Claire A La Mode Secret Hunt

The story of discovering secrets within Claire A La Mode

🚩Spoilers For Claire A La Mode 🚩

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When I began playing Claire A La Mode on launch day, I didn't go into it expecting to obtain 100% completion on my own. For the developers' previous game, Curse Crackers, I definitely needed a guide for some stuff, so I figured this game would be the same. But then I ended up obtaining nearly everything within 2 days of the game's release. The supposed last things for me to find were a way to unlock this door, and the one a achievement marked as hidden on Steam.

Because the game had just released though, no one had made a guide yet. I browsed some playthroughs and social media posts to see if someone had publicly documented the stuff I was missing, but that didn't get me anything. I don't use Discord very much, I just don't like it, but I swallowed my gripes and joined the Colorgrave Discord server (Colorgrave is the name of the game's development studio) since that was the last place I could think to check. Upon asking in the game's General channel, I got a reply from a developer that confirmed I was out of luck.

More to my surprise, I was seemingly the first retail player to find the book in 3-1.

Writing A Guide

While I have posted guides for small stuff like individual glitches before, it had been a goal of mine to put together an expansive guide, and this seemed like the best time for me to finally do so. I initially chose to document all collectables, but eventually I added some unlockables as well since some of them turned out to be really hidden. To keep things simple and straightforward, instead of writing out in detail how to get each collectable, my guide was mostly just built on screenshots. Since I didn't photograph collectables upon first collecting them though, I had to replay the game and refind everything.

This game turned out to not be all too kind for writing guides. So many things are unlocked and obtained without very clear explanation, so even if you can get something, it's hard to explain how. One such example are these large doors, they give you some sort of cryptic clue, then a cryptic congratulations when you figure out how to unlock them, and once they're unlocked you can't even hear their clues anymore. To speak to them again you'd have to delete your save data and restart the game.

Stuff like this is why I chose to not make a full on 100% guide.

I wanted to post a guide to Steam since the game is exclusive to Steam, I figured that's where most people would think to find a guide. Throughout making my guide on Steam, I learned that the formatting of Steam guides is very annoying to work with. Granted, formatting text and images tends to suck in general. I don't know why images show up in such inconsistent sizes when put into grids like this though:

At the end of the day though, I do feel accomplished, happy to help, and prideful 😎. I think I'm satisfied never doing this sort of thing again (okay I still wanna make a Marciline guide despite MultiVersus already having been dead for months now, but I'd make that into a video).

Loose Threads Arise

I don't have the full story behind the tickets in Curse Crackers, I wasn't there for that search, but they set a precedent for this game which I think is worth noting. From what I can tell, they were convoluted to find. They also incorporated hieroglyphics which I never learned to read, I figured some sort of decoding would be required to find stuff in this game, and I didn't look like I was the only one.

Note the "2 characters are unknown".

The largest point of suspicion was this wall near the end of 2-3. Even on a regular playthrough it was stands out as unusual, but you can't just attack to open it like you can do for most other secret passages. Upon testing, it didn't seem directly interactable in any way.

Without any solutions, the search led to trying to find even more leads. I was working on my guide in tandem to trying to help this search, so I was already re-combining through the entire game. One very common thing I noticed was that the ceilings in this game are really inconsistent. Sometimes they're just above the visible screen, sometimes they're a little bit further above the screen, and in this one instance I found a spot in which you could get on top of some of the other celings.

These sort of oddities generally seems like oversights rather than intentional secrets though. I thought it was really suspicious though when a room had invisible platforms that made it match the 2-3 room, but finding this didn't particularly help either.

Hold On

After like a day or 2 of searching, one of the devs decided to give a hint. I didn't know what to make of it, but thankfully some other people put it together.

Waiting for a minute after someone told you to in 3-2 would open up a secret door, containing an ominous message from one of the antagonists (frankly I could not tell you what it means, and even if I did I imagine a proper explanation would require a long tangent).

This was the secret that unlocked the hidden achievement, as well as the 3-5 Cursed Object room, allowing people to finally clear out the in-game checklist.

It turns out that 3-3 door also opened, and it contained a similar message.

Ideas Part 2 (And Refresh 1)

So that was pretty good progress, but that didn't unlock either of the 2 super secret characters. They didn't seem to clue in on any new leads either. I decided to scour the boss rush, but all I found was another oversight.

There remained some suspicious looking spots, but the entire postgame area, , were filled with these sorts of spots so I wasn't too hopeful about them.

After 2 slow days, one of the Mhinbron got particularly sick of waiting, and gave us another hint.

(The 1 tile gap they're referring to is the book location I found and shared in 3-1)

This hint was great and terrible news to me, since finding random gaps in walls and ceilings was something I've proven I could find, but it also meant that in order to find it, I'd have to try and search through the entire game for a 3rd time. Here's what searching looks like:

I did that ⬆️ 2 hours, and eventually found a hidden room in 3-5.

This room was closed off with star blocks (hidden offscreen), which could only be broken by certain characters. I only found it because at this point I found Hawk (with the infinite jumps Blessing enabled) to be the most convenient character to search with, and he happens to be one of the characters that can break star blocks (which I didn't even realize were star blocks until Mhinbron's comment). Granted, if we had continued to struggle finding this room, I imagine we would've gotten another hint.

While I wasn't done trying to help after this, I was pretty satisfied with myself at this point. Sure, my guide helped people find the standard collectables, but this was the first time I had directly made progress towards one of the proper secrets.

Puzzled

The secret room showed above pretty obviously contained a puzzle. The 5 objects around the room could be carried, and the 4 suites on the ground were buttons, but the objects seemingly couldn't press the buttons (you could place the objects on the buttons, but they wouldn't provide any feedback). Presumably something would happen after a specific button combination (such things were in Curse Crackers), but there was no indication of how long such a combination would be, so it didn't seem brute forcable. If we had found anything up to this point suggesting at some sort of code, we would've already been talking about it, so our main lead was the room itself, particularly the items contained within it.

I personally found the can to be mind boggling.

I don't really understand what happened next, seemingly outta nowhere Mhinbron called upon a particular person, and that person solved it on demand.

It turns out the little boat was supposed to represent a yacht, and after jumping on the club 3 times while holding the yacht, Shovel Knight was unlocked.

Yacht Club Games is the name of the Shovel Knight developer.

While I enjoy Shovel Knight, and think it's neat when he cameos in games, I don't think I would've cared much if he had simply been a regulary featured character here since he's already such a common cameo character (there were also already a handful of unlockable cameo characters in this game). I found it much more exciting to have him hidden away as a surprise like this.

The Final Search

Once again, we were out of leads, and I presumed combing through the entire game in through various means would be my most fruitful ideas. Checking all the floors didn't amount to anything though, and Mhinbron mercifully shot down the idea of checking every bottomless pit.

Other ideas were thrown around as well though, I certainly didn't just wanna keep exhaustively looking through the entire game over and over again. The leading idea was that something must have some sort of really special interaction that we hadn't tried yet.

I don't remember what that first message was referring to.

An idea that had been thrown around at multiple points was teleporting through certain walls or floors with Bramble. This didn't amount to anything worthwhile, but it was satisfying figuring out these 2 staircases could be teleported through.

I figured there might be some jank with these 2 staircases since they're the only platforms in the entire game that act as ramps.

Clueless

I had more ideas to comb through the entire game with, but thankfully I didn't get around to bothering with them.

It turns out in the very first room of the entire game, there's a bell. Ringing it 3 times while holding milk would unlock the final secret (ironically, they're the first thing in the entire game that you can unlock).

Clip Source: Justice League Unlimited, Season 3 Episode 8

They're a Vtuber named Ushimei Momoka, and the developers added her into the game without telling her so that they could surprise her. The sweet gesture was a pretty nice way to cap off this hunt.

For additional context, Momoka is watching her friend Cliphy play.

In retrospect, I'm not sure the devs particularly wanted us to find her. Mhinbron told us upon finding Momoka to keep quiet about it (so that they could tell her about the unlock themself), and we didn't receive much hints towards finding her (the best we got was that message about not jumping into bottomless pits).

Conclusion

I'll treasure this experience, I had fun with it, but I don't think I wanna be part of such a thing ever again. I drained myself pretty hard. I was only in the server for a week (I stayed for a bit to clear up some info for my guide, and say goodbye), but it felt like a whole month to me. Ultimately I didn't change my mind about disliking Discord. I actually ended up with slightly more playtime in Claire A La Mode than Curse Crackers.