Evidence The Last Ritual

This repository contains everything needed to complete the game Evidence The Last Ritual (also published under the title In Memoriam Le Dernier Rituel) without resorting to online walkthroughs or the Internet Archive. This is the second game in the In Memoriam series, note that this project does not (yet) cover the first game (Missing: Since January) nor its extension.

The restoration project

Following Lexis Numerique foreclosure in 2014, The Last Ritual is not playable anymore: when creating a user in-game it is not possible to receive the email containing the password, some of the initial online puzzles are missing, along with many of the websites designed for the game. This project aims at providing a (relatively) easy to setup solution to all these issues. Everything is installed locally on the user computer, which will run a small local HTTP server while the game is launched.

The issues are very similar to those that affected the first In Memoriam / Missing game, for which the In Memoriam Revival Project was created around 2014; alas this initiative is now offline, with no available sources nor data. This was the inspiration for the current project, which could hopefully one day be extended to cover the first game.

Goals

The local server we will setup on the user computer has two roles:

• replace the game official server (located at www.inmemoriamdev.com) for managing user accounts, recording progress and sending emails
• allow access to all websites providing hints and anwsers to the game puzzles, originally created and hosted by the game developers

The first is achieved not by sending real emails to you, but by providing a fake website where you will be able to read all fake emails sent by the various protagonists (the 'webmail'). The second is achieved by providing redirections from the websites URLs to local restored copies, along with a fake search engine.

Both the webmail and search engine can be accessed from the www.inmemoriamdev.com address once everything is setup.

Compatibility

This project has been tested on Windows 11 from the start of the game to the end with:

• the US four CD-ROMs version
• the French one DVD version

While most of the content has been restored, some data could not be retrieved from the game server or the websites, including:

• Some images on www.castelodosmouros.com, www.clairekettley.net, www.viagensnotempo.com
• Videos on www.phoenix-investigators.org, www.smokingbug.com, www.xineph.com
• Parts of websites that were behind a login: www.losamigosdedante.org, www.naadirossem.net, www.phoenix-investigators.org, www.skl-network.com
• Missing flash page entitled "Mission" on www.st-dominic-f.org
• Some blogs are missing secondary pages (unrelevant posts, archives, categories): www.alcina-cooking.com, www.californianbloggers.com, www.clairekettley.net, www.julie-webzine.net, www.theo-makarios.info
• www.psykokronik.net is a complete reconstruction from salvaged bits
• The text messages that the server could send to a user phone number are definitely lost

Future improvements

• Restore some of the missing websites data mentioned above
• Find someone with a backup of the text messages data
• Some emails are sent to the server with an additional condition (mail_cond.php), which the server is ignoring for now
• Support user update/deletion and other game requests (verif_level_player.php ?)
• Extend support to the first In Memoriam / Missing Since January game
• Extend support to the first game add-on The 13th Victim

Setup

• Install a portable Apache/PHP/MySQL server: I have successfully used UwAmp for this. You can install it to any directory. The setup below will use the latest UwAmp version, version numbers for PHP and MySQL might differ in future installs.
• Clone the repository in UwAmp/www/ directory
• Copy _config/httpd_uwamp.conf to UwAmp/bin/apache/conf/
• Copy _config/my_uwamp.ini to UwAmp/bin/database/mysql-5.7.11/
• Copy _config/php_uwamp.ini to UwAmp/bin/php/php-7.0.3/
• Add the lines contained in the _config/hosts file to your system hosts file. If you are not familiar, the hosts file can declare redirections from a website URL to another for all applications on your computer. You can follow this WikiHow guide to edit it.

The first time you play:

• Launch the UwAmp application
• In the Configuration tab, select the PHP version (7.0.3), the MySQL version (5.7.11) and set Apache to Offline Mode.
• Start the UwAmp server
• Launch the game
• Create a new account, specifying a username and a (fake) email address. I recommend using an address of the form username@inmemoriamdev.com, so that opening the 'Mail' shortcut in the game directly opens the project pseudo-webmail page. You can specify whether you are a returning player from the first game or not. Some versions of the game also offered an option for receiving text messages, but note that this will not work.
• Once submitted, click on the button to open the pseudo-webmail at www.inmemoriamdev.com. You should have received a first email containing the password to input in the game.
• Log in the game and start playing

Then, each time you want to play the game:

• Start the UwAmp server
• Launch the game
• Check your 'emails' at www.inmemoriamdev.com :)

Whenever you want to end a game session :

• Close the game
• Stop the server in the UwAmp panel (or using the system tray icon)

Notes

As a safety backup the password is also stored in www/www.inmemoriamdev.com/scriptIM2/password.txt, and all received game requests are logged in www/www.inmemoriamdev.com/scriptIM2/log.txt. The password can also be retrieved from the save file, in %USERPROFILE%/Documents/Evidence Save Games/USER_*/user.cfg, 15 bytes after the email address.

The MySQL database should have a root user with root as a password, as specified in www.inmemoriamdev.com/scriptIM2/credentials.php. Or edit this file prior to running the server and the game.

Special thanks

• The J Man for providing a detailed guide of puzzle answers and links to the corresponding archived websites
• Inferno for writing a very detailed walkthrough with additional references
• 123Pazu and FactOfSin for uploading the two only let's play videos of the game on YouTube
• The Internet Archive for hosting copies of some of the websites captured by crawlers
• hartator for maintaining an automation tool for recovering websites from the Internet Archive
• Softbreakers for the initial In Memoriam Revival Project