Bottled

Freddi Fish and the Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds was the fourth of the nearly twenty different point-and-click adventures released by Humongous Entertainment between 1992 and 2003, and was the first of their titles to use randomised plot elements on each playthrough -- every time you played the game the messages in bottles you had to find would be in different locations. I covered this before, the last time I went insane, but just to recap:

• The first bottle will appear at either the Old Whale Bones, near the beach, or by the volcano
• The second bottle will appear at either the Deep Canyon or in the junkyard
• The third bottle will appear at either the King's Castle or in one of the three caves

As you can see from the previous article, later Humongous games would find more and more ways to experiment with random elements on each playthrough, but as the first game to use the idea, The Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds perhaps doesn't take full advantage of the idea. But there's one other element of the game that changes on each playthrough... and it's a strange one, which comes in the penultimate cutscene of the game.

Fortunately, someone has, for whatever reason, uploaded that cutscene by itself to YouTube:

Spongehead the shark, who left the bottles to remind himself where he'd hidden the stolen kelp treasure in the first place (and subsequently forgot where he put them when Freddi got to the first bottle first), says "I thought I left the first bottle at the nexus... or was the first bottle at the Old Whale Bones?"

("What's 'the nexus'?", you may ask. This appears to be the internal name for the second screen in the game, which is a junction linking together three other rooms, which made its way into the game's dialogue despite not really being the obvious way to describe the area; said screen is where Freddi and Luther find the bottle which leads them to either the volcano, the beach or the bones.) But Spongehead won't always say "the Old Whale Bones". He'll randomly say one of several different areas in the game.

This seemed like such an odd thing to randomise, that once I noticed it I wondered if it was tied to specific combinations of bottles; to make sure he'd always be wrong no matter what he said? So I went through as many different walkthroughs and Let's Plays of the game as I could find on YouTube, and it appears the line is random, since I managed to find a few cases of two playthroughs of the same paths which have different lines. Sometimes Spongehead will actually be correct, sometimes he'll be wrong, sometimes he'll give a bottle location which wasn't in that playthrough at all. There are five different variations I can find: apart from "at the Old Whale Bones", he can also say "near the beach", "with the King", "at the caves" or "at the canyon". That leaves only two possible places for bottles to spawn not covered (the junkyard and the volcano); it's possible these were recorded but play very rarely. (If it was up to me I'd have had other alternates referencing locations that never have bottles, or aren't even in the game at all, but that's just me.)

So, this piece ended up less interesting than if the line was tied to the current playthrough, but it's still a curio as the only other random element in the game; the very next game to have random elements (the second Freddi game, The Case of the Haunted Schoolhouse) starts switching up things beyond the Plot Coupons you need to find.