on it. Halligan must then plant a book in the man's coat, so that when he unlocks the car using a metal wire, tripping the car's alarm, the man runs to the exit of the building and sets off the library's alarm, getting himself detained and allowing Halligan to be able to use the computer.
- In the game's climax, the solution to stop the ritual is to have Serstan's promise of having neither you nor Melanie getting hurt to be broken, which is done by stabbing Melanie in the gut yourself.
- Da Chief: Miller is a clear-cut example. While it's unclear how he thinks of miscellaneous staff members like Chris or Janet, it's made very clear that he has nothing but contempt for Halligan and Lowry, referring to them as "idiots" and "blockheads", to name a few. Additionally, much of Halligan's interaction with Miller has the boss annoyed at him for one reason or another before the detective is rudely dismissed, but that could just be because Halligan is, well, Halligan.
- Dartboard of Hate: Halligan's office has a dartboard that on one side has a taped-on drawing of Chief Inspector Miller.
- Delayed Reaction: An unintentional instance occurs after Mr. Blake and his house get blown up under a blackened sky. As Halligan and Melanie stand outside staring at it, it takes about 20 seconds for the sky to return to normal and the cutscene to end, and only then does Halligan finally shout "Oh god, Mr. Blake!"
- Dialogue Tree: Present when having conversations, and figuring out the correct choices for certain situations are necessary to progress the game.
- Dropped a Bridge on Him: Though the exact method is spectacular, Mr. Blake meets an abrupt end halfway through the game as Lord Sinclair blows up him and his house after he finishes translating the druid manuscript. Melanie stops Halligan from going in to try and save him by saying he's probably already dead, and he's almost never mentioned again in the game afterwards.
- Drugs Are Bad: Halligan's briefly mentions that he's trying to give up smoking, though for whatever reason, he still has an unopened pack in one of his office drawers.
- Druid: Present of course, but unlike the typical depiction, they're not of the modern fantasy variety with connections to nature and animals. In this game, they're more inspired by the actual historical orders of priests, with your enemies being a modern cult that intends to Take Over the World using sacrificial rituals. When they do use active magic, it's of the highly explosive kind.
- Druidic Sickle: The druids use a golden sickle to carry out their human sacrifices, using it to strip flesh off a victim's body as Halligan witnesses later on. It's only by discovering some specks of gold on one of the victim's bone that makes their involvement in the case Halligan is on apparent.
- Dude, Not Funny!: The main reason Halligan is shut out from a good deal of Scotland Yard's resources despite it actively hindering him is that when Princess Diana died he put out an arrest warrant on her widower, Prince Charles, as a joke. Lowry really grills Halligan for having done it, especially since now it's made the office bureaucracy to get any work done even more restrictive.
- Easily Forgiven: Melanie joyfully kisses Halligan after he heals her with the mistletoe, not the slightest bit upset that it was him who just stabbed her in the gut in the first place.
- Enfant Terrible: Featured in the intro cutscene, the last of the druids transferred their knowledge and power into five infants called "Inheritors", with the goal of having them complete their final ritual to Take Over the World. They turn out to be "The Circle" in the present day.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Evil as he is, Serstan seems to have a soft spot for his brother Maglor, as he's the only surviving member of the household, and the only reason both Halligan and Turner are even alive was that Serstan was feeling inclined to oblige Maglor's wish. All of this goes flying out of the window however, quite literally too, when Maglor attempts to escape with Halligan, as Serstan's spell orb seems to be aimed at him instead of the detective.
- Evil Gloating: You have the option of confronting Serstan in his chamber multiple times, and despite his insistence that you have nothing to offer him and you're wasting his time, he'll stay in conversation just to gloat about how powerful he will be for minutes.
- Exact Words: Interestingly played with at the end when Halligan makes a pact with Serstan that no harm will come to either him or Melanie, without specifying who commits the harm, allowing Halligan to force Serstan into violation of the pact by stabbing Melanie himself. What makes this particularly amusing, though, is that Halligan doesn't even mention harm. His exact exact words are "you must swear that nothing will happen to either Melanie or me afterwards". Something is always "happening" to a person at any given moment. That's how time works. It is literally impossible to not violate such a condition.
- Fat Bastard: Mr. Smothers, one of the members of Sinclair's Circle, is noticeably overweight, and much of his screentime is focused on him munching on human flesh, fitting for his position as the CEO of a major international food corporation.
- The Friend Nobody Likes: Everyone in Scotland Yard seems to have it out for Halligan to a degree; Da Chief Miller is very frequently exasperated by the consequences of Halligan's shenanigans which he has to deal with, Lowry hates him for always misplacing and never returning the things he borrowed from him, plus all the extra paperwork they have to do thanks to Halligan, and Janet dislikes him for his tacky life choices (and hitting on her). Chris is the only one who at least is professional around him, but even he screws around with Halligan by offering him a taste of ethanol knowing it'll knock him out cold.
- Functional Addict: An unintentional exaggeration. It's stated that Halligan goes through a carton of cigarettes a week. While it's possible they meant just a single pack containing 20 cigarettes and he's going through two or three a day, a carton is a box of ten packs, meaning Halligan goes through roughly 28 cigarettes in one day.
- The Gambling Addict: One offhand comment by Chris mentions that Halligan's got some gambling habits to justify why he doesn't have any change to use a payphone.
- Gargle Blaster: "Det. Halligan's Home-made Apple Schnapps" (i.e. concentrated medical alcohol mixed with apple juice). One sip of it knocks a grown man out cold almost immediately.
- Genre Refugee: The game might as well be described as "Broken Sword, starring Guybrush Threepwood". Halligan seems to be written as the main character of a much quirkier adventure game, locked in a mostly realistic world where his cheerful insanity makes him a nuisance and his antics regularly land him in actual trouble.
- The Guards Must Be Crazy:
- A rather extreme and inexplicable case later in the game. As soon as Halligan and Melanie end up in the past, two soldiers come by and knock them out thinking they're Danish spies, though while Halligan's put in a cell, Melanie simply wakes up in their kitchen as the soldiers lounge in the other room expecting her to make them something to drink. The opportunity to knock them out with a herbal sleeping drink is practically given for free.
- A lighter, but still confusing example much earlier: When Melanie has to sneak into Lord Sinclair's manor, she throws a rock at a wall to distract a guard. This attracts the attention of both him and a second guard on the other side of the manor with an open window to sneak into, and the two will be left huddling around it the rock for her to do so.
- Greater-Scope Villain: Serstan. Despite Lord Sinclair being the Big Bad, he and his fellow Inheritors are still ultimately pawns in Serstan's grand scheme of magical immortality and total world domination via his Tyke Bomb plot.
- Guide Dang It!: Surprisingly, this doesn't always line up with the Moon Logic Puzzles. A common problem is when otherwise simple or logical puzzles simply don't give you the feedback or information you need to know you even can perform a certain action. In many cases there's no feedback at all when you try to use or look at a hotspot, giving you nothing to work with. One particular interaction even has Halligan tell you it's something he won't do at all when it's just a matter of doing it somewhere slightly different. Meanwhile, something as baffling as throwing salt at a castle-shaped structure to blow it up is something told to you outright in game.
- One section has a maze puzzle, the kind where you travel between several barely distinguishable rooms, each containing several doorways, which are inexplicably linked together. Normally such a puzzle would have some kind of rule you need to follow in order to navigate it. This one probably does, maybe something to do with the lanterns and runes on the walls, but, to date, it doesn't seem like anyone's managed to figure it out. What is known is the shortest path through, which is 10 steps long and requires you to go back the way you came four times. This was only learned through trial and error, so the only way to figure it out yourself is to do trial and error of your own.
- Healing Herb: After Halligan and a fatally-wounded Maglor land in a forest, he asks Halligan to find mistletoe, though he succumbs to his wounds as soon as he finds it. Later on, Halligan uses it to magically heal Melanie's stab wounds.
- Idiot Ball: Usually more inconsiderate than stupid, Halligan has his moments. While it's good to not have the character know too much and leave the audience confused, Halligan's lack of information about certain topics makes certain puzzles needlessly confusing for the opposite reason.
- He's never heard of Ethanol, forcing a puzzle where he has to find out what it is and taste it himself before he can use it.
- He can't begin to figure out what the druid water symbol is supposed to represent, despite being one of the most basic and intuitive iconographic symbols.
- When he ends up at the house of a few cannibals, he doesn't seem to realize that the person they're waiting for was Invited as Dinner until he sees them being killed. Even then, he has to be outright told that the meat at the dinner table is human flesh (whether or not he was brainwashed at the time).
- Becomes outright ridiculous later on when the game forces the player to do multiple puzzles to use a crystal bar that shows druids perform a ritual with infants, only for Halligan to tell Maglor in pure shock and terror that they might do a ritual with children. Something that Mr. Blake, Lord Sinclair and Melanie told him at separate points in the game already.
- I'm a Humanitarian: The reason for why the murder victims are stripped down to their skeletons is because the druids ritualistically consume their flesh, which they see as the source of life force, explaining why they've been around for so long. When Halligan gets captured and forced to dine with The Circle, he eats human flesh, making him susceptible to The Circle's brainwashing, though puzzlingly, the game is vague on whether he sat down and willingly ate a human steak before the brainwashing happened.
- I'm Cold... So Cold...: Melanie quotes this trope almost verbatim after Halligan defeated the Circle by stabbing the former in the chest. Fortunately for her, Halligan still has some of the life-saving mistletoes with him, and what little bit of druidic magic given to him by the human flesh he ate during the second act.
- Improvised Parachute: To escape the druid's monastery later in the game, you take a bedsheet, burn a small hole through it using a candle, and leap out a window with it (the game skips some steps since, in the cutscene that follows, he hangs onto ropes attached to it that appear from out of nowhere).
- Infodump: The game is really bad with this, with many long-winded passages of Exposition with characters standing in place for rather long periods of time. Halligan's first meeting with Mr. Blake about druids and the Amulet of Transformation takes about 12 minutes to get the pertinent information.
- Irony: After Melanie breaks Halligan free of his posession after he nearly murders her she tells him to "Never" try anything like that again, the final puzzle of the game involves Halligan FATALLY stabbing Mealanie.
- It's a Wonderful Failure: If Melanie gets caught outside Lord Sinclair's manor, she'll be brought in where a Brainwashed Halligan will invite her as a "guest of honour" for dinner. Following this is a black screen of text that reports that a few days afterwards, her skeleton is found in a forest, Halligan is declared missing, and was last seen leaving Scotland Yard.
- Jump Cut: Right after knocking Halligan out of his trance and recovering the stolen amulet. Some of Sinclair's bodyguards try and get into the room Halligan and Melanie are in. Halligan immediately proclaims that they "should get out of here" and that "they should do it now." The game then cuts to both of them outside the mansion. This happens again when Halligan suggests going to Arthur Blake's house.
- Karma Houdini: The only negative consequence Halligan faces for robbing a homeless man is... a stern talking to from his boss.
- Kleptomaniac Hero: Like most adventure game protagonists, you need to help yourself to whatever you can to get through certain puzzles. Unlike most such protagonists, Halligan stands out because his office workers already know about this and hate him for it. He also seems to have a habit of breaking the items he steals. One notable example is the puzzle where you need the scrape salt off a ferry that's too far away to reach by hand. You ultimately have to trick a fisherman into leaving you to guard his expensive fishing pole. Even though you only need it for something a few feet away, Halligan straight up takes the whole thing with him and never even uses it in the rest of the game.
- Limited Animation: Even by the standards of the time this was made, it's a bit threadbare in the animation department, particularly when any humans need animating. This is probably why many close-ups of Halligan using items are just the item floating around in space doing their own thing (like flying hedge clippers clipping the fence).
- Loophole Abuse: The basis for how the Inheritors' plan is foiled: when in the past, Halligan only gives Serstan back his magic staff on the condition that "nothing will happen to either me or Melanie afterwards." Serstan obliges, and in the present-day during the final ceremony, Halligan fatally stabs Melanie himself, meaning that Serstan broke his promise, causing Lord Sinclair and the other Inheritors to uphold his end of the deal by vanishing, and the ritual stopped. The terms are made even more confusing when Melanie gets healed back with the healing mistletoe shortly afterwards.
- MacGuffin: The Amulet of Transformation for the first section of the game, which is said to be required in order for The Circle to complete their ritual. It's also required for Halligan and Melanie to travel back in time.
- Make It Look Like an Accident: This was Lord Sinclair's original plan to deal with Halligan just in case He Knows Too Much, but the detective delivering himself to his doorstep made that unnecessary.
- Mean Boss: Chief Inspector Miller doesn't have a very high opinion of Halligan, and will take any opportunity to let him know directly.
- Metaphorically True: In one moment during a trip to the past, Halligan encounters a blacksmith and offhandedly mentions to him he's from Scotland Yard. The blacksmith assumes it's somewhere in Scotland, and Halligan corrects him by saying "Let's just say it's a place it takes a long time to get to."
- Moon Logic Puzzle: So, so many.
- One of the most egregious involves finding the Amulet of Transformation. This is done by going to a pier, finding and capturing a cat, throwing it at a fisherman's bait so you can steal his fishing rod and a bucket to scrape coarse salt off the side of a ship. Then, heading to an old druid castle's ruins, you slip by a locked gate with a file folder to get to a nearby mausoleum, grind the salt into something finer on a gravestone, then you throw it at the mausoleum, and the mausoleum explodes. Inside is an inexplicable treasure chest with the amulet.note What makes it even worse is that you can accidentally softlock yourself by going to the castle too early, preventing the correct dialogue option from appearing and making it impossible to get the salt.
- Actually acquiring the alcohol for the infamous homeless puzzle only makes sense in hindsight. You need to clean the bottles of their existing fingerprints so that when Chris goes to get you the alcohol, you can use fingerprint powder after you wake up to find out which one he took. The only problem is there is arbitrarily no conversation option in which Chris will actually agree to give you the alcohol until after you wipe the fingerprints, so you have no reason to clean the bottles until after you do.
- At one point you're trapped in a room with only windows too high to escape from. You might notice that there is a unique dialogue option if you try to use a sheet on a landmark on the horizon, which seems fairly random. It turns out the solution is to burn a hole in the sheet and then fly out the window with it... because it's suddenly a fully makeshift parachute (though this one at least implies some steps of the puzzle left on the cutting room floor).
- Mr. Exposition: Arthur Blake is the source of many Infodumps regarding the druids and their possible plans. Maglor fulfils the same role when Halligan and Melanie end up back in time.
- No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Dine: When Halligan gets caught by Lord Sinclair and his henchmen, Sinclair repeatedly stresses holding him captive but then invites him to dinner as a guest of honour. After briefly escaping but then passing out in shock at discovering their gory human sacrifice, he wakes up finding himself at the dinner table eating the victim's flesh as part of a brainwashing ritual to indoctrinate him into The Circle.
- Non-Standard Game Over: If Melanie is caught by Sinclair's guards when sneaking into his mansion, the player will be treated to a scene of a brainwashed Halligan leading her into the garden. This is followed by a short text describing how her skeleton is found several days later, and that Halligan is declared missing.
- Obstructive Bureaucrat: Scotland Yard requires a much higher level of security clearance to get anything done than usual, and the need to get the appropriate paperwork completed is an issue Halligan must workaround at certain points. The game is aware of this; apparently, security increased ever since Halligan put out an arrest warrant for Prince Charles after Princess Diana's accident as a joke.
- Oddly Small Organization: Scotland Yard's Murder Squad seems to have three staff total besides Halligan.
- Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: A weirdly consistent example - most of the game's voice acting is excellent, except Halligan always pronounces the word "pizza" as "pits-uh". This is how the word is pronounced with a German accent, probably not a coincidence given that was the game's native production language, though almost all of the other characters use the normal English pronunciation.
- Paper Key-Retrieval Trick: During one puzzle where Halligan is locked inside inside Lord Sinclair's mansion, he has to escape through the locked door using this trick. While the game (like most others that include this puzzle) doesn't question why the key is still in the lock on the other side of the door, it's a little more realistic in acknowledging that there isn't enough room beneath the door to slide a key back in. For the trick to work, Halligan has to first remove the floor tile beneath it.
- Pixel Hunt: Even some of the more straightforward puzzles in the game are made difficult because the hotspots to trigger the proper or obvious solution are tiny, out of the way, or otherwise just plain not obvious. Making it worse, not all hotspots have dialogue for attempting to use or look at them, which is especially troublesome if two hotspot are close enough to each other to not obviously be distinct.
- At one point you prop open a door, then later need to remove the blockage and let the door shut. Once you place it you cannot interact with this object anymore from the perspective in which you placed it. Halligan doesn't even refuse to remove it from there, you just can't highlight it at all. You have to shut yourself in from the side in which the object is small, in darkness, and its thin hitbox is buried in the middle of the "leave room" edge of screen hotspot.
- At one point the game even gives an anti-hint involving an elusive hotspot. You need to get a bird to move from its nest. If you use the worms directly on the conspicuous bird, Halligan will refuse because he has no reason to move the bird, likely prompting you to think you're missing something. As it turns out, the problem isn't that he has no reason to move the bird, it's just that he'll only do so if you use the worms on a small, inconspicuous section of the roof instead.
- Point of No Return: During Halligan and Melanie's crossing of the Twelve Bridges to reach the Gate of the Worlds, the last of the bridges crumble. Conveniently, once they have their expedition in the past and return to the present, they awaken on the other side of the bridges.
- Police Are Useless:
- For as much as they demand Halligan solve the case quickly, the folks at Scotland Yard actively obstruct a lot of his developments that would make things smoother, including refusing to let him use their phones, scissors, or even give him a signature for a form to access a database for no reason other than spite. Even Halligan calls Miller out for being so pointlessly obstructive during the murder investigation, but Miller simply tells him to stop whining and do his research on foot.
- While not AS bad considering he actually concerns himself with solving the case, Halligan also counts, as it never occurs for him to use his authority as a police officer to make the surprisingly large number of uncooperative individuals in his way to help him, as opposed to the circuitous and cruel path the game railroads you on. The one time he tries to use his authority on a professor who won't let him use a library computer, the latter simply mentions being friends with the Dean of the Faculty of Law and Halligan just drops it.
- It's also made clear that Halligan is partially responsible for the police being useless. Due to him using it to "jokingly" putting out an arrest warrant for Prince Charles after Princess Diana's death, accessing the database requires an ridiculous amount of paperwork, and due to him breaking and wasting tons of office supplies, so does ordering new office supplies.
- Product Placement: A Coca-Cola machine features prominently in the lobby of Scotland Yard.
- Ransacked Room: Halligan's cabin is ransacked after he hides the Amulet of Transformation there.
- Really 700 Years Old: Lord Sinclair and his fellow Inheritors are actually close to a millennium old, their lives having been prolonged by druidic magic and ritual cannibalism.
- Red Herring: The burnt grass from the initial murder scene is nothing more than a dead-end of a lead if you bring it up for forensics and a useless item that exists in your inventory for the rest of the game after you pick it up. Nothing ever explains why the grass was burnt, either.
- Refuge in Audacity: One puzzle requires you to frame an old professor for stealing a library book. To do so, you must slip a book into his pocket and then lure him through the sensors by triggering his car alarm. If you don't bother with the first part, he'll be able to walk outside and see Halligan standing next to his car, and thus accuse him of trying to steal it. Halligan will defend himself by pointing out the absurdity of him breaking into a car and then simply standing there waiting for the owner to come out. The professor begrudgingly accepts this logic and returns to the library.
- The Rival: Lowry is another Scotland Yard detective with minor involvement in the first half of the game, and one with a low opinion of Halligan. He was previously on the case of the Skeleton Murders, but was booted off after the suspect they deemed guilty turned out to not be the case, and he makes his disdain towards Halligan taking his place very clear.
- Rotating Protagonist: There are three brief parts of the game where you take control of Melanie instead of Halligan, the latter two being because he's either brainwashed or imprisoned.
- Shockingly Expensive Bill: One of the messages on Halligan's answering machine is from a pizza place saying he still has to pay a tab of 275 pounds. (Typical cost of a pizza in GBP: About £10.)
- Sigil Spam: Once the druid fire/transformation symbol is introduced, the symbols for the elements start popping up everywhere you go. The fact that the other characters keep reminding you how important they are and what they mean arguably turns the Sigil Spam into an outright Red Herring, because even when they look important they basically remain set dressing until one of the very last puzzles.
- Stupidity Is the Only Option: A rather glaring instance occurs when Halligan finds the Amulet of Transformation and takes the ferry back to England. When he arrives at his cabin, the player has to hide it someplace in the room out of fear it's going to get stolen with no explanation as to why Halligan thinks it's safer in an unfamiliar room than in his inventory where it's been safe so far. Sure enough, after putting it down and leaving, the game immediately cuts to him returning to his room having been ransacked and the amulet stolen.
- Synchronization: Sinclair and Serstan have this while performing the final ritual as one empowers the future Inheritors and the other finalizes the ritual to Take Over the World. Halligan takes advantage of this by mortally wounding Melanie and then shouting at Serstan through Sinclair that his vow that no harm would come to the two of them was broken. Since he made a magically binding oath to Halligan, Serstan is then magically compelled to slit his own throat, which causes Sinclair to do the same. Not that that point matters since Serstan's death causes he and the Inheritors to have never made it to the present.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: At one point early into the game, one of the Moon Logic Puzzles requires Halligan to knock out a beggar with a spiked drink and steal his money in order to make a phone call. In an average adventure game, this would be nothing more than just one of many inconsequential acts of jerkassery that a typical adventure game hero commits over the course of their journey. Therefore, it may come as a surprising subversion to many players, and even Halligan, when this action is later brought up by Halligan's boss, who says that the beggar contacted a police department and, since Halligan actually revealed his name to the beggar, they were able to find the culprit quite easily. This gets Halligan a thorough chewing out by his boss and a stern warning that any further morally dubious actions on his part will get him in serious trouble.
- Take Your Time: With the exception of the cat puzzle, the game never cares how long you're on a screen, even when someone is about to die in the distance, breaking down the door, or an evil ritual is about to reach fruition (a good thing too, since the latter two in particular are resolved by infamously obtuse puzzles). Perhaps the most notable example of this, however, is the initial crime scene. It's available from the start of the game, is never relevant again, but can be visited unchanged until the Point of No Return. Somehow in the days that have passed over the course of the rest of the game, no one has cleaned up the crime scene and news crews are still interviewing the same people just beyond the police tape.
- Taken Off the Case:
- The game sees the player put on the titular case due to this happening to the original detective. Steve Lowry supposedly caught the man behind the "Skeleton Murders", but it wasn't until the suspect was stabbed to death in prison that they realized he was the wrong guy, and that he was only ever deemed guilty in court was because Lowry royally screwed up his case. The game starts with Da Chief reassigning the case onto Halligan, much to Lowry's recurring disdain.
- Two-thirds into the game, Halligan himself is suspended after Da Chief gets wind of Lord Sinclair threatening to bring charges against him for "burglary". This is after Halligan has escaped from Sinclair's manor, having been almost brainwashed after discovering Sinclair and his local cabal are in fact the neo-druid murderers, among other things. Naturally, Halligan is undeterred and sees to solve the rest of the case by himself.
- Time Travel: Halligan and Melanie travel to centuries past, back to when Serstan would enact his plan for immortality via the child Inheritors.
- Trademark Favorite Food: Halligan's a regular at Al's Pizza Palace, to a point where he owes them a tab of 275 pounds. When he asks Melanie out for a date, she correctly guesses where he's about to ask her to based on the piles of pizza boxes in his office.
- Translation Convention: Played very confusingly. When Halligan and Melanie get imprisoned by a couple of English soldiers in the past, they're accused of being Danish spies in disguise who are speaking Danish. It's mildly implied that being uneducated soldiers during The Dark Ages, they perceive Melanie's modern vocabulary as Danish, except they can otherwise perfectly understand her just fine.
- Tyke Bomb: The five Inheritor children are Serstan's idea of this, being granted immense power via a druidic ritual that also gave them virtual immortality so that they can bring about total chaos and world domination a thousand years later in his stead.
- Unintentionally Unwinnable: Early on in the game, you need to find get salt at a pier in order to blow up the mausoleum at the ruins of an old castle. In order to do so, you must follow the correct dialogue options with a couple of NPCs at said pier. However, going to the ruins too early can prevent the dialogue options from appearing at all, leaving you stuck unless you reload a save.
- Ultimate Job Security: According to his boss and colleagues at Scotland Yard, not only is Halligan a sub-par detective, but he also constantly loses and/or damages other people's stationery, rang up astronomical telephone bills until his external call privileges were cut and once put out an arrest order for Prince Charles after Princess Diana's death as a joke. With all these transgressions, it's a miracle he wasn't fired.
- Villain Ball: Lord Sinclair, instead of disposing of Halligan after capturing him and holding him prisoner in the estate, which would remove the only thing standing between him and his goal of world domination, decided to induct him into his Circle and feed him human flesh. This would later come to bite him in the ass tremendously.
- Vocal Dissonance: In the moments right before his death, Mr. Blake's voice inexplicably becomes much grouchier and ragged before returning to normal, then grouchy again, as if a new voice actor replaced him for two lines of dialogue.
- Waiting Puzzle: As part of the infamous quest to obtain salt in France, after talking to the fisherman at the pier you'll need to wait for a cat to appear in order to catch it.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Halligan can talk to the beggar he drugged previously, where the latter is understandably pissed off. Halligan's response crosses this line when he justifies it as necessary for his work, implying that his eccentric and sometimes cruel actions are entirely in character as his way of getting the job done.
- Whole-Plot Reference: Halligan's office shenanigans are heavily inspired by Grim Fandango, which came out a couple of years earlier, as he must put up with a demanding but unhelpful boss, has to forge his boss's signature to move the plot forward, deals with a "golden boy" rival that never seems to actually work, and so on. The difference is Manny's D.O.D. was corrupt while Halligan has, through his own actions, utterly wrecked his reputation to the point nobody wants to help him.
