Detectives United: Timeless Voyage

Detectives United: Timeless Voyage is the third installment in the Detectives United series by Elephant Games.

The three detectives are taken prisoner by Dark Anna, Anna Gray's evil counterpart from another dimension, and sent to different points in history to recover mystic artifacts. They have no choice but to concede to her terms in order to survive, even as they work to learn her real plan and put a stop to it.

Plot
After a brief cinematic showing that Dark Anna is up to something, the game proper begins with the three detectives gathered in their office for a meeting with Agent Shade. While Brown and James have one of their friendly quarrels, Anna goes on the computer and prints a report about the recent events. Once this is accomplished, Shade joins them with a surprise - Anna's cousin Tobias has sent her and her friends tickets for a weekend cruise aboard a ship called the Titan.

The detectives head for the pier and board the ship, getting dressed up for a formal dinner. Anna greets her friends in the dining room, complimenting them on their appearance; but just as Agent Brown comments that the lack of other guests is disturbing, Dark Anna appears and thanks them for falling right into her trap. She opens a pair of portals, pulling James and Brown into different points in time and leaving Anna with just Richard to help her. The ship almost immediately collides with an iceberg, forcing Anna to find warmer clothes. Richard emerges from the skull, lightly teasing Anna about walking right into a trap before admitting that even he, with his supernatural senses, didn't notice anything was amiss. He gives Anna her purse, which she dropped during the crash.

Going through the purse, Anna finds that her Connector was damaged when the ship crashed. Her ship ticket now contains a message: "Find the One Amulet and I'll let you live." She finds James's Connector on the floor, where he dropped it when he was taken, and once outside she makes contact with Agent Shade to brief her on the situation. Shade tells her more about the One Amulet, and says that although it's long gone in the present day, Anna should be able to travel back in time to retrieve it; she provides information which Anna can use to make the necessary portal. Anna then makes her way to a nearby ice cave, where centuries-dead Vikings serve as ghostly guardians, and she's forced into battle. As she wonders aloud how she can possibly win this fight, she fervently hopes that the boys are safe.

The action then switches to Brown, who has been knocked unconscious; he awakens to find himself on a small rowboat in an unfamiliar river. After navigating to shore on someone's estate, he grabs a rock to disable a nearby drone before it can report his presence. He pulls out his Connector, intending to contact Agent Shade, but gets only a recording informing him that Detectives United has disbanded. Careful snooping eventually reveals that he's at the home of the McGrays, Anna's cousins, and that he's actually been thrown thirty years into the future. His ticket directs him to "Find the Sand of Time and I'll let you live." Hoping that his partners are all right, he sets to work exploring the estate in search of this strange item, finding documents which explain that it was given to the McGrays by a witch to help their land prosper. Before he can succeed in his objective, however, the place is crawling with hired guards, and he takes refuge in some bushes to avoid detection.

The game then travels centuries into the past, where James awakens to find himself in the Mystery Trackers' castle "dressed like an old jester." His ticket tells him he must "Find the branch of the Blood-Bred Tree and I'll let you live." To do this, he needs to first make his way out of the room where he's landed, but as soon as he opens the door, he's confronted by an armored knight determined to keep him from disturbing an unknown individual. Like his friends, James is in for a struggle.

Cutting back to Anna, she manages to defeat the Viking guard and makes her way into the ancient camp, where she has to find the mysterious One Amulet. Papers she finds show that the Viking captain became obsessed with this talisman, and though his crew just wanted to go home, they ended up dying where they were because he wouldn't leave. The amulet is in the captain's quarters on the ship, and after she finally acquires it, a portal opens and she is pulled into an unknown time and place.

The perspective then returns to Brown, who must carefully get past the guards by watching their paths and avoiding their notice. He makes his way to the ancient McGray cemetery in search of clues, eventually getting past a fallen tree and into the nearby forest, where the Sand of Time is submerged in a noxious swamp. He's incredulous that he has to use magic to purify the water in order to retrieve the hourglass containing the Sand, but he does it, and no sooner is it in his hands than he is pulled through a portal just like Anna.

James manages to defeat the armored guardian in his way, and after some further exploration of the castle, he finds himself in an underground chamber which he never knew existed. After assembling the necessary components to get past a barrier, he enters the sanctuary of the Blood-Bred Tree, an ancient magical tree which protects the Mystery Trackers castle from monsters. The chamber also contains a stone sarcophagus in which is sealed Morpheus, the ancient enemy of the Mystery Trackers. In his efforts to get to the tree, James disturbs Morpheus, who awakens; fortunately, another armored guardian has waited nearby to subdue him, and while they fight with each other James takes advantage of the distraction to get the branch for Dark Anna. Once he does, he too is pulled through a portal.

Anna then becomes the player character for the rest of the game. She and the boys are back on the cruise ship, tied up next to a bomb which is set to go off in less than twenty seconds - so much for Dark Anna letting them live. Anna manages to free herself before the bomb can go off, but there's no time to free her friends; Brown tells her to jump back in time and disable the bomb. She does, going back to the glory days of the Titan - a ship which sank many decades earlier when it hit an iceberg. Dark Anna has headquartered herself aboard the ship, but is frozen in time and cannot interfere with Anna's efforts to thwart her.

As she searches the ship for what she needs, Anna finds documentation explaining what Dark Anna is doing. She failed in a previous mission for D.A.R.K. S.H.R.I.N.E., her dimension's version of Detectives United, and has been chastised by her boss, Commander Brown, because their world is being threatened by an environmental apocalypse which is on the verge of taking place. (This corresponds to the detectives' experiences in that dimension during the previous game's bonus chapter, when James observed that the air was difficult to breathe.) Dark Anna's research has shown her how to craft an item called the Time Mighter, using the three components she had the detectives gather for her, enabling her to both save her world and get revenge on the detectives for previously thwarting her efforts to do so. Though Anna can't condone much of what Dark Anna has done, she sympathizes with her motives and doesn't attempt to incapacitate her frozen enemy. She finds the bomb and disables it, and back in the present, James and Brown are relieved when it stops ticking before it kills them both.

Back in their office, Anna explains to her partners and Agent Shade what Dark Anna was doing and why. They agree that they understand her motivation, because as James puts it, "Innocent people live everywhere." The game ends by showing Dark Anna, on the deck of a ship in her own dimension, deploying the Time Mighter and smiling as it undoes the environmental damage threatening to destroy the world.

Bonus Chapter
Agent Brown is at his desk, doing paperwork, when he receives a strange message about a security breach. The video footage shows James breaking into a part of the castle where he would not normally go. Alarmed, Brown immediately calls Anna and asks her to come and help him find out what's going on; she joins him in the corridor outside of the plant laboratory where James has sealed himself.

They make their way into the room, where James - whose eyes are glowing a strange yellow - tries to attack them. Richard comes out of the skull in order to subdue him, while Brown retrieves a chain, and they secure him to a bench. Taking an amulet away from him brings him back to himself, and James explains that he was at home, but the next thing he knew he was at the castle. It seems that when he disturbed Morpheus while collecting the branch of the Blood-Bred Tree, the evil being put a spell on James's mind, and once James was returned to the future, Morpheus reached out telepathically to make James his servant; he has forced James to help him escape his tomb. Brown briefly explains to the others who Morpheus is, then leaves Anna and Richard to watch over James while he makes his way to the Mystery Trackers library to search for his organization's ancient foe. Upon opening a secret passage, he discovers that Morpheus has set the library ablaze in order to destroy all records of how to beat him; he then tells Brown that he too will become Morpheus's loyal servant. Brown sends a distress signal to Anna on the Connector, telling her that he's in danger and she must stay away for her own safety.

Back in the plant lab, Anna - receiving this message - goes back in time to collect items James needs for a ritual to subdue Morpheus. After returning to the present, she leaves James to assemble his ritual while she goes to try and help Brown. James concocts a potion and uses it to enchant a knife with which to fight Morpheus. He heads for the library, where Morpheus has both Brown and Anna unconscious and under his control, and uses the enchanted knife to cut off Morpheus's power and destroy him forever. James's friends wake and thank him for saving them, with Brown apologizing for the fact that Morpheus "got the drop on me." The others assure him that he's not to blame. James suggests that they all go out and have a glass of wine, and the chapter ends with a shot of the three of them collected around a table, enjoying a drink and each other's company in peace.

Characters

 * Dorian Brown: Mystery Trackers special agent from Mystery Trackers series.
 * James Blackthorne: paranormal expert and detective from Haunted Hotel series.
 * Anna Gray: private investigator from Grim Tales series. She can time travel using personal objects.
 * Richard Gray: Anna's father. His soul is in the skull which Anna always carries with her.
 * Dark Anna Gray: the main antagonist. She seeks revenge on the three detectives for interrupting her plans during the bonus chapter of the previous game.
 * Morpheus: One of the founding members of the Mystery Trackers, who has been sealed in a sarcophagus beneath the organization's headquarters. He wants to be resurrected so he can once again seize control of the paranormal agency.

Connections

 * The Blood-Bred Tree, a branch of which is needed by Dark Anna to form the Time Mighter, is from the Mystery Trackers installment Silent Hollow.
 * The Sand of Time, another item required by Dark Anna, is from the Grim Tales installment The Heir. Agent Brown acquires it from the McGray mansion, the setting of that game; he finds a photograph of Anna and her daughter Alice in the house.
 * The One Amulet, the third item needed, is from the bonus chapter of the Haunted Hotel installment Personal Nightmare.
 * When Anna is going through her purse, the player might notice a photograph of a little girl with braided pigtails. Anna doesn't comment on the photo, but a few months after the release of Timeless Voyage, the Grim Tales installment The Generous Gift showed Anna's six-year-old daughter Alice as looking pretty much exactly like the photo.
 * Morpheus, the antagonist of the bonus chapter, is an ancient enemy of the Mystery Trackers organization. The player must deal with him in the installment Silent Hollow.
 * Throughout the collector's edition of the game, the player can find assorted 'case cards' which contain references to not only the two previous Detectives United games, but also to cases which the three detectives resolved in their individual series.

Trivia

 * The cruise ship in the game is very clearly meant to be an homage to the RMS Titanic. The name is similar, it dates from a similar time period, it met a similar fate (having crashed into an iceberg and sunk), and both ships even had captains with the last name of Smith.
 * Because Dark Anna is visually indistinguishable from Anna, in all scenes where she is alone, she is depicted wearing a light blue hooded cloak so the player knows that it's her.
 * Although this game does not identify him, the immortal armored guardian who fights Morpheus when he wakes is in fact Morpheus's own son.