Blood of the Glitches, Broken of the Graphics: Let's Play Gabriel Knight 3 Until It Breaks

[Timrod]

A few years ago, while bored at work, I read through an excellent SSLP of Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. You can find that LP here.

Gabriel Knight 1 was effectively a spiritual successor to the Laura Bow games… or at least it was in my eyes. The game starts out as a murder mystery in late-90s New Orleans and quickly spirals out of control until you witness a man rip out his own heart to sacrifice it to a voodoo god to solve a puzzle. It delves straight into the supernatural and never really comes out: by the end of the game, Gabriel Knight has gone from being a washed-up writer in New Orleans to owning a castle in Germany and becoming what is essentially a Hunter from the Old World of Darkness series. It was also notable because the main character is voiced by Tim Curry.

There’s also an LP of Gabriel Knight 2 that I only got slightly into because Gabriel Knight 2 is an FMV game and also does not star Tim Curry. Sierra just dropped the ball on that one.

What I noticed, however, was that there was no LP on the archive of the third game… and that’s kind of where I got into the idea of SSLPing. In fact, I was going to do this game immediately after Dagger of Amon Ra. I even bought a copy on Steam (which was a mistake)… but then I just kinda forgot about it.

A few days ago, I decided to pick the project back up now that I’m done with Ni no Kuni 2. Almost immediately, I found out why no one has ever done an SSLP of it:

Gabriel Knight 3 is a game that does not take well to modern computers. The Steam version actually doesn’t work at all - they put up a badly-cracked version that freaks out if it can’t find an optical disc drive in your system. The GoG version is only mildly better in that it’ll boot but still has severe issues (that screenshot up above is from the unpatched GoG version).

To get the game to not glitch the fuck out, I had to install a DirectX wrapper and a bunch of other shit to make it compatible with a modern display. Thankfully, none of the gamebreaking glitches have (yet) occurred over the course of this LP.

At least we’ve got Tim Curry and his ridiculous New Orleans accent that turns on and off seemingly at random.

Updates

[Timrod]

Like most Sierra games, Gabriel Knight 3 has an intro cinematic. Unlike most Sierra games, it explains roughly fuck-all about what’s going on. In fact, even after getting the footage for this update, I STILL have no clue what the plot of this game is. The intro is… less than helpful.

Yeah, fucked if I know. About the only thing that the intro establishes is that the game takes place in France.

The end of the intro has Gabriel meeting this guy, who confirms that he’s in France and sends him to a taxi. Gabriel asks him if he’s seen two men and a trunk, which I assume is a new sitcom on ABC. I also read through the game’s manual to see if it had any more information, and it doesn’t.

The plot is that apparently, Gabriel and his partner Grace get called to a castle in Paris to protect the son of a prince, whose father fears that he’s going to be kidnapped by vampires. Spoiler alert: the kid gets kidnapped. By vampires.

We start in Gabriel’s hotel room. This game has… some really weird controls. Rather than controlling Gabriel directly, we just control the camera - this is in fact a point-and-click adventure game. We do start with a few items, but I’ll go over those in a bit. The game’s manual actually has a walkthrough specifically for this room, because one of the items in this hotel room is critical to the game’s most infamous puzzle.

The first thing we want to do is take a look at that dresser. I’ll probably record video footage of this at some point, but if you’ve played or seen any footage at all of the first game, you know of Tim Curry’s legendary New Orleans accent. It is HILARIOUSLY bad, to the point where I like to imagine that Gabriel is faking being from New Orleans the way Yvette faked being French in Dagger of Amon Ra.

This is our standard verb chart. The first option looks like it’d be the one for examine, but in fact all it does is zoom the camera at whatever you use it on. The second one is examine, and finally we’ve got pick up.

If we look at that little grey thing in the back, Gabriel… helpfully doesn’t tell us what it is. In fact, that object is kind of hard to click without getting the coat hanger first. Gotta have a coat hanger in every adventure game. It’s like a law.

Gabriel just kinda… takes it and teleports it into his jeans.

Now when we go to look at the grey object, we’ve got a fourth option. This is for using items on things.

The grey thing turns out to be a piece of masking tape.

There’s a safe next to the dresser, but it’s locked and Gabriel doesn’t know the combination. Considering this is a hotel, that kind of makes no sense.

Anyway, let’s close the dresser and get on with this adventure.

There’s two doors out of the hotel room. The one down the little hallway behind Gabriel leads outside, the other one goes to the bathroom.

Here’s where I start showing off disembodied ghost camera mode.

This floor of the hotel has seven rooms and two staircases.

All of the other rooms apart from Gabriel’s are locked, so we might as well go downstairs. This is the right side staircase, furthest away from Gabriel’s current position.

A helpful hint if you decide to try this game yourself: hitting Escape will cause Gabriel to instantly warp to anything you’ve clicked on. This is actually useful for a “puzzle” we’ll be seeing shortly, as it makes Gabriel warp but does not have any effect on anything else.

Downstairs is the lobby of this tiny hotel - this room and the ones above are more or less all there is to it. Let’s go bother that guy with the newspaper.

I should mention that I’m like… 98% sure this game uses a slightly updated version of the one Sierra used for King’s Quest Mask of Eternity. Gabriel Knight 3 was the last adventure game they released before they got eaten by Activision.

Anyway, this is Emilio. He’s… just kinda here. We’ll find out why in a bit.

There’s also the desk clerk, Jean. He has a French accent almost as bad as Gabriel’s New Orleans one.

More interesting than Jean is the fact that there’s a black magic marker on the desk. Unfortunately, Gabriel won’t take it while Jean is there. Let’s just go outside for a bit, shall we?

Welcome to the small town of Rennes-le-Chateau, France. There’s a woman with a giant VW bus that we can talk to, so why not?

This woman is Madeline, though we won’t know her name for a few minutes. You can see Emilio on a bench in the background, but if we try to talk to him…

He gets up, somehow magically changes his vest to be brown, and then runs off back into the hotel.

Once we go back into the lobby, Jean will go over to look out the window… which he has a clear view of from the desk.

We can use this precious time to activate Gabriel’s hyperdrive and teleport him to the desk, where we can get his magic marker. The marker isn’t something we’re going to need right away, but since we can get it now we might as well.

Out back is the dining room, and while Gabriel walks there, the score display pops up. This game has a score counter for some unknown reason, and it’s entirely possible to miss stuff. I’m not going for a max score run, so I might miss some stuff.

I pity whoever had to write the subtitles for this game.

Yep, nothing more to do here than get a cup of coffee. Just totally ignore the guy at the table who looks suspiciously like the detective from the first game and…

Wait, what. Who uses “wanker” outside of the UK, Ireland/Scotland, and like… Australia?

The guy in the red shirt is Detective Frank Mosely. In Gabriel Knight 1, he was a detective with the police department in New Orleans and was also voiced by Mark Hamill. What he’s doing in France is a mystery, other than possibly trying to kill Gabriel for stealing his badge and maxing out his credit card in the first game.

: “So, what are YOU doing here again?”

: “Umm… I came to see you!”

: “What?”

: “Sure. I called your number at the po-”

: “Right! Of course! I forgot I mentioned it. Well, great to see ya.”

: “Yeah.”

Madeline was, of course, the red-haired woman with the bus.

Mosely’s room is the one directly across from Gabriel’s. He does have more to say, but Gabriel won’t talk to him again right now.

If we look at the table in the back, there’s a basket full of maple syrup… and not much else.

Normally I wouldn’t just grab maple syrup packets, but then I went to Magfest and they have the breakfast buffet in the Gaylord which charges like… $30. I am absolutely with Gabriel on this one. The maple syrup, along with the masking tape, is a component to the Big Bullshit Puzzle.

Back in the lobby, there’s one other item we can get. There’s another basket on this side table that has candy in it.

We can just take one, no problem. This actually helps because our next destination is right behind those red curtains in the background.

This is the phone room. Remember when hotels had these? Strangely, they’re not payphones, so Gabriel can use them freely.

Looking at the phone gives us a couple of new options. The first one, the interlocking gears, is “use”. The second one is the light bulb, which is “think”. Let’s use that one now.

Let’s take a look at Gabriel’s inventory. This shot I took before I found out about the candy, so the candy isn’t here. I’ll list them from top-left to bottom-right:

• Black Magic Marker
• The Schattenjager Dagger
• Gabriel’s Passport
• Coat Hanger
• Roll of Masking Tape
• Notebook
• Prince James’s Business Card
• Key to Room 25
• Maple Syrup
• Schattenjager Talisman
• Tape Recorder
• Wallet

The only thing Gabriel has much to say about is the tape recorder, which was key to one of the major puzzles in the first game:

SIDNEY is the source of what may or may not be a gamebreaking bug. We’ll run into it… much later. I should also talk about the whole Schattenjager thing: in the first game, Gabriel finds out that he is the last Schattenjager, a German word that translates to “Shadow Hunter”. The Schattenjagers are (or were) the world’s foremost group of hunters of the supernatural. The item highlighted in red, by the way, is the one that’s on our quick-use bar with our verbs.

We can use Prince James’s business card on the phone to get his number.

Funnily enough, Tim Curry just kinda drops the accent for this entire segment.

Well, that was… ominous. We still have stuff to do at the hotel before this two-hour segment is over, though.

The first thing we can do is look at the hotel’s guestbook.

Doing this gives us some extra dialogue with Emilio and Jean, but there’s not really a whole lot important there:

Jean wasn’t on duty last night, so he doesn’t know anything and didn’t see the two guys with the trunk we’re after. He does, however, give us the name of the night clerk:

And Emilio… yeah.

We can, however, go back and talk to Madeline now that we know who she is. Weirdly, as soon as we go outside, Emilio follows. He’ll also follow Gabriel back into the hotel.

Honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget Tim Curry’s godawful accent.

: “What accent?”

There’s also one last bit of information that’s important enough to warrant getting:

Good to know. We’re almost done with this first two-hour segment - just one more place to go.

The outdoor part of the town is… kinda bad to navigate. Essentially, you move the camera until it hits an invisible wall and that’s the load zone for the next part. There’s a lot of buildings, but most of them aren’t useful - this is where I feel like the move to 3D was a bad idea because in 2D, most of these would just be painted in the background.

There’s a bookstore next door with a sign that will tell us pretty much everything about what the treasure is that all these people are looking for.

What we want to do is walk past that fountain in the background, do a screen transition, and then do a second screen transition to this place. There’s no indication of what it actually is, but it’s a museum.

Madame Girard has the most conversation topics of anyone we’ve met so far, but knows almost nothing about any of them. She was home last night and goes to bed early, and for any questions about the town she directs us to the other room. I do, however, want to do the topic of the Holy Grail because it’s kind of amusing.

Then there’s a follow-up about the treasure, which is the amusing part:

Something tells me that if this was made recently, the lady would have her jacket covered in 9/11 truther pins.

Behind her is the back room, which is the last area we need to visit… and also the worst one to navigate the camera through.

We can’t actually read the signs, but the camera will get stuck on them and treats them as solid.

Both of these characters have very fake British accents and sound about as annoying as you’d think.

We can ask them about the same things we can ask everyone else about.

They don’t really have anything important to say and I’m not entirely sure why we need to talk to them before progressing, but we do. In fact, I’m pretty sure every question you ask them is worth points.

There’s also one other thing we can do with them - this is missable and worth points if you’re going for a max-score run.

If you come back behind the banners and walk toward Lilly and Estelle, Gabriel can spy on them.

Looks like Estelle and Lily are more than a little into the occult. With that, we can successfully leave the museum.

There’s a lost and found bin by the door. I haven’t played this game before, but I feel like it’s important. I also tried examining all of the stuff behind the two tourists, but all Gabriel says is “It’s in French”.

Next time…

I found a list of all of the points in this game and where they come from, so let’s go over the ones we got this update:

Got the Hanger from the Dresser - 2 points
Got the Masking Tape from the Dresser - 2 points
Got the Black Marker - 2 points
Met Mosely - 4 points
Got the Syrup Packet - 2 points
Got the Candy - 2 points
Read the Hotel Register- 2 points
Used the card to call the Prince - 4 points
Met Emilio - 2 points
Talked to Emilio - 2 points
Talked to Madeline - 4 points
Talked to Jean - 4 points
Looked at the bookstore - 2 points
Talked to Madame Girard - 6 points
Eavesdropped on Estelle and Lily - 2 points
Talked to Estelle and Lily - 4 points

Total: 46/965 points

[Timrod]

Welcome to our second two-hour time block. The background image is sort of a hint on where we’re going next.

First, we need to go back into the hotel. I can sort of see a Dagger of Amon Ra influence with how much eavesdropping we’re about to do.

The man on the left is John Wilkes, an Australian whose voiceactor kind of fluctuates between sounding semi-Australian and sounding like he’s trying to be Irish or something. Interestingly, this looks a lot crisper in screenshot form than it did when I was playing it - though that might be because I’m on an ultrawide monitor.

Meanwhile, Gabriel is just standing there. We got two points for walking in here, but now we have to introduce ourselves to Wilkes.

Really, all that’s relevant here is that he’s on the tour, which we already know from Madeline.

If we go upstairs, Estelle and Lily are… moving their luggage? The animation for this is actually really strange - Lily will move and then the luggage just kinda slides as if it’s on ice.

So in case it’s not obvious, Estelle and Lily have switched rooms with Emilio… though for what reason, we have no idea. I’m going into this game almost completely blind apart from knowing the basic plot background. We do know that Estelle and Lily are into some occult shit, so it wouldn’t surprise me if it had something to do with that.

Anyway, we then need to exit the hotel again and go to the town’s church, as indicated by the chapter’s intro screen.

Even with a guide, I had to fuck around for a few minutes to find out where the church was. It’s on a back street from one of the screens that connects to the hotel.

When we get there, there’s a weird guy in shorts sitting in the doorway.

He then starts spouting off some foreign language. I don’t know whether it’s French or Italian, because this guy has a definite Italian accent.

The priest in the back responds.

If you’ve ever played Civilization 6 and wondered what theological combat looks like up close, I imagine this is probably it.

The guy in the shorts is absolutely going to go back home and rant on his hardcore Christian Facebook page about how he “totally owned” that priest. I don’t even care that this game takes place in the late 90s. He’ll find a way.

Let’s introduce ourselves. We’ve met everyone in the tour group except one person, and guess who this is?

Buchelli has four dialog options, but only the first two are really relevant… at least, as far as I know. Let’s do “check into hotel” first.

Interesting. We know that the two men who took the prince’s son took a train to a town right near this one. We also know that Buchelli arrived sometime after Gabriel did. My bet is that he’s one of the kidnappers.

The other thing that stood out to me was asking him about the church.

Given that we’re probably dealing with vampires, this is… interesting. From what I remember, it’s pretty common in old-style vampire lore that vampires can’t go in churches. Just in case though, I asked noted vampire expert and probably actual vampire Devious Vacuum.

Once we ask him about everything, Buchelli packs up and leaves. I realized after the last update that a lot of things in this game do have readable text on them, but you have to position the camera just so and Gabriel won’t just read them aloud if you look at them.

Naturally, the next thing we want to do is talk to the priest. Why IS there a priest here if this isn’t an actual church?

I googled the term “abbe” and what I found out is that while that is in fact the French word for a priest, Wikipedia claims (via an old Catholic encyclopedia) that it can apparently also be used for non-ordained ministers.

We have a lot of stuff we can ask him about as well, but most of it (the treasure and the grail) he doesn’t much care for.

Wait, what? I had to look it up, but Mary Magdalene is in fact a canonized saint.

I googled this and found almost nothing about it. By the time I’m done with this LP, Google is going to think I’m some kind of whackjob.

This opens up a follow-up question on the same topic:

Another thing I had to google. The “black madonna” is a catch-all term for images of Mary (as in the mother of Jesus) where she and the baby Jesus are portrayed as having dark skin.

My theory is that Jesus is like the Power Rangers: there’s a black Jesus, a white Jesus, a red Jesus, a yellow Jesus, a blue Jesus, and a pink Jesus. They each have their own robot vehicle thing which they can Voltron together into the almighty Jesuszord. Go go Last Supper Rangers.

Finally, we can get off the topic of Dan Brown style religious conspiracy garbage and onto the topic of…

Assassin’s Creed style religious conspiracy garbage!

We’ll keep that in mind. With that, we’ve done everything we can at the church. Remember how in the last update, Mosely said to come see him in his room? Let’s go do that now.

This is one of those spots where you’re going to miss something unless you’re using a guide. As soon as Gabriel enters Mosely’s hotel room, you can hear a weird thumping noise outside.

We have a bunch of stuff we can talk to Mosely about, but here’s the trick: there’s a thing we’d easily miss if we went ahead and talked to him about everything. Instead, we want to talk to him about the first two topics: the baby and the case.

Now, the strange part here to me is that while Mosely wasn’t in the second game (as far as I know), he was definitely in the first game and helped Gabriel raid a voodoo cult base. Mosely, in fact, shot their leader to death shortly before the entire base collapsed into a fiery abyss (which I’m like, 90% sure he also saw). You’d think given that he’s seen those things before that he wouldn’t question vampires.

Now, it’s been kinda obvious from the start that some of the people in the tour group are suspicious: Emilio followed us around at the start of the game, and we know that Buchelli was also probably on the train with Gabriel. I don’t think either one of them is a vampire, though. They’ve both gone outside during the day: Emilio was on the bench in front of the hotel in broad daylight and Buchelli apparently left the not-church after he spoke with the priest there.

Next, we want to ask him about the baby.

At this point, if we were to continue talking to Mosely, the noises outside would stop. What we want to do…

Is turn our attention to the door. There’s a new option there to “sneak”, which only shows up if you’ve stopped the conversation here.

And oh look, there’s suspect number one leaning conspicuously close to Mosely’s door.

This is a clue as to one last thing we need to pick up before we finish this two-hour segment. If we want full points though, we’ll need to talk to Mosely about the rest of the topics at hand. First, we’ll talk about Grace. Grace was Gabriel’s business partner/sorta kinda girlfriend in the first game, and shows up in the second game as well.

This is a reference to Gabriel Knight 2.

Another sort-of reference to GK2. Gabriel gets bitten at one point in that game.

Gabriel is basically Vincent from Catherine a good 15 years before that game existed.

Yeah, I had that happen. It was called Ni no Kuni 2 and I took it into my Steam library and then I had to remove everything else for fear of cross-contamination.

The only other really interesting thing we can talk to him about is the Schattenjager business.

Gerde is, from what I remember, the housekeeper at Schloss Ritter, Gabriel’s castle in Germany.

Finally, once we leave the room…

Clearly, Mosely is actually here on police business - though he’s still with the New Orleans Police Department as far as I know, which would put him a long way from jurisdiction.

One last thing we need to do. Emilio stupidly left his water glass on the table in the hallway.

Well, it’s ours now.

And, with that, the second time segment comes to an end. Next time, we’ll handle the Big Bullshit Puzzle. Yes, it’s that time already.

Points Breakdown:

Prior Update: 46/965 points

Overheard Madeline and Wilkes: 2 points (48)
Talked to Wilkes: 2 points (50)
Saw Estelle and Lily switch rooms with Emilio: 2 points (52)
Met/Talked to Buchelli: 8 points (60)
Met/Talked to Arnaud: 10 points (70)
Met Mosely in his room: 6 points (76)
Stopped conversation in time to catch Emilio: 5 points (81)
Picked up Emilio’s water glass: 2 points (83)

Total: 83/965 points

[Nidoking]

Buchelli is almost certainly speaking Italian, although my command of the language is grossly insufficient to tell you how accurate it might be.

One of your images seems to be wrong - the one where Mosely asks Gabriel not to tell anyone that he’s a cop shows up earlier when they’re talking about the old case.

[Timrod]

Thanks for pointing that out. I went ahead and fixed it.

[Timrod]

Well, we’re here. Welcome to the infamous Big Bullshit Puzzle.

When we hit “continue” after the transition screen, Gabriel will see a guy ride by on a moped. From what I remember, Gabriel had a motorcycle back in New Orleans, and it looks like he’s still a fan.

The bike rental shop is directly across from the hotel, right near where you transition screens to get to the museum and church.

I mean, clearly this shouldn’t be a problem. The guy’s got plenty of mopeds… oh, and a single motorcycle.

Gabriel does not approve.

The game doesn’t really do the camera right, but it’s the pink moped.

Gabriel, being a twelve year old in the body of an adult, refuses to consider the sheer terror a vampire would feel being chased by a man on a bright pink moped. I’d say this is out of character for him, but he went through the entire first game wearing a black trenchcoat. In summertime. In New Orleans.

I feel like the writers for Archer must’ve seen this game at least once.

So, what do we have to do? This, my friends, is the start of the Big Bullshit Puzzle. We have a couple of the items we need for it already: the candy we picked up in the hotel lobby, the black marker, and the maple syrup. First, we need to go back to the hotel.

There’s a buzzer for each room near Jean’s desk, but Gabriel won’t use it until Jean is looking away. He’ll do this if you stand near it long enough, but we have some setup to do first.

Upstairs, there are three tables in the hallway with paintings behind them. This first one is in the part that leads to the left staircase, between Room 21 and Room 23.

The second one is across from Mosely’s room, Room 33. This is where we picked up the water glass last update.

The third one is on the right side of the hallway. Can you guess what we’re going to do? Pause the video if you want to figure it out!

What we need to do is take the candy and put it on the table on the right side of the hallway.

We then need to go downstairs and press the buzzer for Mosely’s room, then quickly go up the left staircase.

Mosely, for reasons unknown, will always leave his room to the right.

He also cannot pass up the sight of cheap peppermint candy… for some reason.

Halfway through eating it, he drops the wrapper on the floor and bends over to pick it up. Clearly, Gabriel is playing 4-D chess here and knew that Mosely would drop the wrapper.

This causes his passport to slip out of his back pocket.

Gabriel then uses all of his Schattenjager training to uh… steal Mosely’s passport. This isn’t even like in the first game where Gabriel stole his badge and his credit card - he’s pretty much just doing this to be a dick.

Mosely then walks on, completely oblivious. My fan theory is that Mosely is like a wombat in that his ass is armored and has no sensation in it.

The next thing we need is Mosely’s coat. Why he even brought it when he’s on vacation and also in France in what appears to be the summertime is a mystery.

The animation for taking the coat is… something.

We’ve now got two pieces out of the four we need for our Mosely disguise. If we go back to the museum and check the lost and found…

We’ve already stolen a cop’s passport and his jacket, and a hat from a lost and found, so let’s continue Gabriel’s thieving spree and go steal from a priest.

The church has two exits leading past it. The left one goes into the graveyard, while the right one goes down into an alley.

At the end of the graveyard, Arnaud is using a spray bottle to water his flowers.

Eventually, he’ll just turn around and leave his spray bottle behind.

The alley has a black cat at the end of it. This is the part of the Big Bullshit Puzzle you’ve probably heard about, because it stretches moon logic about as far as it goes.

Directly across from the cat is a pair of doors with a hole at the bottom. It’s kind of hard to make out because GK3 has some serious issues with visibility when it wants to make shadows.

The cat has a “pet” command. Let’s give that a try.

The cat decides it is not having any of Gabriel’s bullshit and flees into the shed via the hole.

Can YOU guess what we have to do and why? Pause the video now and - nah, I’m not stealing that a second time.

What we have to do is take the masking tape, which we got in the opening seconds of the game, and put it on the hole.

Leaving and returning to this area brings the cat back… only this time, it’s sitting on top of the wall and Gabriel can’t reach it to annoy it.

Stealing from a priest and now cruelty to animals. Truly, there is no level to which Gabriel Knight will not stoop in the name of possibly killing a vampire.

Our inventory is now so big that it has a scroll bar. We have the cat’s fur… but what are we going to do with it?

First off, let’s combine the hat and the jacket. Unfortunately, this isn’t enough to make Gabriel look like Mosely.

Now let’s do the real moon logic part. There’s no way to get the moustache to stick… so let’s… use… maple syrup? Yeah sure okay.

We’ve got a Mosely disguise, so let’s head to the bike shop. Clearly, we’ve done enough moon logic bullshit for one day.

Unfortunately, we STILL don’t have a working disguise. I mostly did this because I found a weird glitch that only happened for me if I tried using the Mosely outfit the way we have it now…

For some reason, this gives us the option to shoot the bike shop owner. Trying this will give us a stock “I don’t have a gun” response.

The last part of the disguise involves using the black marker on Mosely’s passport to draw in a moustache. How this wouldn’t be incredibly obvious to anyone looking at it is a mystery.

What’s amazing about this exchange is that Tim Curry manages to do sort of what he did in the first game and does a bad accent impersonating another bad accent.

And with that, we’ve successfully completed the Big Bullshit Puzzle.

At least Gabriel puts the stuff back when he’s done with it.

Finishing that sequence puts Gabriel back in front of the hotel.

Our inventory has also shrunk considerably.

First thing is to get the bike and drive off into the French countryside. This segment is going to have a bit of back-and-forth due to some timed events.

Welcome to the map screen, which is pretty godawful. The green dot represents Gabriel… but what are those orange and purple dots? Guess we’ll have to find out. If we were to just sit here on the map, they’ll slowly drive a circle around the outer edge.

The game also isn’t great at pointing out locations. Basically, you just have to hover the mouse until a name pops up, and that’s more or less the only indication that you can visit a place.

Welcome to… Blanchefort and Cardeau? I don’t know what the deal with the name discrepancy is. There’s a lot of signs here that won’t tell us much, and honestly we’re only in the area for one thing right now.

If we wait long enough, Wilkes will come by on a moped. Clicking on him is kind of a pain in the ass since he’s moving and the camera doesn’t automatically follow him. The first time, I wound up accidentally clicking to the next screen and had to wait more.

We’ve got a new option: follow. We want to use this as soon as we see Wilkes.

This is L’ermitage, not to be confused with L’Hermitage, which is an actual region in the French countryside. Wilkes has conveniently parked his moped right where we can see it.

Unfortunately, before I could finish looking at the moped, Madeline drove by in the tour bus. We also need to follow her, so I did.

She stops at a different location, just north of where Wilkes is. For now though, I’m going to go back to L’Ermitage.

If we examine Wilkes’s moped from the back, Gabriel will note his license plate.

Even though he says this, Gabriel WILL NOT note Wilkes’s license plate by himself. We have to do that manually, using the notebook.

Now let’s go up and talk to Wilkes.

Wilkes is… apparently using a laptop to control… something. Whatever it is, you can hear it from the parking area. What I want to know is this: how the hell did he get a table, a chair and that drill thing here from the hotel on a moped?

Honestly, I only really bothered to come up here to show what Wilkes was doing. All of the dialog with him is basically there so that Tim Curry could spout off references to Dune, though for a minute I thought he might’ve been referencing Tremors.

After asking him like four times, Wilkes will tell us what it is: a seismic survey machine. Something tells me he’s not a vampire. I don’t think Australians can even be vampires. There is one possible lead to what might turn out to be another Giant Bullshit Puzzle, but I hope not.

Something tells me Wilkes is an asshole. Let’s go check on Madeline.

This time, we don’t need to take down a license plate number - I actually tried it and there’s no separate hotspot for the license plate.

This area is called Coume-Sourde. There’s a sign closer to where Madeline is that explains a bit more.

Madeline is doing… something… but as soon as we go up to her, she stops and goes on a smoke break. There’s a bit of dialog where she just tells Gabriel to go away.

What we need to do is go back to Blanchefort. I’m… not entirely sure how you’re supposed to intuit this, apart from using the in-game hint system or a walkthrough. There’s two exits from this screen - if we go left and up the hill, we wind up at Larry Chester’s house. We won’t be talking to him until the next update (and besides, you can reach his house directly from the map). Instead, we’re going to take a little sightseeing detour.

If we go past Larry’s house and up to the left, we wind up in a ruin on top of the mountain.

The distant view is a hotspot that allows you to use the binoculars on it.

The binoculars are a bit janky, but the idea is that you find a point of interest and then hit the “Zoom 50x” button.

If we look at Madeline, we can see she’s got what looks like a radio and is walking around talking into it.

Meanwhile, if we look back at Rennes-le-Chateau, we can see… Buchelli watching us with his own pair of binoculars. There’s one last place we have to go to finish this time segment, but… I kinda forgot that there’s an optional conversation back in the hotel.

That’s the story he gave them. They mention briefly that there was some sort of problem with their old room, but don’t say what it is.

Our final stop in this… rather long update is the train station. This is apparently where Gabriel was at the end of the intro, in Couiza - a town even smaller than Rennes-le-Chateau on the northwestern corner of the map. This is also where Gabriel saw the two kidnappers take the baby.

There’s only one person here, so let’s ask her some questions.

This checks out. The three arrivals were Gabriel and the two kidnappers - the train line presumably did not know they had a baby in their luggage. However, we have a second question we can ask her. Remember how Buchelli said that he got to Rennes-le-Chateau by taking the train from Naples?

Why am I not surprised?

There’s also a board showing all the scheduled trains.

Not only was there no Naples train last night, there is no Naples train at all.

Outside, we can also find the cab driver who took Gabriel to the hotel last night.

Hmm… that’s kind of an interesting detail. Garlic is one of the usual classic anti-vampire tactics, though a lot of more recent vampire lore tends to ignore that.

We can now add bribery to the list of petty offenses committed by Gabriel Knight after entering France.

We just need to use Gabriel’s wallet on him, and…

I don’t remember every detail about the town, but I don’t think there are any black cars parked anywhere we can see, at least.

I think at this point we have a pretty good idea of who the kidnappers are, but proving that they did it will be another thing altogether. As soon as we finish talking to the taxi driver…

We gained a massive amount of points this update, nearly doubling our previous score.

Previous Update: 83 points

Talked to Bigout at the Bike Shop: 2 points (85)
Solved the Big Bullshit Puzzle: 40 points (125)
Followed Wilkes’s Moped: 2 points (127)
Talked to Wilkes: 6 points (133)
Took down Wilkes’s License Plate: 2 points (135)
Followed Madeline: 2 points (137)
Used Binoculars to see Madeline and Buchelli: 5 points (142)
Talked to the woman at the train station: 4 points (146)
Looked at the Train Schedule: 2 points (148)
Bribed the Taxi Driver: 5 points (153)

Total Score: 153/965

[Timrod]

Here we are at the next time segment for Day 1. This part is rather short - in fact, it could’ve been even shorter had we chosen to talk to Larry Chester in the prior segment.

We’re dumped right onto the map, with no real indication of what it is we’re supposed to be doing. In fact, this part is basically a repeat of the end of the last segment.

Our next destination is here, L’Homme Mort.

Oh look, there’s the moped we didn’t want. Since all of the other mopeds were reserved, we can only guess who actually took this one.

Naturally, Mosely got stuck with it since we took the motorcycle.

Talking with him quickly takes a turn for The Room. Mosely did naht hit Leesa. He did naht!

Unfortunately, he’s not interested in talking to us. However, you’ll notice on the map that L’Homme Mort is basically the same distance from the mountain ruins as Comme-Sourde, where we saw Madeline in the last update.

We can, however, get some extra points by being an asshole.

Before we leave, we want to repeat what we did with Wilkes and take down the license plate number on Mosely’s moped. I don’t know WHY we’re doing this, but I have a feeling there’s going to be some kind of bullshit bike-swapping puzzle later on.

Let’s go to Blanchefort again and see if we can spy on Mosely.

Well, that’s new. Last time we were here, there was only one moped: the orange one. Who does this red one belong to?

A few seconds later, we find out what that blue dot on the map was that you might’ve seen. We could follow Estelle and Lily, but…

Back at Blanchefort, Wilkes has moved his operation to the other side of the mountain. He doesn’t have anything interesting to say.

If we go back up to the ruins, however… Emilio is here.

If the sun didn’t usually destroy vampires, I’d automatically assume Emilio was one just based off this line alone.

What we really came up here to do though is use our binoculars in a way that kind of throws off the game’s entire timeline. If we were to go back to the town right now, Madeline’s van is parked right in front of the hotel.

That’s pretty much the only thing we came here to do. That, and…

Getting the license plate of the red moped, which must belong to Emilio.

Now, here’s a pretty well-hidden source of points. Back in town, there’s a window that is now open right across from where we took the spray bottle earlier.

Madeline has somehow teleported back here.

Man, what IS it with Sierra games and French women who spend the entire game doing nothing but flirting?

We should, and that’s why our final stop for this update is going to be Larry Chester’s house.

Interestingly, Larry has a car, but it’s blue.

For some reason, there’s a good… ten or twenty seconds of dead air between the knock and when he answers.

Larry has an accent that is about as close as anyone has ever gotten to impersonating Vincent Price.

Man, I remember CRT monitors. Back before they became the domain of neckbeard Melee players who insist that even with an expensive scaler that a tenth of a frame of lag ruins their game.

Larry has a bunch of things we can ask him about, and all of them are kind of important. Usually, the game only rewards points for one or two topics for any given person. I believe all of Larry’s award points.

Given Sierra’s usual writing, I’d bet he means Manchester, New Hampshire. People from New Hampshire are generally insane, but they’re not vampires as far as I know.

So yeah, this is more of the usual History Channel bullshit where they go to an island in Canada and make a bunch of fake stones with crosses cut into them then ask a couple of local dipshits about whether it could’ve been the templars who were also pirates.

What he’s getting at has to do with what happens if you ask him about the Holy Grail, which is the only other thing I’m going to bother posting. The Templars have been pretty overused as a plot device since this game came out.

So finally, let’s ask him about his theory in regards to the grail.

Why is this sounding more and more like the start of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure?

Unfortunately, he won’t say what he thinks the grail is an allegory for. It’s pretty clear that he thinks the Templars found something in the Temple of Solomon, though. I swear, if it was a stone mask…

Anyway, after I did this conversation, I looked around Larry’s house a bit. Just to, you know, see if I could find some kind of foreshadowing of him being a vampire or something.

He has a chest of drawers here with a “break in” verb. Potentially interesting. Gabriel isn’t interested in any of his books though.

There’s also a well outside that Gabriel thinks he can climb. He won’t do it, but I bet this is going to be important later for something. Just a hunch.

Finally, one of the windows in the back has a hole in it. I have a feeling we’re going to need to come back here at some point, possibly to commit more crimes.

Once we leave Larry’s house, time moves forward once again. Next time, we’ll… honestly, I have no idea, but from the looks of things we’re probably going to break into that church.

List of Points this update:

Previous Score: 153 points

Talked to Mosely at L’Homme Mort: 2 points
Got the license plate number off Mosley’s moped: 2 points
Used the binoculars to spy on Mosely and Madeline: 5 points
Got the license plate number off Emilio’s moped: 2 points
Eavesdropped on Arnaud and Madeline: 5 points
Talked to Larry Chester: 12 points

Total Score: 181/965 points

[Timrod]

Here we are at Gabriel’s first (well, technically second if you count the prior night when he got off the train) night in Rennes le Chateau. Let’s see what’s happened in town since we left.

The bike rental shop has closed for the night, and as a bonus…

All of the bikes are parked here. We already have the license plates off three of these, so let’s grab the other two. The blue one we already know is Estelle and Lily’s so I’ll spare you the shot of Gabriel methodically pulling out his notebook.

Astute observers might notice that there are two red bikes. The one with the markings is Emilio’s - you can only really notice this if you happen to zoom in on his bike while trying to get his license plate in the previous segment. This one is Buchelli’s. Again, I grabbed the license plate off-screen. I feel like Gabriel is now more of a traffic cop than Sonny Bonds ever was.

When we turn the corner, there’s now a new car in front of the hotel - and three new people.

The two men are McDougall and Mallory, while the woman is Grace Nakimura, Gabriel’s partner since the first game. Mystery partner, not life partner. She looks like that one person I saw cosplay the original model for Lara Croft where they cut a cardboard box in half diagonally and used that for the breasts.

If you’ll remember, these are the men the prince said he would send when we talked to him earlier.

They give Gabriel some money. I didn’t check the inventory to see if the money goes in as an item, but I doubt it does.

So okay, I guess this de-confirms a suspicion I had. My theory was that Buchelli and Baza WERE the men from the train - but Gabriel did say earlier the men on the train had ponytails and Buchelli is nearly bald.

And with that, they leave. This is definitely not the last time we’ll be seeing them.

This also kind of double-deconfirms my theory. The game has taken some pretty lengthy steps to show every single person from the tour group outside in broad daylight. The only people we haven’t seen outside are Arnaud, Larry Chester, and Madam Girard from the museum.

The game automatically walks Gabriel into the hallway, giving us a slight hint as to what we’re supposed to do next. However, there’s two small things we can do in the hotel before we leave.

Down in the lobby, the night clerk has replaced Jean. If you’ll remember, Jean told us to ask her about the men from the train.

I’d say why I think Buchelli got in when he did, but we’ll actually find that out… pretty shortly. Simone hasn’t seen or heard much of anything else.

While we’re here, we can also go spy on people in the dining room.

This time, it’s Wilkes and Buchelli. Wilkes is competing in what I can only assume is the national sport of Australia - drinking heavily. They don’t really have anything interesting to say, but Buchelli tells Wilkes that he’s not here for the treasure.

They then move closer and that’s the end of the scene.

Once we leave the hotel, the Prince’s men start walking toward the church. We’re going to be spending most of the rest of this update following them.

They go back into the graveyard. Thankfully, this isn’t timed: they only move when you show up, so there’s no chance of missing anything.

Here, we have access to a new command - hide.

The two of them knock on Arnaud’s door.

The only reason I can think of that he’d open the door is because he thought it might be Madeline coming back.

Looking back on it, the animation for this is not very good. It looks like the two scottish guys are merging into a single amorphous blob and trying to eat Arnaud.

They apparently think that Arnaud had something to do with the baby’s kidnapping. I mean, he’s a little shifty being the priest of a not-church and all, but it doesn’t seem like he’d have too many places around here to hide a baby.

Oh boy. Why do I have the feeling that Arnaud is a death cultist or something?

One thing this segment does a lot is tell us stuff we already know. I feel like a lot of games do this, and I kinda wish they’d stop.

The Order? You know, this kind of makes sense. Buchelli is suspicious as hell, but where did we first see him? In the church with Arnaud. Could it be that Buchelli is an agent of this “order”?

This feels like one of the Yakuza games where there’s some giant plot involving people who are secretly Chinese and like, a plan to build a yakuza moonbase.

Since it’s pretty obvious by the time segment titlecards that there are multiple days in this game, I wouldn’t be surprised if we have to come back here later.

Once the conversation finishes, there’s a short scene where Gabriel evades the scots. Weirdly, Arnaud will just kind of stand in place in the graveyard until we leave - but we can progress to the next event and he’ll teleport to where he needs to be for that.

For some reason, simply listening to Arnaud in his office won’t work. We have to use Gabriel’s tape recorder - probably because Arnaud is about to speak French.

I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to get this translated later, but I ran it through Google Translate, which did a decent job. Mostly. What I’m going to do is kind of smooth out the dialog a bit - hopefully without screwing anything up.

This line is “Hello? This is Arnaud speaking. I need to speak to the Grand Master. Of course it’s urgent!”

“Hello? I regret to inform you, sir, but I have just had a rather painful visit with two of Prince James’s men!”

“They think we kidnapped Prince James’s son! They say they followed the kidnappers to the train station in Couiza. And they seem convinced that we have him!”

“That’s what I told them! But I… I wanted to hear you say it yourself. But who has…?”

“But it’s us they accuse. They’re threatening to stop the talks until the baby is returned.”

“I don’t know! It’s got to be a personal enemy of the Prince’s… maybe it’s the English?”

“Yes, of course. I’ll take care of my side. Goodbye.”

While I totally get why they had this conversation take place in French - in fact, I think this is the first time we’ve heard anyone speak French since the intro cutscene - I don’t get why they didn’t just subtitle it in English. It’s not like anyone who has taken a high-school level course in pretty much any European language isn’t going to know what Anglais means, and most of what he’s saying is stuff we already know.

Next, we have to follow the scots back to the hotel, where they’ll get in their car. The animation for this is incredibly slow - but as it turns out, you can just use the “follow” verb on them at any point during the animation and it’ll work.

Unfortunately, we can’t just do the same. Instead, we have to go to Blanchefort and take the footpath to Larry’s house.

When we get there through the back route, the scots are… sitting in their car. I had a guide open (as I do the entire time I’m recording for the LP) but I thought “Oh hey, Larry had that hole in his window… I wonder if I can use the tape recorder on that.”

Nope! In fact, the hole magically vanished in a fit of developer oversight.

Instead, we have to hide behind this tree. While this part isn’t optional, its entire purpose is for an optional puzzle that is honestly kinda hard simply because it relies on the godawful animations. I could see something like what we’re about to see work in a game like LA Noire where the graphics are at least okay, but not in something like this.

The game then zooms way in to show off their secret handshake.

The problem is that the animation is so bad that it’s kinda hard to tell exactly what they’re doing.

The game will then show the entire handshake a second time.

Can you guess why the game showed that handshake off twice? That’s because we’re about to encounter the first real “fuck you” point for people going for maximum score runs.

Back in town, we need to go back to the hotel and tell Grace about what we’ve just seen.

Strangely, Emilio follows Gabriel upstairs, despite the fact that I didn’t see him at all in the lobby.

When we get back to Gabriel’s room, Mosely has already found his way in.

Where did Grace get 2000 francs? Unless Mosely somehow vouched for her.

Grace “figuring it out” may or may not be the source of a potentially gamebreaking bug that may or may not stop us from a max points run. We’ll see that in the next update.

So here’s what I call the big (optional) bullshit puzzle. Remember that handshake?

Unlike the Big Bullshit Puzzle, this one only gives us a little bit of extra dialog (and 5 points) if we make it. You get exactly one attempt.

Notice that the icons look almost NOTHING like the 3D models did. The answer here, with the options numbered left to right, is 2 5 3 1 4.

Great, now we’ve got the Masons thrown in with the Templars, the vampires, and that weird Mary Magdalene cult.

Ahh, Dunkin’ Donuts. The Starbucks of the East Coast. There’s still like… probably six of them around here, and two of them are less than a mile apart.

This also unlocks a new conversation topic.

That’s… actually a good question. How the hell DOES Mosely know so much about them? My guess is it’s going to be something like his dad was one.

I’m not sure if this second bit of conversation gets locked out if you don’t do the handshake right, but it’s worth another 2 points so that’s potentially 7 off your total if you screwed up the Big (Optional) Bullshit Puzzle.

Everyone knows the natural enemies of the Freemasons are the Mole People, who work for the Illuminati. This is like, basic conspiracy theories 101 here.

And with that, we’ve completed the first day of Gabriel Knight 3! I also have some good news: I went ahead and tested the next day to see if the gamebreaking bug occurs… and it doesn’t look like it will. This wrapper thing really un-fucks this game.

Next update, we’ll meet SIDNEY and see where a potential gamebreaking bug would occur if not for this wrapper.

Points Breakdown:

Previous Update: 181 points

Got the license plate off Estelle and Lily’s bike: 2 points
Got the license plate off Buchelli’s bike: 2 points
Talked with Simone, the hotel’s night clerk: 4 points
Eavesdropped on Buchelli and Wilkes in the dining room: 2 points
Hid behind the tomb to spy on the Scots: 5 points
Used the tape recorder to spy on Arnaud: 7 points
Followed the Scots to Larry’s house: 2 points
Hid behind the tree to spy on the Scots: 5 points
Talked to Grace and Mosely for a recap: 4 points
The Big (Optional) Bullshit Puzzle: 5 points

Total: 219 points

[Timrod]

Welcome to Day 2. If you’ve ever played the first Gabriel Knight game, you know that Gabriel hates waking up early.

So instead, we’re going to spend this segment playing as Grace.

Gabriel is busy sleeping, in all of his incredibly low-polycount glory.

The real point of interest right now is the desk over here, where Grace has set up SIDNEY. There’s also these two boxes here, which are…

Let’s just grab one of those while we’re at it.

Over here is the source of about 60% of the game-breaking bugs in Gabriel Knight 3 that don’t have to do with crashing or cutscenes failing to load.

This is SIDNEY. At the top, you can see that there’s a couple of options that would be of use to Gabriel - particularly the “Translate” option, which we’ll probably wind up using on that tape we got from the last update.

Shortly after we log in, we see the first possible gamebreaking bug. See that “New E-Mail” thing in the corner? Right now, that’s not important… but it will be before we’re done with the game.

This is how it’s supposed to look. However, if you’re not using the wrapper (and I tried loading the game without it to see if I could get a screenshot but nope) the box will be blank due to the game not liking your screen resolution.

The emails themselves aren’t important: the first one is from Grace’s mother in Japan telling her that they’ve found a potential husband for her and urging her to come home (Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, this will not solve Japan’s declining birthrate).

The second one is from the potential husband, and the third one is from the warrior monks in India that Gabriel mentioned a while back. I’ll post them at the end of the update if anyone wants to read them.

What we need to do instead is search for two specific subjects. The first one, unsurprisingly, is “vampires”.

Oh boy, blood cults! I swear, if this turns into another situation where Gabriel wanders into the den of an Egyptian death cult and has to answer a stupid riddle or be sacrificed by an accountant, I’m done. There are a ton of entries in SIDNEY’s search thing, and I’m not going to go through all of them - just the ones that get us points.

Next, we need to look up the Holy Grail. You can use the English term for it, but I think if you want the point for it you have to use “San Greal”.

Once we’ve done that, we’re free to leave the hotel room. We know Grace was planning on going on the tour, so we’d better get moving on that.

Or not. Someone left a book by the door.

You can’t see it right now, but this is a copy of that “Secrets of the Holy Grail” book that was being advertised in the bookstore.

Grace then gets a really weird urge to leave the poem for Gabriel to handle.

I took a quick second to look at Grace’s items. We won’t be using any of them this update - but really, all she’s got is her notepad, her ID, and the fingerprint kit. The book is a bit different from other items we’ve come across.

We can actually examine the book, but Grace won’t look at it right now.

Downstairs, we automatically get drawn into an unimportant conversation with Jean. There’s nothing important here - Grace just tells him she’s staying with Gabriel and then awkwardly insists they’re not dating or anything.

As with every time segment so far, we can go into the dining room for points.

All of the people in the tour group are here, but the only person we’re interested in is Madeline.

Why is it that like every woman Gabriel meets instantly wants to bang him?

We have one more stop to make that isn’t entirely intuitive, because it’s in a spot you’d have absolutely no reason to visit. I knew where it was only because I ran into it trying to find the church when I first started the LP.

By the way, one thing I missed: there’s a couple of easter eggs in the game - I saw a video about them after it got recommended to me on Youtube when I was trying to find a video of the email glitch. It’s hard to make out, but the poster here is about Jane Jensen’s new Gabriel Knight book. The pictures underneath are a really low-resolution photo of one of the actual Gabriel Knight novels.

There’s another one I missed at the train station where you can find a note in an overturned ashtray that asks why you’re reading a note in an overturned ashtray, but I don’t think we can go back and get that one unless I load a save.

I found a copy for like $5 and bought it because why not? I’ve read worse.

Anyway, if we go past the bookstore and ignore the turn off to the museum, there’s this weird mansion and a patch of grass behind it.

This building, which is really fucking hard to get a decent shot of due to the way the game’s camera works, is basically an observation tower. The guides I’ve read refer to it as the “Tour Magdala” and I have no idea where they got that name from.

On the top floor, Arnaud is busy pulling a Gabriel and spying on someone with his binoculars. I bet he’s looking for babies to kidnap.

“Sorry, I was just scouting the landscape for small children to sacrifice to my god.”

…Wait a second. He owns a car? I’m willing to bet it’s black and had to be fumigated for vampires.

And with that, he goes back to hunting for babies. It’s also kinda weird that he wants to go on the tour, given that he lives around here.

When we head back to the hotel, Emilio is sitting on the bench outside. At this point, everyone else is still in the dining room. In fact, it’ll be pretty obvious once we get on the tour that Emilio is just not having any of it.

Before we go on the tour, we have to wake Mosely up for some reason.

I’m going to warn you that the shirt you’re about to see Mosely wearing is probably considered a crime against humanity under the Geneva Convention.

See that? See that fucking shirt? If someone can find me that shirt somewhere, I will buy it and absolutely wear it.

There it is up close. It’s like vomit in shirt form.

This part is one giant lecture by Madeline with the sole purpose of showing off the one thing we need to do here. Once she stops talking, this section is timed: you have a good few minutes to figure out what you need to do, but it’s missable.

Les Bergeres d’Arcadie is an actual painting. I wasn’t sure because I don’t really know my classical French painters. There are in fact some weird theories about it.

To me, it looks like two guys showing a woman how they told some idiot that if he rubbed this random stone pylon a genie would come out and he’s actually doing it the absolute madman.

While Madeline is talking, the game makes a very deliberate camera shift to show Emilio doing… something.

Honestly, I think the only reason Madeline’s speech is this long is because the writers wanted to show off the fact that they looked up the painting. Basically, the painting is very mysterious.

Estelle looks like one of those female TF2 Engineer models I saw once.

Well, I’m glad that’s over. If you skipped all of that, I do not in the last blame you.

What happens now is that the game starts a hidden timer. Gabriel Knight 3 has no pause button as far as I know - except for being in the save menu. Once the timer is up, Madeline automatically moves the tour along. The game kind of helps by disabling the ability to do much of anything except look at Emilio, who has written “SUM” on the ground.

So what do we do with this, you ask? The same thing we do with like half the stuff in this game.

Why does she have to write it down? Hell if I know. It’s worth points though.

Anyway, after a few minutes we wind up at the ruins on top of the mountain near Larry’s house.

I’ll just skip the rest of her talk. In fact, there’s a LOT of shit I’m gonna skip.

You know, I kind of wish they had put this BEFORE all those parts where we had to come up here as Gabriel and spy on people. Would’ve been a nice hint.

If we try to go up to Madeline, we get a scene of Wilkes hitting on her. Again.

Instead, we want to go near Estelle and Lily.

Did somebody say “weeaboo”? Because I think I just heard someone say “weeaboo”.

It’s an Albany expression.

God that shirt is a fucking war crime. I actually searched around a bit and I haven’t found anything that looks like it, though I did find a couple of plaid ones in the same color.

Whatever this Red Serpent is, it got everyone’s attention the second anyone mentioned it. We can ask every single person here about it (and I did, off-screen) but they all tell you pretty much the same thing. I’ll go with Madeline’s answer.

Wilkes mentions that the riddle is meant to be a clue to the treasure’s location if you ask him.

I bet they changed that law around the time slash fanfics became a thing.

The last thing we can do in this time segment is ask Mosely about stuff. I started by asking him about Gabriel.

Mosley sounds like he’s a half-step away from posting on /r/incels about how the guy who keeps stealing his stuff has a girlfriend and he doesn’t. Also, I like how they pixelated the part of his chest that’s showing through the gap in the shirt and not, you know, the shirt itself.

The other topics aren’t really that important. Mosely won’t tell Grace why he’s here (which is what happens if you ask him about himself) and also doesn’t know anything about the Serpent Rouge but just goes ahead and drops a reference anyway:

I love the “duh” expression the game gave me here.

What we want to do to end the chapter is talk to him about the treasure.

Meanwhile, back at the hotel…

God dammit game stop ripping off- oh wait, Nier Automata came out a decade later.

There’s another “forever” here that didn’t cap for some reason.

Gabriel does a spit-take and immediately wakes up. The weird thing is, he had a blanket on him when we left him in the morning, and it’s missing from the cutscene.

\

Next time, we’ll commit more crimes as Gabriel.

Points Breakdown:

Previous Update: 219 points

Got the Fingerprint Kit: 1 point (220)
Searched for “San Greal” (or “Holy Grail”) and “Vampires” in SIDNEY: 2 points (222)
Got the Secrets of the Holy Grail book: 2 points (224)
Talked to Arnaud in the observation tower: 2 points (226)
Talked to Madeline in the dining room: 2 points (228)
Automatically granted for listening to Madeline’s first speech: 4 points (232)
Used the notebook to copy down “SUM”: 4 points (236)
Automatically granted for listening to Madeline’s second speech: 2 points (238)
Listened to Wilkes hit on Madeline: 2 points (240)
Overheard Estelle talking about Le Serpent Rouge: 2 points (242)
Asked Madeline and Wilkes about Serpent Rouge: 4 points (246)
Talked to Mosely: 4 points (250)

Total: 250/965 points

Also, here’s the emails:

God dammit Shinzo Abe.

He probably collects stamps. Engineers are weirdos.

[Timrod]

Welcome to the second time segment of Day 2. Coming into this game, the only bullshit puzzle I knew about was the moustache puzzle. What I found when doing this segment is something just as time-consuming and somehow even more repetitive.

First thing I did was grab the poem. This isn’t worth points, but I figured I might as well. It’s also hard to notice, but Gabriel has in fact changed his shirt: he’s wearing a yellow one rather than white.

We also need to grab the fingerprint kit. This IS worth a point.

Now, let’s head out to something I’m going to call… The Big Dumb Bullshit Waiting Puzzle.

Outside, we meet the maid, who is just about to enter Gabriel’s room to clean it. It’s probably a good thing that we picked up that poem.

Roxanne is going to be the key to the Big Dumb Bullshit Waiting Puzzle. You see, what we need to do in this time segment is get into all of the other guest rooms in the hotel.

As soon as we leave, Roxanne pulls a key (out of her bra, naturally) and opens the door to Gabriel’s room. She’ll do this animation to every door on this floor, so I won’t show this one because it’s not important.

She’ll then repeat the process with Room 27 - which if you’ll remember is Emilio’s room after he traded with Estelle and Lily.

Once she enters, she places the cleaning cart across the doorway to stop us from entering.

The door closes over, and after a few seconds she comes out with the dirty towels. This procedure is not going to make a whole lot of sense once we get a few rooms down.

After loading the dirty laundry, she moves the cart out of the way. This is our chance.

Gabriel can then sneak into the room and watch her. You’ll notice that Emilio has what looks like a safe on the wall - the wall facing Gabriel’s room, in fact. Gabriel actually will not tell you what this is when you look at it: I assumed it was a safe because he’ll tell you that it’s locked if you try to open it.

What this is… is a dumbwaiter.

After a good 20 to 30 second animation, Roxanne moves into the bathroom. This is when we need to get into the room.

I got a better shot of this in one of the other rooms, but what you have to do is pop the lock. You might question how this would help us… or why they’d have a slide lock on a dumbwaiter instead of just having one that pops into place once it shuts. The answer is moon logic.

We then need to GTFO before Roxanne comes out of the bathroom.

Once again, Madeline does the same procedure with Room 29, which is Madeline’s room.

Unlike Gabriel and Emilio’s rooms, Madeline’s doesn’t have a dumbwaiter.

Instead, it has a balcony. Thankfully, the doors are made of frosted glass.

What we have to do is have Gabriel run into the balcony and shut the doors, allowing Roxanne to leave.

We then need to go to the door and VERY PRECISELY click on the doorknob to unlock it.

Roxanne does Estelle and Lily’s room next, which is identical to Madeline’s. We do exactly the same thing here. At this point we’ve been going for like 10 minutes of just doing this stupid puzzle.

Thankfully, Roxanne will continue her cleaning even if you’re not there to watch. If you wait for her in Estelle and Lily’s room when she goes in here (this is Buchelli’s room) she’ll just happily keep on going. I have no idea what happens if you miss a room, and I didn’t feel like wasting a bunch of time to find out.

Buchelli also has a dumbwaiter. The hotel has some weird-ass logic: the men get dumbwaiters, the women get balconies, and Mosely gets nothing.

Finally, Wilkes’s room.

Once we finish up here, we have to head back to Gabriel’s room and do some bullshit with the dumbwaiter. Gabriel, of course, won’t unlock his dumbwaiter unless you tell him to.

Now we do something incredibly unsafe and enter the dumbwaiter, which for some reason has a solid floor. I don’t think that’s how that works.

It also has enough room for a grown man to stand up in it. Again, I’m pretty sure that’s not how dumbwaiters work. I’m also pretty sure that people have gotten killed doing this shit.

Now we’re in Emilio’s room. Unfortunately, there’s not much of interest in here.

The only thing we really get a hit on is this pillow right by the dumbwaiter.

We can’t take it or do anything with it, it’s just kinda there, and it’s worth points. You’d think there’d be something in the bag, but there isn’t.

We do have to try taking it to have Gabriel tell us what it is, though. That’s one thing I really dislike about this game: there’s certain things that the writers just kind of assumed people would recognize on sight and didn’t write something in the “look at” description that actually tells you what it is.

There is one optional thing we could take a look at:

If we look on Emilio’s dresser, there’s a picture of Jesus. I don’t know why it’d be odd for a Muslim to have around, given that Jesus is very much a thing in Islam. Gabriel will suggest fingerprinting it, but if you try to there’s no prints on it, which is something he remarks about as being “strange”.

Back in the dumbwaiter, you’ll notice that there’s two sets of ropes across from Gabriel. The left side lowers the dumbwaiter, while the right side raises it.

Good luck spotting where the door is at the bottom, since you can’t change camera angles here.

The answer is it’s behind Gabriel.

Welcome to the kitchen. There’s not much we can do here. The note on the fridge, in case you’re curious, is a list of room service orders. Emilio is apparently a vegetarian.

Over on the other side of the room is a second dumbwaiter. This is the one that goes to Wilkes’s and Buchelli’s rooms.

Strangely, the dumbwaiter is upstairs… even though Emilio is the one ordering room service. We have to use the crank to lower it.

I wound up heading into Buchelli’s room first.

What we want here is Buchelli’s bag. Gabriel will suggest fingerprinting it if we look at it.

Welcome to the fingerprinting minigame. Remember doing this in Ace Attorney, where it had the neat gimmick where you covered the bottom screen in dust and then blew into the mic? Yeah, none of that innovative stuff here.

Basically, what you wind up doing is taking the brush, dipping it in the powder, and then HOLDING left click and moving the mouse all over the image. There’s no indication of where you’ve already checked - this is why we play with a guide. There’s a fingerprint on the clasp.

We then need to take a piece of tape and get the print…

And then stick it in a bag.

We also need to check Buchelli’s dresser.

Buchelli’s either a priest, or impersonating one. That would explain why he was talking to Arnaud, and probably how he knew that Arnaud’s church isn’t real.

There’s also a reference to Gabriel Knight 1 in here.

And here I was hoping that I’d get to record Tim Curry doing his legendary “layer a fake Irish accent on top of a fake New Orleans accent” thing that he did in the first game. Seriously, go find that on Youtube or something.

What we’re actually here for is this thing.

You can see it later on, but the stub lists him as taking the train from Rome… which would make sense if Buchelli is working for the Vatican.

Onward to the last room we can reach from here - Wilkes’s.

Wilkes has a bunch of papers on his desk, and among them is this one:

Strangely enough, we don’t wind up taking the letter with us. You’ll understand why that’s strange when we get to the end of the borefest that is this time segment.

Next up is Madeline’s room. You can see from here that she’s got something underneath her bed.

First though, we want to look at this drawer.

Inside is a handheld GPS and… a map.

Gabriel isn’t interested in the GPS.

Now let’s fish out the briefcase from under her bed.

You know, the last game I played where you go through someone’s suitcase and they have a gun in it, that person turned out to be with the FBI. Given that we’ve seen her with Mosely, and that we don’t know why Mosely is here, my guess is that she’s a cop.

Unfortunately, Gabriel won’t steal the gun (which I suppose makes sense given that it doesn’t appear to be loaded) but he will take a fingerprint from it. I don’t know why there’d be one on the barrel like that though. I’d expect it to be further up, from the person practicing trigger discipline and putting their finger on the side of the gun, since apparently putting it on the trigger guard instead is considered bad practice for some reason.

We’re also going to want to remember to put the gun back where we found it.

Finally, we’ve got Estelle and Lily’s room. This is the source of… I’ll just call it the Asshole Puzzle.

First off, we search the bed. This brings up a folder with some parchments in it.

For the first time, we need to go to the bathroom. The first object of interest is on the sink.

This is why I call it the Asshole Puzzle. If you thought the Big Bullshit Puzzle was bad, this takes moon logic to an extreme.

We can also dust the hand mirror that was underneath it to get Lily’s print. I don’t know how Gabriel knows it’s Lily’s and not Estelle’s, but whatever.

We’ve now gotten everything we need from inside the hotel. Time to head out.

As soon as we go downstairs, Jean forces us into a conversation.

Basically, this entire conversation is to let you know that you can get into the kitchen from the lower level (through the dining room) for this time segment. This is mostly so that if you missed something in one of the upstairs rooms, you don’t have to go all the way back through Gabriel’s room to get there.

To get the full score for this though, we have to tell him we’re hungry.

I wish I had a video of this, because every time Gabriel talks to Jean he switches to a mocking French accent and just makes fun of him.

Anyway, the next place we need to go is the church. If you’ll remember, Arnaud is on the tour right now, meaning no one’s there to stop us breaking in. I mean, it’s not a REAL church so breaking in totally doesn’t count.

The only way in is Arnaud’s office window, which he apparently leaves unlocked.

Welcome to the Asshole Puzzle. The office window is stuck - how Gabriel didn’t notice this the first two times he opened it is a mystery.

Here’s our inventory right now. Now, I know what you’re thinking: we have a shovel that we could just use as a pry bar to force the window open. Given that we left half the hotel rooms unlocked upstairs, you’d think that Gabriel wouldn’t be beyond just breaking the damn window.

Nope! The description for Lily’s butt cream says it reduces swelling.

Yes, we are using a tube of butt cream on a window. I don’t know how the hell this makes any sense at all, and I’m pretty sure there are several reasons why this wouldn’t work in reality.

Whatever. After the Big Bullshit Puzzle, I’ve just kind of come to accept that all of the puzzles in this game suck.

Arnaud’s office has two things we need to see in it… and even with a guide, it took me several minutes to find both. The camera in this room is not great.

Since you can’t move the camera up or down, I had to kind of twist it. If you look at the bottom, you can just barely see a gold-colored handle. This table is actually a desk.

Now, I want you to look at the first shot of Gabriel opening the drawer. There’s something in the drawer we SHOULD be able to see from this angle, but can’t. First, let’s take a look at the magazine - it’s worth points.

Oh no! Clearly, the vampires are plotting to make France exit the European Union in this dark future of 1998.

Now, pay VERY close attention to the empty drawer. See how it’s totally empty? The guide mentioned an item in the desk that I spent like ten minutes trying to find.

You have to turn the camera completely around the desk and zoom in from the other side. I don’t know how the hell this wasn’t visible in, I dunno, any of those other shots where we could see the full drawer and that there was nothing in it.

We now have Arnaud’s fingerprint, which is the last thing we need to get in this time segment. Thank god that shit’s over… except it’s not.

We have to go back to the hotel again, and go back to Gabriel’s room.

Welcome to the third and final act of this godawful segment - TEDIOUS DATABASE MANAGEMENT!

This time, we need to use the “ADD DATA” option in SIDNEY. What’s that do, you ask? Well, first it pops this text up. Then, there’s about a second of load time while the game loads your inventory.

You can then pick an item to scan into the computer. We have… a LOT of shit that needs to be scanned. In total:

Arnaud’s Fingerprints
Arnaud’s Tape
Buchelli’s License Plate
Buchelli’s Fingerprints
Emilio’s License Plate
Lily’s License Plate
Lily’s Fingeprints
Lily’s Parchments (x2, have to be done separately)
Madeline’s Fingerprints
Madeline’s Map
Wilkes’s License Plate

That’s a total of twelve items.

Upon selecting an item, there’s another two seconds or so where the computer makes some scanner noises…

And then a window where Gabriel types in a filename that takes another second or two. These are Madeline’s fingerprints.

We then get booted back out to the main menu and have to click “Add Data” again.

This entire process takes something like five to six minutes. You know what I love doing in a video game? Watching repetitive animations.

I finished by scanning Arnaud’s tape. Now, you see the “Suspects” button in the top-right?

Doing this brings up a list of every character in the tour group. Mosely is not included, even though we have his license plate.

The notes section actually allows you to type stuff in yourself. I’m just gonna leave that there.

What we need to do now is even MORE tedious database management! We have to link all of the things we just scanned in (apart from the map and the parchments, though I did that anyway) to a suspect. I’m sure whoever it was that programmed this was really proud of it, and for the time I can see how it would be kind of impressive. In fact, I’m not going to drag on Sierra too hard for this, because if they had made it a bit less repetitive I could see it being neat if you were playing this in 1999.

Once we link a license plate number, it’ll show up on the screen.

Same goes for the fingerprints.

Here’s Emilio’s completed screen. Not much to it.

Arnaud’s. We don’t have a license plate number for him because we’ve never seen his car.

Here’s Madeline’s. The reason I’m showing this one off is because this is what happens if we link an item to a suspect that doesn’t give us points.

Anyway, you get the idea.

There is one last thing we can do, which is translate Arnaud’s tape.

It’s funny how much this resembles Google Translate… despite the fact that this game predates it by seven years.

Google Translate came remarkably close.

We’re done with SIDNEY, but if you’ll remember, when we took the map and the parchments Gabriel said he should go put them back after they’ve been scanned.

So that’s just what we do.

To end this time segment, we need to go back downstairs.

Yes, I too cannot find the mayonnaise in my own kitchen. It’s in the refrigerator, middle shelf, left side, back behind all the salad stuff and next to the bottle of ketchup.

And with that, we’re done. This background image looks… promising. Are we finally going to see evidence of vampires at work? I have no idea, I haven’t played this game before and haven’t played ahead.

Points Breakdown:

Previous Update: 250 points

Got the Fingerprint Kit: 1 point (251)
The Big Dumb Waiting Puzzle: 18 points (269)
Got into Emilio’s room and searched it: 6 points (275)
Cranked down the second dumbwaiter in the kitchen: 2 points (277)
Got into Buchelli’s room and searched it: 10 points (287)
Got into Wilkes’s room and read the letter: 6 points (292)
Searched Madeline’s room: 6 points (298)
Searched Estelle/Lily’s room: 8 points (306)
Told Jean we were hungry: 2 points (308)
Solved the Asshole Puzzle: 2 points (310)
Searched Arnaud’s office: 6 points (316)
Tedious Database Management: 24 points (340)
Put the map back in Madeline’s room: 1 point (341)
Put the parchments back in Lily’s room: 1 point (342)

Total: 342/965 points (35.4%)

[Timrod]

After the continue point, the game has a cutscene where the graphics take a nosedive quality-wise. I recorded this scene twice: once while I was doing the last update and again when I came back to start this update.

When I say I don’t play ahead, the exception is stuff like this where I can’t quit out of the game. The reason for this is that if I leave the game via alt-tab and kill the process, it crashes and causes me to not be able to get back to my desktop, even using the process manager. I think that’s a side effect of the wrapper plugin.

I think the reason it looks so terrible is because this is all prerendered and compressed to hell.

Ever since Gabriel confirmed that no one in the tour group matches the vampires that attacked him on the train, I’ve had a hard time figuring out what the fuck Emilio’s deal is. My first theory was that he was a vampire but through some bullshit plot device was able to go out in the sun.

There’s that fucking shirt again! Someone find me that goddamn shirt! Seriously, I’ve spent hours looking for it at this point and haven’t found anything even close to being the war crime that shirt is.

This is Chateau de Serres. I’m not sure if it was even on the map when we were playing as Gabriel.

The Chateau is divided into three buildings. This first one is the garage, which is locked.

The second one is the wine tasting room.

And third is the main house. We’re going into the wine tasting room first.

Is it just me, or does that guy look a lot like Guybrush Threepwood? We could talk to everyone here, but the only person that will give us points is in the back.

For some reason, Madeline REALLY does not want Mosely talking to Grace. She does this as soon as we walk by him, and will rebuke us if we try to go anywhere near him.

The person we need to talk to is Arnaud.

Montreaux, huh? His name is on the sign above the wine tasting room.

Outside, there is… one other place we can go. It’s hard to see because this ENTIRE LOCATION absolutely hates the camera but there’s a little archway that leads back behind the house.

As soon as we get back here, the music changes and Grace will remark that she can hear a baby crying. If you move the camera, it gets louder and louder as you approach that cellar door… which is locked.

What we have to do is climb. This entire area might as well have been a cutscene. In fact, about half this segment probably could’ve been a cutscene.

Now we’re higher up, but we still aren’t in the house. The vines on the side of the house will be familiar to anyone who has played Ocarina of Time.

Finally, we reach the house.

Right around the corner is… oh shit, I think we’ve just hit plot.

I didn’t do this in the most optimal order, but from here on out we’re in for some Resident Evil style bullshit.

Graphics!

Someone is coming, and we need to hide. If you don’t know what you’re doing, I’d imagine it’s probably pretty easy to get caught here.

Right across the room is an armoire. That’ll do.

I feel like half of this game so far has been sneaking into places, and the other half is hiding in and/or behind stuff. And… those look like cult robes.

Oh man. If that’s really the trunk that the baby was in, then this motherfucker is ABSOLUTELY a vampire.

He’s no dipshit either. Grace doesn’t close the armoire all the way, and he immediately notices. We are SO fucked-

Wait, what? Is he… won’t that kill him?

What the shit? He HAS to be a vampire! There is no fucking way this guy has a baby in his creepy-ass mansion and he’s not a vampire!

With Montreaux gone, we can check the… is that a baby?

Oh, it’s just an ugly low-polycount mess. Crisis averted. Let’s go take another look at those cult robes.

It’s really too bad that Grace doesn’t know that Buchelli is probably with the Vatican. A priest would probably come in handy right about now.

We’ll just use Grace’s notebook on that.

We can now go over to where Montreaux entered the room from and go downstairs.

The study is even worse than the rest of the house camera-wise. In fact, there’s several things we need to do in here that basically amount to pixel hunts. First, you’ll notice that desk right next to Grace.

The desk has a drawer in it, but it’s almost impossible to see. This is about as close as you can get the camera. What you have to do is use the “camera inspect” button to change the view.

I spent a good five minutes trying to figure this shit out. Note to the developers, the camera should never be a puzzle. Anyway, we can see the drawer now.

Unlike Arnaud’s drawer, this one doesn’t have any camera fuckery to it. Now, your first instinct might be to read the book or look at it. WRONG, IDIOT! You want to fingerprint it first. I didn’t care to find out myself, but the guide I read claimed this is missable if you touch the book before fingerprinting it.

So, here’s where my new theory about Emilio comes into play. It’s kind of a long shot, but… you’ll notice in the book, the last item on the page is the “Wandering Jew”. I happened to find the entry for the Wandering Jew in SIDNEY back when we first used it as Gabriel to look up vampires.

Emilio has a picture of Jesus in his room despite Grace thinking it makes no sense. He also doesn’t seem to leave fingerprints, and Sidney doesn’t seem to know where he’s from. My theory when I saw this was that Emilio might be the Wandering Jew. It… kinda makes sense, given that he’s probably not a vampire due to the whole being out in the sun thing. Unless the game is bullshitting that and the vampires have found a way to go outside.

If we flip the page, we get… this. I couldn’t read it clearly because the game stretches the 640x480 window to 2560x1080 on my monitor, but in the screenshot I can see it pretty clearly. It looks like someone is tracking an immortal… or at least someone they believe to be one. The only problem is that this can’t be the Wandering Jew, because it starts before the birth of Jesus.

Grace won’t even copy the stuff down into her notebook.

The next thing we need to do is move the desk chair over to the painting. Grace will say that she sees something weird in its eyes.

The problem here is that if you miss the handful of pixels that represent the left eye, Grace will get off the chair.

That guy in the painting… he kinda looks like Gabriel.

Next, we need to zoom in on the desk. There’s a button underneath the desk that is a second pixel hunt to find.

There are five statues in this room, and each one is now shooting a laser out of its forehead. It’s almost like the developers played Resident Evil.

What we want to do is turn each of the statue heads to the left once, causing the lasers to form a pentagram.

This opens up a second staircase in the floor.

This is the chateau’s wine cellar, and it’s a giant maze. Why it’s a giant maze in a game where you control a free-floating camera, I have no idea.

Well, there’s no baby here. I don’t know how exactly Grace managed to mistake the noise that machine is making for a baby.

There’s a little old lady managing the press.

The last part of that translates to “So young, so pretty, so delicious!”

Google Translate translates this as “Blue Apples”, but I think she’s probably talking about the grapes.

This seems more like a misunderstanding than this lady being some kind of Bloodborne-style monstrosity.

Grace somehow escapes that room, probably through the hatchway we saw earlier.

I feel like you could replace Mosely and Grace with the genome soldiers from MGS1 and this would still work.

I have to wonder. Let’s say that old lady was one of those monstrosities. Would she in fact be able to bring herself to bite Mosely through that shirt? I feel like wearing that shirt makes you biteproof.

Meanwhile, back in extremely compressed cutscene land…

Wilkes looks like a lego man in this shot. Like his head is just a modular piece attached to a generic body.

Well, that’s… something. Dunno what kind of vampire would bother cutting a slice out of the neck though.

In case you can’t tell from the poor graphics, these two guys are the Scots we ran into at the church and again at Larry Chester’s house a few updates ago.

And with that, another time segment comes to an end. I’m glad I got this one in before the weekend was over, since now we’ve got something approaching an actual plot - just as our score starts to reach the halfway mark.

Points Breakdown:

Previous Update: 342 points

Talked to Arnaud in the Wine Tasting Room: 2 points (344)
Climbed up to the second floor of the house: 6 points (350)
Opened the trunk: 2 points (352)
Hid in the armoire: 2 points (354)
Found the doll in the trunk: 2 points (356)
Took notes on the cult robes: 2 points (358)
Got Montreaux’s fingerprint: 2 points (360)
Read the Immortals book: 2 points (362)
Moved the chair and examined the painting: 4 points (366)
Solved the laser puzzle: 7 points (373)
Opened the door to the wine press room: 2 points (375)
Talked to the creepy old lady: 5 points (380)

Total: 380/965 points (39.3%)

Next time, we’ll probably go investigate those dead bodies.

[Timrod]

We start back in Gabriel’s apartment, with Grace practically ready to collapse.

The spoken dialogue here doesn’t really match the subtitles - Grace does a lot of “Hmm… well… let me think…” beforehand.

Honestly, it’d probably make more sense to take Grace but Sierra clearly had not yet figured out how to do a multi-protagonist adventure game. That technology wouldn’t be invented until, uh… the far-flung future of 1992 with Coktel Vision’s “Gobliiins”.

The game automatically walks Gabriel out of the hotel room.

There are a TON of missable points in this time segment. The first thing we want to do is something that Emilio hinted at way back when we first met Mosely in his room.

The logic here is kinda questionable. The assumption is that the entire tour group is now back at the hotel, and thus in their rooms, after witnessing the dead bodies.

What we want to do is use the water glass on Madeline’s door.

That’s interesting. I wonder why Gabriel doesn’t have one.

We also want to do this on Estelle and Lily’s door.

No wonder Grace thought she over-reacted. I hope this isn’t going to be a thing like the Phantom in whatever Ace Attorney game that was.

Let’s head downstairs now. What we’re about to do is one of the easiest to miss sources of points in this game.

Wilkes is down in the sitting area. This much you can see immediately. What you probably don’t realize (without a guide) is that the second you go downstairs in this segment, a hidden timer starts.

You see, back in the phone room, Buchelli is on the phone. Once a certain amount of time passes, he will leave the phone room and go talk to Wilkes. Eavesdropping on him will cause him to INSTANTLY leave the room once we’re done.

What’s even more fun is that without the wrapper, the game has a framerate issue here where it runs at like 300 FPS, causing the timer to tick down before you’ve even made it to where Wilkes is. The trick is that we want to talk to Wilkes first, then quickly go for the phone room.

Now what we want to do is use the tape recorder on Buchelli. The conversation is in Italian - and we’re going to translate it later, so I’m not going to bother posting it.

As soon as we’ve finished recording him and left the room, Buchelli comes out.

They basically just start drinking while Wilkes laments the loss of his ability to test his treasure hypothesis. If you missed talking to Wilkes or recording Buchelli before this, you’d have to reload your save (or just go without a full points run).

Our next unlikely source of points is Arnaud, who is back on top of the observation tower. I thought for a bit about why this gives us points since all he does is deny knowing the Scots.

Then I remembered I took a look at the novelization of the first game (my copy came in as I was working on this update) and Jane Jensen is INCREDIBLY verbose. Like, she takes five pages to describe what is maybe 30 seconds of cutscene.

With that done, we need to head to the Armchair of the Devil. I missed some points here and had to re-record because this shit is a pixel hunt even with a guide.

The first missable thing is this right here. There’s tire marks in the dirt - you’re forgiven if you don’t see them because I sure as hell didn’t. You need to have Gabriel look at these.

Thank you for your amazing insight, Gabriel.

If we follow the tire tracks with the camera, they eventually lead to the Scots’s car.

Now, there’s a source of points here that is not going to be obvious to anyone at all. We got points both for looking at the tire track by the bike and looking a the car… but there’s one other thing we can do.

We can use the notebook on the car, which causes Gabriel to get a rubbing of the tire imprint. Why that tire in particular? Hell if I know. The game does give you a pretty direct hint if you use the “think” action on the car though.

With that done, we want to go up the mountain to the armchair itself. Mosely is already here taking a look around. There’s even MORE pixel-hunting to be done up here, only this pixel hunt is a requirement.

I couldn’t capture it, but Mosely jumps when Gabriel approaches him.

There’s a choice here that I forgot to capture, but it’s got four options: Arnaud, the Tour Group, I Don’t Know, and VAMPIRES. We’re picking that last one because it’s the only one that’s worth points.

We then have to examine the bodies, specifically their heads. You can also examine the rest of the body, but only examining the heads gives you points… despite all three of the hotspots basically saying the same thing.

Well yeah, it’s not like they were say… a black Scottish cyclops. There’s more (redacted) than there are black Scottish cyclopes out there.

Here’s what you get if you examine the bodies anywhere but the head:

This is where the pixel hunt comes in. You see, the invisible walls for this area are actually fairly far in - in fact, that large pixelated tree just above Mosely pretty much marks the boundary.

On the far left side of the map is a bloodstain. For reference…

The area around the rock is surrounded by invisible walls, and it’s a complete pain in the ass to find if you don’t know that it’s there.

Along with the bloodstain, there’s four indentations in the dirt. We need Gabriel to use the think action on these.

Gabriel bends down, and then starts having a vision. Or, if I’m aping Jane Jensen:

Gabriel knelt down at the strange indentation in the dirt, touching it with the tips of his fingers. The soil was soft and pliable, but dry. As he touched the dirt, images came flooding into his brain, as if by some sort of sorcery most dark. Gabriel was tripping fucking balls.

In the same way that he remembered what to buy at the grocery store (by conducting an elaborate Schattenjager ritual consisting of waving his hands in the air and just generally being Tim Curry) Gabriel had solved the mystery of the indentations. Why his own feet were not making any was a mystery probably answered by the fact that Mask of Eternity’s engine was bunk.

HANGMAN’S GAMBIT!

The objectively correct answer is “BRUTALLQ MURDEREX THEM”

Who the fuck are you, Kokichi Ouma?

The answer is that we have to trip balls again. For some reason.

I had to re-record this part twice: the first time because I thought I missed some points, and the second time because once you finish looking at the blood, there’s a scene that is VERY easy to accidentally skip.

Yep, Madeline is definitely a cop. Probably Interpol.

More like she is the police. I’m honestly surprised Mosely hasn’t worked this out yet.

I love how even with these low-poly models they still manage to convey Madeline being a smug piece of shit.

I thought for a minute that it was weird we didn’t see Mosely’s moped, then I realized he probably just never went back with the tour group.

Gabriel is, of course, a smug asshole.

We’re now back in town, but we need to leave right away. It’s kind of a wonder the game didn’t hint at this by just dumping us back on the world map.

One thing I didn’t point out: just to the left of the hotel, across from the route you take to get to the observation tower, is a road you can use to get out of town without having to go back to the bike shop.

Our next destination is Larry’s house.

I don’t even know why Gabriel bothers playing around with him.

And here we go.

Honestly, one thing I thought of is that they should have put the Big (Optional) Bullshit Puzzle here instead. Fool Larry into thinking Gabriel is a Freemason.

Now that we’ve done all of this, we can cut right to the chase.

If we go back around to where that sometimes-broken window is…

Larry gets up and touches that… whatever it is. I’m amazed he doesn’t see Gabriel from this angle.

He then takes off on foot, while Gabriel sneaks around to the back of the house.

Now, you’re probably wondering, much as I was, what the hell we do with that hole in the window.

The answer is… we use the coat hanger. This entire thing kind of makes no sense to me. The thing Larry was fiddling with is an alarm clock. Why he decided to, of all things, set his alarm clock before venturing out is a mystery.

Gabriel manages to rotate the clock completely… and manipulate it somehow.

The writer for the guide implied that Gabriel was setting the alarm clock for 2AM for some reason. I think what he’s doing is finding out what time it was set for. It’s still really, really weird that Larry would bother to set an alarm clock for 2AM when it’s like, 6PM right now. Also, shout-outs to that artifacting on the left side of the screen.

Gabriel then accidentally drops the coat hanger, ensuring that Larry will know someone’s been here. Now, would you believe this is only the halfway point for this update? We still have a TON of stuff to do.

Back at the hotel, Lily and Emilio bump into each other. By the way, the guide I’m using is wrong on the point values - I only figured it out here because when I checked I was two points ahead of where the guide said I should be.

I’m positive it has something to do with talking to Larry, because the points counter matched when I saved the game after doing the part with the bodies.

Emilio goes back to sitting down, which blocks us from doing something in that area.

Before we go upstairs to see Grace, we have to do one thing with Jean here.

I cut out a good… ten lines of dialog where Jean talks about how horrible the murders were.

By the way, what Emilio is blocking us from… are the drinking glasses Wilkes and Buchelli were using earlier. The response from Gabriel when I tried to fingerprint them anyway was… interesting.

Could it be because he’s the Wandering Jew?

We have one more stop to make downstairs, and that’s to the phone room, where we need to call the Prince again.

The ellipses are bits where the voiceacting goes silent.

Hopefully by soon he means “within the next time segment”. I feel like the game is only just starting to pick up and we’re more than halfway through it by this point. The point counter isn’t exactly accurate for progress.

This game is rapidly turning into Seinfeld. I’m half-expecting Mosely to start offering Gabriel a Snapple.

This cutscene is on the long side, so I’m going to trim it as much as possible. I kind of wish the game had done a better job keeping the time segments roughly even.

First up we’ve got the Priory of Sion. There is a “real” Priory of Sion…it was a hoax made in the 50s by a guy named Pierre Plantard. Plantard’s supposed theory involves Rennes-le-Chateau (which is an actual town in France) being the home to the “holy grail”. We’ll get into that in a bit, but know that most of the grail/treasure theories presented in this game are basically taken straight out of Plantard’s bullshit.

Weirdly enough, Plantard used this to register the Priory of Sion as a business or something so he could put out a newsletter critiquing the local government. Also, if you Google him you will find a TON of sites that still believe his shit.

Grace also explains that the Freemasons are a second Templar offshoot. I’m not entirely sure what wacky conspiracy theory bullshit site Jane Jensen got this from. What I didn’t know is that apparently, the secret handshake thing is something they do in real life, which doesn’t surprise me because the Freemasons are a bunch of old white guys LARPing.

Basically, the game is just taking Plantard’s theory and slapping the Freemasons into it, only they’re not LARPers.

Chateau de Serres is our last stop in this update, but we still have a little bit more to ask about, including the meat of Plantard’s bullshit. I do want to show this off though.

You can sort of tell that Tim Curry and whoever it is that’s voicing Mosely this time around were kinda fed up with this BS.

Of these, Hardcastle and McCormick is the only one I hadn’t heard of. It’s a TV show that ran before I was even born, and sounds like it was pretty dumb.

Now, back to Plantard and his bullshit.

This is also ripped right out of Plantard. If this sounds at all like The Da Vinci Code to you, that’s because Dan Brown ALSO used the whole Priory thing for that. In fact, most of the articles written about the Priory hoax were done after The Da Vinci Code, because so many people were convinced it was real.

Unfortunately, I’ve also seen it used in a lot of racist conspiracy theories.

Gonna skip ahead a bit.

Oh look, there’s Plantard again. He did, in fact, claim to be descended from the Merovingians.

There’s also a part I couldn’t find a good place to fit:

This is pretty much the crux of the whole Priory hoax. I’m not sure if Sauniere was a real person or not (in the game he’s the abbot who founded the church that Arnaud runs) but the idea is that the Templars found a genealogy chart in the Temple of Solomon which had the descendants of Jesus written down on it and then hid it in France.

You might notice that Mosely left something on the table, and by now I hope that you know what we’re going to do with it.

This one kinda sucks because unlike every other fingerprinting session in the game, Gabriel won’t tell you when you’ve highlighted the print enough to put it on the tape.

Obviously because there is going to be a second Big Bullshit Puzzle at some point involving matching fingerprints and license plate numbers. I don’t actually know this, but I’ve been suspecting it for a while.

Gabriel then automatically deposits the print on the table. We COULD do some more tedious database management, but… we need to go downstairs again first.

Just gotta fingerprint this glass, and…

… How the fuck do you know that just from memory? Gabriel isn’t even carrying the print around anymore.

No, what we need is THIS glass.

And NOW we get to to tedious database management! I’ll spare you. Honestly, this session isn’t as bad because there’s only two items we have: the tape from Buchelli and Wilkes’s fingerprint.

Speaking of that tape…

Well, that all but confirms that Buchelli is working for the Vatican. How much do you want to bet he’s here to find and destroy the genealogy records?

Now that we’ve done all that, there’s a new function in SIDNEY we need to use.

Sidney features a fully functional fake ID maker. You’ll notice up on top that there’s five categories.

What we need is this one, though there’s a couple of other options that are… pretty out there.

Yeah, I’ll just go with the first one. The other options for Reporter are freelance, a local paper in New Orleans, and…

I was actually a reporter at a shitty local newspaper for a year. It took them almost a year just to print me some business cards. They arrived the day before I quit.

And of course, we’re not going to use it. Instead, we have to go back to Blanchefort. I swear I’m not re-using images.

Eventually, Estelle will come by on her bike. This is Estelle, by the way. The game didn’t do a very good job of explaining it, but Lily is the crazy lady in the sunglasses.

This is a new location that’s simply referred to as “Lady Howard and Estelle’s Site”.

I feel like a lot of the events in this game don’t really make sense. This is one of them. Lily is apparently so traumatized from seeing the bodies that she’s locked in her room, and Estelle is… out in the middle of the French countryside looking at a rock.

That’s some grammar right there.

Estelle won’t tell us too much more, but their motivation is pretty obvious: Lily wants to buy her house back, and thinks the treasure is going to give her enough money to do that. Of course, she doesn’t know the treasure is genealogical records.

Our final stop this update is back at Chateau de Serres.

We don’t even have to use the ID we made - as long as it’s in our inventory, the option shows up.

The fact that his first name is Excelsior makes me think he’s a douche in addition to being probably a vampire.

This part is where the other two mystery points came from - I kept track and up until this spot, I was only two points ahead of the guide.

Red… like BLOOD? Because I think it’s a rule that any French winemaker has to be a vampire. See: Witcher 3 Blood and Wine.

This reminds me of when I worked as a reporter and had to cover high school sports.

I’m going to guess that there is no way in hell that wine isn’t laced with blood. This is going to be Mystery of the Druids all over again.

They spend like six lines discussing the murders. Montreaux claims the constable called him and told him about them.

I like how in this age of… a full year after Google… Gabriel couldn’t have at least looked up some stuff about wine tasting.

To progress, we have to ask him about viticulture three times, about the murder, and about the holy grail.

I’m sure by “vines” he means “human prisoners”.

He’s not exactly subtle about it, but he’s talking about eugenics.

Only Sierra’s advanced graphics engine could have given us this face which is half “I just dropped acid and now I’m tripping balls” and half “I’m an idiot”.

The way Tim Curry says it, it kind of implies that Gabriel doesn’t actually drink the wine.

And here’s where they hit you right over the head with it.

This exchange honestly made me laugh a little.

Yep, more conspiracy bullshit. Let’s just ignore that and move on.

That one episode of Dexter’s Lab with the dub from a party at the production studio where everyone swore a lot. 4chan spent years looking for that and I remember Cartoon Network re-airing it but it was the original dub and not the swear one.

Or a place where I can finally do an LP of Monster Girl Quest. Or a portal to an alternate dimension where Ni no Kuni 2 never happened.

Okay I get it, you’re a fucking vampire!

I also went ahead and asked him about himself and the other topics that aren’t necessary. I think that’s where the extra 2 points came from. The only highlight from that is that Montreaux is also a misogynist.

Yep, I’m just gonna stroll on right back to the hotel room and end this segment, thanks.

Does being a vampire count as being in a secret society?

Shot down in flames.

Wait, what the fuck is that thing? What’s wrong with your face? WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOUR FAAAAAACE?

Next time, we’ll be Grace and do more tedious database management in a second long update.

Points Breakdown:

Previous Update: 380 points

Spied on Madeline with the glass: 2 points (382)
Spied on Estelle/Lily with the glass: 2 points (384)
Talked to Wilkes in the lobby: 2 points (386)
Recorded Buchelli’s phone call: 7 points (393)
Talked to Arnaud: 2 points (395)
Looked at the tire tracks behind the bike in the Devil’s Armchair parking lot: 2 points (397)
Found the clearing with the Scots’s car in it: 2 points (399)
Took tire rubbing from the Scots’s car: 2 points (401)
Met Mosely at the Devil’s Armchair: 4 points (405)
Examined the bodies: 2 points (407)
Found the execution site: 5 points (412)
Tripped balls looking at the indentations in the ground near the bloodstains: 4 points (416)
Talked to Larry Chester: 8 points (424)
The Two Mystery Points: 2 points (426)
Used the hanger to fuck with Larry’s alarm clock: 5 points (431)
Saw Emilio and Estelle in the lobby: 2 points (433)
Asked Jean for a 2 AM wake up call: 2 points (435)
Called Prince James: 5 points (440)
Talked to Grace about wacky conspiracy bullshit: 10 points (450)
Got Mosely’s fingerprint: 2 points (452)
Got Wilkes’s fingerprint: 2 points (454)
Database Management and also making a fake ID: 5 points (459)
Translated the tape from Buchelli: 3 points (462)
Followed Estelle from Blanchefort to her dig site: 2 points (464)
Talked to Estelle: 4 points (468)
Showed the fake ID to Montreaux’s butler: 5 points (473)
Talked to Montreaux: 6 points (479)
The Two Other Mystery Points: 2 points (481)

Total Score: 481 / 965 (49.8%)

I don’t know for sure that there’s actually a total of 965 points anymore, because the guide doesn’t account for those four mystery points anywhere. I think it might be a thing the guide author stuck in to stop people stealing his guide - if they didn’t know about the mystery points you could easily spot it if they stole it.

EDIT: I found another guide that confirms the max score is in fact 965 points. The guide author on GameFAQs misses the extra points, which are from completing Larry’s dialog tree and from completing Montreaux’s dialog tree. Hopefully, I haven’t missed anything along the way.

[Timrod]

Welcome to the last time segment of Day 2. Are you ready for some more tedious Dan Brown bullshit? I hope so! Just a warning: this update will contain brief depictions of sexual harassment.

We’re Grace again, and it’s time to… do a bunch of tedious shit with SIDNEY.

First, we want to go out into the hallway, where Estelle and Lily have left a tray of glassware.

This is mostly so that Grace can get a glass for spying on people the same way Gabriel did.

Next up is the dining room. From this point on, the theme of this time segment is: do a bunch of shit in SIDNEY until the game stops you, watch an event, then do more shit in SIDNEY.

/r/-relationships: “Me (40-someodd year old M) can’t understand why my friend’s not-girlfriend (30-someodd F) keeps trying to date him instead of a nice guy like me!”

I like how Buchelli is just kinda sitting there.

I feel like Mosely would have more luck with women if he, I dunno, turned that shirt in to the Hague for prosecution. By the way, someone find me that fucking shirt!

Yeah, at the local Interpol branch interrogating him about the murders.

Grace, having had enough of this shit, leaves the hotel. What we’re about to do isn’t exactly intuitive, but I think the developers kind of suspected you’d either take the Darkseed 2 approach and just check every location every time something happens or use the hint system.

If we go to the museum, there’s… something on the door. It’s very easy to miss - in fact, I had to finagle the camera just to be able to get a good screenshot of it.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. We should’ve fingerprinted the envelope before we touched it. In fact, we have to pick it up first.

Ideally, you’re supposed to read through the entire thing for hints on what to do, but on my screen that’s almost impossible because of how stretched out everything is.

The next thing we need to do is go to the church. This is also kind of counterintuitive, because if we were to do what we’re about to do as Gabriel (and I’ve tried it), he won’t do it.

Inside the church is a stack of pamphlets, right near where Arnaud was sitting when Gabriel first met him. We need one of these.

The important clue here is under #3. Remember the names of those churches.

We also need to talk to Arnaud to get an idea of just what it is we’re supposed to do.

Basically, the four statues are special. I think that’s kind of a given.

Remember this bit about the “sunrise line” as well.

That’s all we really need out of him. I did finish the dialog tree just to make sure there were no points involved, but it’s not much. Anyway,what’s important here are the four churches with the weird Magdalene statues and the “sunrise line.”

Back in SIDNEY, we have to scan in a whole bunch of shit - Montreaux’s fingerprint, the print off the Serpent Rouge envelope, the diagram of the symbols on the cult robes in Montreaux’s attic, and the “sum” note from Emilio.

When we open up the suspect list, it’s automatically set to Mosely’s new listing. The game adds his print automatically - but doesn’t add his license plate, which is worth a point.

Now what we need to do is use the “analyze” tool on the two parchments from Estelle and Lily. Instead of just, I dunno, showing us what we need to see, the game makes us jump through a few dumb hoops.

When we hit “extract anomalies”, this pops up. I pity whichever intern at Sierra had to draw this, because god that must’ve sucked.

It’s insinuating that Dagobert II’s tomb is where the treasure is. Dagobert II was a Merovingian king, and is one of the main parts of Pierre Plantard’s stupid conspiracy - supposedly, he was one of the founders of the Priory of Sion.

View Geometry gives us… this. I’m not entirely sure what it means, but it’s probably something we’re going to have to come back to later. This entire thing seems like Glenn Beck with a chalkboard levels of stupid… though I don’t know if I’d have said that if I had played this in 1999, before The Da Vinci Code was even written.

We can also analyze the second parchment.

The game makes the dialup modem noise right here. Remember dialup? I do. It was hell.

Wait a second. Blue apples? The crazy old lady in Montreaux’s wine cellar was talking about those. I assumed Google Translate was just off and that they were talking about grapes, but no. Shepherdess no Temptation sounds like a song Kiryu would do karaoke to in Yakuza, or alternatively one of those prototype SNES games that existed for like two weeks in 1991.

The map part of this is probably the worst part. It’s not hard, it’s just really tedious.

The first thing we need to do is enter points on the map. Remember the “sunrise line”? Arnaud said it goes from the church in Rennes-le-Chateau to Blanchefort. Let’s enter that in.

The controls for map mode are not great. Basically, you use the right side as a coarse focus, and a zoomed-in view of whatever you’ve clicked on will show up on the left.

When we put a second dot on Blanchefort and hit the button, the game puts a line between them that stretches all the way to Arques, which I don’t think is a place in the game. Now, remember those three churches?

We need to put a second dot on RLC…

Another here, on Coustaussa…

And then one at each of the other two. Unfortunately, just doing this isn’t enough to get us points. The game will suggest drawing a shape, so let’s do that.

The shapes we have all came from those two parchments. What we want is a circle, just like on the second parchment.

We then have to manually resize it. I got lost on this for a bit, but you accomplish that by clicking the circle on the right side.

Once we do this, the game plays a clock noise in the background to let you know time is passing. We’re still not done with SIDNEY.

I’m not entirely sure why we had to see that, but whatever. There’s a scene shortly after this with Buchelli and Emilio where Buchelli offers him a drink… but I’m not entirely sure why it’s there.

You’d think, given how we got Wilkes’s fingerprint, that this would be our opportunity to fingerprint Emilio, but you’d be wrong. I’ll show you later.

We have to now go back to SIDNEY and look up three terms: Quaternity, St. Michael, and Pythagoras.

I don’t know exactly what the point of looking up the first two terms is, but the important concept here is the idea of “squaring a circle”.

Unfortunately, merely drawing a square isn’t going to cut it. We have to rotate it, but we don’t know at what angle. Due to the fact that Rennes-le-Chateau apparently has the same time issues Lordran does, the clock starts ticking again after we do this.

If we go back downstairs, Lily is busy trying to recruit people into playing bridge, despite Estelle telling her that’s probably not the best idea.

Wait… Wilkes isn’t at the hotel? I figured everyone was.

I obviously know the answer to this because it’s at the end of this update, but at the time I figured this was going to turn into Dagger of Amon Ra where we find Wilkes dead somewhere.

Emilio joins though, and drops his water glass, which he is clearly holding onto. With his hand.

You thinking what I’m thinking?

I don’t remember if I showed it or not, but if we tried fingerprinting the picture of Jesus in Emilio’s room the same thing happens. However, I’d be willing to bet that Emilio was the one who left the copy of Le Serpent Rouge on the door of the museum - seeing as we have everyone else’s fingerprints.

No, what we need to do is go back to the church. See that freaky statue there? That’s the thing in the title card for this segment. It’s supposed to be a statue of Asmodeus, which is a weird thing to find in a church. What we need to do is interact with this badly-compressed texture above it.

You’re supposed to put a point on each of the angels hands - the ones that aren’t at their sides.

Back in SIDNEY, we first need to draw another line. This one goes from Chateau de Serres to the Paris Meridian - specifically, to the spot where the circle crosses the Meridian.

Then we need to rotate the square so that one of the edges touches that new line. Now, there’s just one more thing we need to do… but if we do it, it’ll end the time segment immediately and we’d be missing out on several things. In fact, I may have had to re-record this entire segment a third time just so I didn’t miss this part.

Edit: A FOURTH time because fuck this fucking segment! If you try to sequence break it (by doing the angel statue thing in the church on your first visit or drawing the circle too early) the game bugs out and doesn’t give you full points.

We first need to look up three more terms:

We also need to try and analyze the symbols from Montreaux’s cult robes. Unfortunately, SIDNEY won’t just give us the answers - it’ll email us, which is the source of the gamebreaking email bug a few segments from now.

Finally, we have to translate the “Sum note” from Emilio.

To end the time segment, we need to put an 8x8 grid into the square.

Then we get sent back into highly compressed cutscene land.

Well, at least Wilkes is still alive.

The way the models in these cutscenes look reminds me a lot of Neo Turf Masters, where all of the characters have the exact same body just recolored and with a different head.

We saw this map as Gabriel when we came in here through the dumbwaiter system. Why Gabriel didn’t just take it and scan it into SIDNEY is a mystery.

Also I like how Grace just changes into an outfit that’s just a recolor of her old one.

I can count the number of polygons in Grace’s butt on one hand. In fact, I can probably count the number of polygons in Grace’s entire model on one hand.

From the looks of things, there is one very large, very phallic cavern underneath this part of France. Who wants to bet that’s where our vampires are, in this giant earthen Tenga cup?

Before Wilkes can do anything, Grace judo throws him like he’s made of paper.

Whoever did the subtitling on this part did not do a very good job with the timing.

Shot the fuck down.

And with that, we go to… is that 2001: A Space Odyssey playing on top of a really low-res cutscene of some guy doing the monkey next to Gabriel and Mosely? I want to see this shit.

Points Breakdown:

Previous Update: 481 points

I have no idea how accurate any of these point values are anymore, so what I’m going to do is just list them the way the guide has them. I know how much we had at the start, and somehow we were less ahead versus the list I have than we were at the start.

Got the glass - 2 points
Spied on Gabriel and Mosely in the dining room - 5 points
Got the LSR envelope - 2 points
Fingerprinted the envelope - 2 points
Got the pamphlet from the church - 2 points
Talked to Arnaud - 4 points
Database Management - 6 points
Internet Searches - 6 points (6 x 1 each)
Analyzed Parchment #1 - 6 points
Analyzed Parchment #2 - 8 points
Drew the first line on the map from RLC to Blanchefort - 5 points
Drew the circle connecting the four churches in the pamphlet - 5 points
Saw Gabriel and Mosely leave with Madeline - 2 points
Drew the square on the map - 5 points
Saw Lily invite everyone to bridge - 2 points
Traced the angel statue in the church - 2 points
Tilted the square correctly on the map - 7 points
Drew the grid on the map - 5 points
Either lost two mystery points or hell if I know - (-2) points

Total: 559/965 points (57.9%)

[Timrod]

I hope you’re ready for the shortest update in this LP! Welcome to 2AM, Day 3. By the way, absolutely NOTHING in that title card happens in this time segment. Also, fair warning: the cutscene at the end of this update contains content related to sexual assault. Nothing in this time segment is at all important apart from the one item we pick up, so you can probably skip this one if that’s something you don’t want to see.

We start as Gabriel again, outside of the hotel room.

If we go downstairs, Simone is sleeping. That can’t possibly be good for her upper back and shoulders. Also, if she’s asleep… who sent us the wake-up call?

Now, you’re probably thinking that the first and only thing we’re going to do is go to Larry Chester’s house, follow him, spy a lot, and then go back to the hotel. But… there’s a source of points that I have no idea how you could possibly figure out exists.

We actually want to start by heading to L’Homme Mort. If you’ll remember, this is where we saw Mosely and Madeline bump into each other back before this game turned into a geometry management simulator.

Mosely is out here digging a hole by himself. It’s like he’s ASKING for whoever killed the Scottish guys to come kill him and bury him in his pre-dug grave. You’d figure that if two guys who were probably armed got brutally murdered people would… you know, not go out alone at night.

I also have absolutely zero idea what the logic was supposed to be that would bring you here, apart from just checking every location.

I’d like to think that Grace told Mosely about how his shirt is a war crime and he’s trying to bury it before the ICC can get to it.

There’s one other thing that doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense here if you think about it. Grace spent presumably several hours with Mosely before falling asleep. Why didn’t she tell him about the whole geometry thing she did?

Actually, wasn’t Mosely there when Grace and Gabriel were talking about how the treasure was probably the holy grail, and how the grail was actually just a metaphor for the birth records from the Temple of Solomon? I dunno, I think the writers and designers for this game were just kinda phoning it in at this point. They probably didn’t expect anyone would get this far.

The worst part is I can practically hear Archer’s voiceactor saying this.

There’s nothing we actually need here, other than the points.

Now that we’re at Larry’s, there’s another pixel hunt. You’d think we’d just go up to the window, but no.

Instead, you have to pan the camera to the window, click on Larry, and “sneak” to him.

Here’s another plot hole: why Larry even bothered setting his alarm clock if he’s up and about already. Moreover, why is his alarm clock in his office and not in his bedroom?

Larry heads out with a shovel and… something under his arm.

He then goes off to a separate screen behind his house with it. I honestly thought he was going to die here, but he doesn’t.

The camera angle for this is definitely not the best, but you can see him burying something by those rocks…

and if we look down there, there’s an off-colored patch of dirt.

I don’t know why they bothered to do this when it’s already been shown that Gabriel can fit pretty much anything into his jeans, but whatever.

Now, if you’ll remember, I’m pretty sure Sinclair was one of the list of families thought to be descended from the Merovingians and thus may or may not have Jesus blood in them.

And naturally, don’t forget to fingerprint! With this print, we now have fingerprints for every major character except Emilio. We can therefore narrow the list of people who could have taped the copy of Le Serpent Rouge to the museum door down to one person: if it’s not Larry, it’s got to be Emilio.

Unfortunately, Gabriel won’t look at the report, insisting that reading is for Grace. He’s supposed to be a writer by the way.

Also, don’t question how Gabriel managed to dust something for fingerprints at 2AM in pitch darkness.

When we go back for the bike… hey wait, that’s the vampire car! By the way, this area is godawful to navigate at night - thankfully, the game will dump us back at the bike once we leave the area behind Larry’s house.

Naturally, we’d expect to find the vampire car at the house of the guy who totally isn’t a vampire, but unfortunately the gates are closed and there’s no sign of the car. Actually… wait - the garage was locked when we got here the first time. I bet that black sedan is in the garage. The only question is, what were they doing?

Near the end of Montreaux’s driveway is a pair of tire tracks. I don’t think you could find these when Gabriel was here earlier.

No surprise that they belong to the Scottish guys.

That’s all we can do in this time segment. Let’s head back to the hotel.

Meanwhile, in badly-compressed CGI land…

I never thought about it before, but I think this unicorn might actually be a re-used asset from King’s Quest Mask of Eternity.

No, you dipshits! Has Monster Hunter taught you nothing?! You want to plant barrel bombs near Kirin before you go rushing in. It’s free damage!

It’s hard to see what’s happening even in-game, and even when I tried increasing the gamma on the image it still looks like a blocky mess.

That’s it! Cut that fucker’s head off! Bastard carted my hunter enough.

It’s hard to show in stills, but the guy’s face pulsates in a way that could only be rendered in a late-90s blocky cutscene.

Ladies and gentlemen, furries. In case you can’t tell what’s going on, the guy grew a unicorn horn. I have a theory that says that everything that has to do with furries eventually ends in vore, and I think this is just proving me right.

It must really suck if you’re like, a bear furry though. Or a hippo furry. Actually, what if you’re one of those furries that’s a furry of a single-celled organism that can’t technically bleed, which I presume exist because of course they do. It’s furries.

I’m not entirely sure where this shot came from, but whatever.

Oh fuck, an actual vampire! This is the first one we’ve seen in… almost 2/3 of the game!

You ever just get your leg stuck in a couch? By the way, the reason the vampire isn’t just killing Gabriel is because Gabriel has the Schattenjager talisman, which as far as I understands it protects against most supernatural bullshit.

The vampire then does something kinda… questionable.

Gabriel finally gets up. The game doesn’t do a cut here for some reason, but the implication is that this is just a dream… layered on another dream.

I’m sure the fact that he just put the talisman on her will in no way relate to a dumb bullshit puzzle later on, because I’m positive there’s going to be a puzzle to get it back.

Points Breakdown:

Previous Update: 559/965 points

Talked to Mosely at L’Homme Mort: 2 points (561)
Watched Larry bury the report: 5 points (566)
Dug the report up: 4 points (570)
Fingerprinted the report cover: 2 points (572)
Saw the black sedan drive by: 2 points (574)
Compared the tire pattern to the one in Montreaux’s driveway: 2 points (576)

Total: 576/965 points, still 2 points ahead of the guide.

[Timrod]

It’s morning, and I hope everyone’s ready for some GEOMETRY MANAGEMENT! This is starting to feel like we’re on Namek again.

I feel like the fact that almost every chapter starts with Gabriel or Grace entering the hotel room makes this feel like some kind of horrible Dan Brown meets Seinfeld fanfic.

On the end table by the couch are two things we’re going to need.

The first one is Larry’s report. We don’t actually wind up taking it with us, but reading it gets us points so I’m doing it anyway.

The other item is the key to the bike.

Our first stop on today’s godawful geometry management tour is the museum.

Remember the postcard rack that I said I tried to use as Gabriel? Here’s another “puzzle” that makes absolutely no sense. The game has established at this point that SIDNEY is connected to the internet: you hear it dial out when you tell it to analyze the symbols from the cult robes in Montreaux’s attic. Grace could just, I dunno, Altavista those paintings? I think everyone used Altavista back in 1998.

The postcards we need are all on the top rack, but we have to get them individually. I feel like a modern adventure game would just have Grace go “Oh, there’s some postcards on the rack, let me take the ones I need.”

By the way, Grace gets the artist’s name wrong. It’s David Teniers, not David Tenier. There’s actually a version you can zoom in on here:

The Temptation of St. Anthony, David Teniers, the Younger ^ Minneapolis...

My favorite part of that image is the devil going “Hey bro, check out this thot I found” and Saint Anthony is just not having any of it. “Bro, she’s not even that hot.”

The second one is another Teniers painting. By the way, the postcards are about $1.75 each in today’s money. Unfortunately, there’s no big zoomable version I could find of this painting, so you’ll just have to go with one I pulled off Wikipedia.

In this one, St. Peter is all “I don’t even need thots anymore. I trained a crow to steal pies off windowsills and bring them to me. I got all the hot pies I could want, and I only have to give the crow a little. We get this going on scale, and we’ll have a finger in every pie in Mesopotamia.”

St. Anthony, meanwhile, has just come to a revelation that if he puts two beer cans on a hat and runs a straw down the side, he could drink two beers without having to hold them, allowing his hands to be free to hold a third and fourth beer. Later, St. Anthony would go on to invent the keg stand.

The third one is a painting I posted when it first came up, it’s the one with the two guys and the woman daring the third guy to lick a stone pylon.

Back in SIDNEY, we have to add all of the postcards. Weirdly enough, unlike all of the other objects we’ve added to SIDNEY, the postcards do not get removed from Grace’s inventory after the fact.

Here’s Poussin’s “Man About to Lick Pylon”.

Oh look, a Star of David. Geometry management!

I like how they did a really, really bad re-draw of the painting. It kind of reminds me of that one lady who painted over that picture of Jesus. I don’t know why games ask you questions like this when the answer is obviously yes.

The answer here is yes as well. I’m not entirely sure how you’re supposed to figure this out apart from it being the only other thing we’ve ever seen written in Latin and the fact that Emilio wrote it near Poussin’s tomb, but…

We want to add “sum” to it. Even though the game tells us there’s an anagram, Grace won’t do anything with it right now.

Next up is Teniers’ “St. Peter presenting the idea of Cryptocurrency to St. Anthony”.

I don’t know much about geometry in art theory, but this seems like a load of bullshit to me.

As you can see for yourself, there’s no text in the real painting. We all know that book was actually St. Anthony’s famous recipe for running cheap vodka through a water filter several times to make it taste like more expensive vodka.

The biggest slap in the face of all this? Hearing that goddamn dialup modem noise again. Also, the fact that SIDNEY was connected to the internet the entire time and could’ve just downloaded these paintings!

God really, really sucks at architecture. Oh, and as for the Temptation of Saint Anthony?

Wow, it’s nothing! It’s almost like this was just added as filler. I don’t know why this picture is different from the one I found, but I’ve seen a couple of different versions of it. I think the one in that big zoomable copy is the original, while these are done by a different artist.

Guess what time it is now? Map management time!

This time, we need to put a spot at Poussin’s Tomb…

And a second one on L’Ermitage.

I have absolutely zero idea how you’re supposed to figure any of this shit out, apart from reading through Le Serpent Rouge a bunch of times and banging your head against the wall until something falls loose.

We need to go outside next, but before we do, there’s a couple of things we need from the hotel and its immediate surroundings. You might not notice it right away (it’s in the screenshot a few up where I started adding the postcards to SIDNEY) but Mosely gave Grace his spare room key. You’d think that after last night it would’ve just been a better idea to let her sleep in there and put Mosely with Gabriel, since Mosely’s room has no windows and also lacks a dumbwaiter.

What we’re looking for is in that pile of laundry right in front of Grace. She won’t actually do anything with it unless we tell her to do so… twice. I HATE IT when games do that.

As it turns out, Mosely also has a GPS unit. We are going to need this for what I’m going to call the Bad Controls Puzzle, coming up later this update.

Once we have that, we need to make a stop at the bike shop for an item we’re not even going to use in this update. I don’t know how this makes any sense, but at this point I’ve learned to just turn my brain off.

Behind the seat of Lily’s bike is a pair of binoculars. They’re almost impossible to see unless you use the “zoom the camera in on this” button because the sidecar blocks them from view. I have absolutely zero idea how the fuck you’re supposed to know this is there, or that you’ll need it.

With that done, our next destination is L’Ermitage, presumably because one of the game’s developers rolled a die and landed on it.

The center of the circle is right at Wilkes’s original dig site.

Now, I don’t know if you can see them, but there’s exactly two white pixels in the cave. This is the only clue you’re probably going to get that there’s something in there. As a reminder, Gabriel would not go into the cave when we were here the first time.

This is our only indication of a couple of things we have to look up on SIDNEY once we get done here. Now, it’s time for… the Bad Controls Puzzle.

First though, we need to take out the postcard with the painting of St. Anthony and St. Peter on it and use it on the rock formation just to the right of the cave.

Next, we need to use the GPS on Grace.

Thus begins the Bad Controls Puzzle. Our objective is to line up Grace with a set of coordinates she wrote down off the map in SIDNEY. The game, to its credit, does give you a copy of those coordinates in your inventory.

However, here’s the problem. We need to be at an EXACT set of values for both longitude and latitude. The game’s movement controls will only activate if the cursor is a certain distance away from Grace, meaning that she’ll skip several… I think that’s hundredths? of a degree with every movement. This “puzzle” basically consists of just moving everywhere you can on the screen. The actual location we’re looking for…

Is basically right in front of the cave.

Grace will draw a mark with her foot, even though as you might notice, the coordinates are a little off.

I have a feeling that you could take these last four screenshots and it’d be pretty accurate to the story of how Gabriel Knight 3 was made.

On our way back to town, we can stop at L’Homme Mort to see Madeline in the hole Mosely dug at 2AM. She’ll complain a lot if we talk to her, so I’m just going to leave that out even though it’s worth points. She really wants to see Mosely so she can complain at him.

We can also run into Buchelli in the hotel’s dining room.

He’s talking about the dead Scottish guys. I cut a couple of lines out because this conversation is largely pointless… except for the fact that we need it to max our score.

Back in SIDNEY, it’s time for more searching and geometry management! There’s three more terms we need to look up and one link we need to click. St. Vincent is the first term.

I feel like Grace is on another level entirely from what the player is. Also shout-outs to that typo, it’s “Israel”.

This page we need to go to for one reason. See that link for “Temple Diagram”? We need to click it.

Guess what that’s probably going to be used for? If you said “More boring geometry management crap” you’re probably right!

And… that’s all of the stuff we have to look up for right now. And wait… an egg? So all those people using the egg avatar on Twitter were just evil spirits or some shit the whole time? That explains a lot.

Next, it’s Geometry Management time! We have to, for reasons I’m entirely too lazy to figure out, put dots on these specific spots on the map.

I THINK the way you’re supposed to figure this out is by using the measurements from Solomon’s temple, but fuck.

Finally, we need to plunk down a hexagram. At this point, the map is so cluttered that it’s almost unusable. You’d think the developers would’ve realized this and made the lines different colors or something.

I’ve long since given up trying to make any sense of any of this shit.

And… that’s it. Next time, we’ll hopefully do something not involving geometry management and hope to god that was the final Grace segment of the game. We’re a bit more than 2/3 of the way through this game now, and like… nothing has happened. Two guys died, there may or may not be a vampire with a baby who is also a furry (the vampire, not the baby, though maybe the baby is a furry fucked if I know) and we did a bunch of dumb shit on a computer.

Points Breakdown:

Previous Update: 576 points

Got the bike keys: 2 points (578)
Read Larry’s report: 2 points (580)
Got the postcards from the Museum: 3 points (583)
DATABASE MANAGEMENT: 19 points (602)
Got into Mosely’s room with his key: 2 points (604)
Got the GPS unit from Mosely’s laundry pile: 4 points (608)
Got the binoculars: 2 points (610)
Found the note in the cave in L’Ermitage: 2 points (612)
Used the postcard on the rock formation: 5 points (617)
Pointed at the rock: 2 points (619)
Bad Controls Puzzle: 4 points (623)
Talked to Madeline and Buchelli: 4 points (627)
Sidney Bullshit: 8 points (635)
GEOMETRY MANAGEMENT: 10 points (645)

Total: 645/965 points (66.8%)

[Timrod]

Well, I have some good news. I found a better point list for the game, and we are on track for a max score run - 645 points is exactly where we should be going into this update. Basically, if you’re going for a max score run, do not use the guides on GameFAQs, they’re shit.

Also… I found out today that there is no speedrun record for Gabriel Knight 3 100%. I think a fitting end to this LP will be setting that record. If you’re interested in doing co-commentary (assuming I can figure out how the hell Voicemeeter works) let me know.

It’s 10AM now, so it’s time for Gabriel to get up.

Oh, shit. And here I was thinking he put the Schattenjager talisman on her and went back to the couch. Also, it somehow does not surprise me that Gabriel Knight prefers briefs.

Grace gives the “Oh shit that’s right, I slept with Gabriel last night, WHY THE HELL DID I DO THAT?!” face.

I think what she’s implying is that Gabriel showers, when I think we all know he hasn’t seen a shower in years.

You know, you’d think it would make sense to have Mosely in on the whole geometry management thing given that two people have died already.

I went ahead and omitted the slur from the subtitles. The game takes place in 1998, so it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out what it is.

The camera deliberately stays here even after the voice line finishes to show Jean and Roxanne going into one of the rooms. This is yet another place we could miss points if we don’t hurry up.

We first want to listen in on them from outside.

You know… maybe leaving Wilkes highly intoxicated wasn’t the best idea.

Still, I feel like the fact that they’re only NOW getting to intrigue is… kind of bad writing. Anyway, the next thing we want to do is barge right into the room. This is another missable source of points because if we wait too long…

Roxanne will leave and close the door behind her. Meanwhile, in the real timeline where I didn’t stop to look at the point guide on my phone because alt-tabbing tends to cause the game to crash:

What we need to do is talk to Roxanne, but to do that we have to make Jean fuck off. Thankfully, he’ll do that on his own after this scene.

Roxanne will head to the storage closet, which is our next goal. Ignore the bad clipping on the sign, that just kinda happens sometimes. I think it’s because the game has two level of detail settings: one for being like three inches from the object, and one for being any further away than that.

Wait, did she just say… yep, he’s vampire food. What’s weird is that they’d have a regular-ass vampire when there was that whole article in SIDNEY about vampires who are basically just people who drink blood to gain power.

Okay, we get it, the vampire went into his window and ate him. The question is… why Wilkes?

Gonna skip ahead a little bit, since it’s more of Gabriel being a lying asshole.

For purposes of the speedrun, we could easily just turn around and leave. There’s no points to be had here - no prints, no evidence.

Our next stop is to Mosely’s room. I can boil what happens in here down to three shots.

Yeah. It’s totally unimportant, but it gets us points.

From this point onward, Larry’s voiceactor does something real weird. He sort of keeps the Vincent Price-sounding accent, but then also switches into a lighter Scottish accent at times. It’s not exactly Tim Curry’s legendary fake-cajun layered on fake-irish from the first game, but it’s pretty good.

Larry doesn’t actually offer us much in the way of real information, just a lot of cryptic bullshit.

He informs us that Montreaux is not a Freemason. Again, I’m cutting out extra lines. This is pretty obvious because I’m sure the Freemasons don’t allow vampires.

I still really don’t understand what Larry was hoping to accomplish by burying the manuscript in the first place.

I don’t really get how Gabriel can say this, given that he… you know… hasn’t read the manuscript at all except for the cover.

You know, the more I think about it, the less sense this situation makes. Larry probably has an internet connection. Even in 1998, sending a Word document isn’t going to be that taxing. Hell, he could’ve put it on a floppy disk and just hid that. There was no reason for him to even print it out!

How do you not even have a backup of it? What was your plan if it rained and the report got ruined?

I’m now realizing that this game makes even less sense than Ni no Kuni 2 did.

I’m starting to wonder if Prince James’s first name is Evan, and his middle name is Pettiwhisker Tildrum.

There’s a separate topic about the throne, but Larry will tell us nothing about it. Probably the throne of King of Underground Conspiracy Bullshit.

Again, he won’t explain what the shit the Freemasons are up to.

This is all we can really do with Larry right now. I have a strange suspicion we’re going to find him dead at some point.

Our next brief stop is at Poussin’s Tomb, where we need to talk to Emilio. He doesn’t say anything important at all, but it counts for points.

Now we need to go back to the hotel. We could go do the big obvious thing and look for Wilkes, but if we did that we’d miss out on points.

Gee, I wonder what Mosely is strolling off with under his arm. Couldn’t be, say, the bloodline report he was clearly interested in and probably just stole from Gabriel’s room. Nah.

How much do you want to bet we’re going to have to save Mosely from the vampires?

While we’re here, we can upload Larry’s print to the system. Strangely, SIDNEY doesn’t update to reflect the fact that Larry’s last name is Sinclair and that he’s Scottish, not British.

NOW we can go find Wilkes. Strangely, he’s not by L’Ermitage, which is kind of where you’d expect him to be given the probably vampire-infested tunnel underneath it. Instead, he’s at L’Homme Mort, probably because of the stupid pun.

The first thing you’ll notice coming in is a surprising number of footprints that just suddenly stop for no reason. You’ll need to examine these before going on ahead, because I think otherwise you don’t get the points for doing so.

Gabriel will automatically move on to find the body.

We then, of course, want to search it. Man, Wilkes really is starting to pixelate. It’s like all the polygons just drained right out of him.

This time, the blood and kneeprints aren’t hard to find. They’re right behind this rock. What I don’t get is why the vampires even bothered to move the body if they weren’t going to hide the bloodstain.

Here’s my best guess on this. Wilkes was the only one who knew about the tunnel - until he told Grace about it. Because he was sitting out with the seismic surveying equipment, it wouldn’t be hard to figure out that he knew about it.

Anyway, that’s over. Time to head back to the hotel. Seriously, that’s about all that happens - Gabriel looks at the body, looks at the blood, then he’s just… done.

Buchelli will pop out of his room to look at Madeline. Humorously enough, I managed to glitch this somehow and Madeline wound up walking two circuits around the second floor before disappearing.

Our final stop is to go see Grace for a recap of the so-far almost nonexistent vampire plot.

There’s more to this dialog but it’s all stuff we already know (Grace talks about Wilkes’s map).

We can then ask about the manuscript. Grace did, in fact, read it. Some of it’s redundant: we already know what the deal with the grail is, for example. Let’s start by asking about the Bloodline.

Oh, uh… they don’t happen to… you know, be unicorn furries? Anyway, I googled the whole unicorn thing and it’s just something they made up for the game - I didn’t know if they had gotten it off Pierre Plantard’s bullshit train or not.

The second I heard “fertile Jesus” I started thinking about this Youtube Poop remix someone did years ago that got taken down by the Mormon church. You just can’t touch Fertile Jesus (literally and figuratively, he’s probably all sticky).

They already filed a DMCA complaint against Grace’s Geocities page where she hosts her mashups.

I wouldn’t say it shows anything so much as a unicorn and a lion both grossed out that they’re apparently involved in some kind of weird sex competition while a smaller lion on top judges, but sure.

The one other new thing we want to ask about is the throne that Larry was talking about.

One of the other topics mentions briefly that Prince James basically has the most Jesus blood in him of any of the unicorn furries.

What is she, Nathan Drake?

So yes, we are now at a point where a French Freemason is using Pierre Plantard’s dumbass hoax to become king of Europe by finding the Holy Grail and proving that he has the most Jesus in him of anyone. He’s 51% pure Jesus by volume and he’s damn well going to use it. Also vampires kidnapped his baby and I’m guessing it’s because if they kill him off, they have control of the most Jesus in the world or some dumb shit.

What I’m saying is that as incoherent as Ni no Kuni 2’s plot was, this manages to somehow be WORSE.

Suddenly, we can hear a car in the background.

Oh man. Is Gabriel finally going to get his comeuppance and be forced to ride the shitty moped?

And that’s it for this update. The new guide I found was… a little less spaced-out than the one on GameFAQs, so I’ll be able to tell you that next time… we’re in for more Geometry Management.

Points Breakdown:

Previous Update: 645 points

Eavesdropped on Roxanne and Jean: 2 points (647)
Busted into room to confront Roxanne and Jean: 2 points (649)
Got into Wilkes’s room: 2 points (651)
Talked to Mosely about Grace: 2 points (653)
Talked to Larry Sinclair: 6 points (659)
Talked to Emilio: 2 points (661)
Watched Mosely leave with the manuscript: 2 points (663)
Database Management: 2 points (665)
Found the footprints at L’Homme Mort: 2 points (667)
Found Wilkes’s dead body: 5 points (672)
Found the letter in Wilkes’s pocket: 2 points (674)
Found the execution site: 2 points (676)
Saw Madeline leave with the manuscript: 2 points (678)
Talked to Grace for a recap: 8 points (686)

Total: 686/965 points (71%)

[Timrod]

We’re Grace again, and you know what that means! It’s GEOMETRY MANAGEMENT TIME! But not only this geometry management time, it’s also the biggest load of horseshit in this game. I’d say this would probably be worse than even the Big Bullshit Puzzle, if only because of how temperamental the game is about it and how bad the controls are.

Remember when I said that there was a game-breaking glitch involving the email menu in SIDNEY? This is where it shows up.

If you’ll recall, a few updates ago we had to look up the floor plan for the Temple of Solomon. Strangely, SIDNEY somehow got to this before the symbols on the cult robes from Montreaux’s house, which we analyzed well before that. Reading this email sets an event flag that allows us to progress with the geometry management.

Man, God really sucks at architecture. “Okay Solomon, you’re going to build a rectangle that is actually, get this, two squares and a rectangle. It’ll totally survive anything.”

Wikipedia had this picture of what the temple probably looked like, and… yeah, I’m not really seeing it. It looks like pretty much every government building I’ve ever seen.

Now what we need to do is draw in the floor plan of the temple on the map. You can see the green dots where I put the lines in - they’re not precise because the map controls SUCK, but you can see that it follows the straight lines between the top and bottom of the hexagon in the center of the star.

Next, we need to stick a point right in the middle of the top square.

Grace even adds a label so we know it’s THE SITE. However, this isn’t the dickish part. This puzzle is bad, sure, but I’m pretty sure you have to look up the Temple of Solomon to progress - so at least you have something to go off of.

This puzzle, however, is what I call the Bigger Bullshit Puzzle. Grace will look at Le Serpent Rouge and determine that this is an anagram for something, but will give you exactly zero hints as to what. The game gives you the option of trying to “anagram parse” the text earlier, but Grace won’t do it.

Once you click the parser, you’re treated to a roughly 90-second animation of SIDNEY looking up anagrams.

By the end, we have this huge fucking list of words, and need to put certain words in the “phrase building area” to figure out the riddle.

This is not a short list of words.

The phrase we’re looking for is “Arcam Dei Tango”, which translates to English as “Tomb God I Touch” which sounds like it came from one of those early 2000s anime translations where they just went as literal as possible to the point where nothing makes sense. I have absolutely NO IDEA how you’re supposed to figure this out, other than that the letters at the top will darken to show which ones you’ve used already.

Now, you might think we’re done with geometry management, and you’d be wrong. After that last bullshit puzzle, we then get to deal with the game’s extremely temperamental map parser. See this noose-shaped thing outside of the circle? This is the “red serpent”. We need to highlight it.

It took me about four attempts to get this to work. I think the game doesn’t like it if you use too many or too few points, and it also doesn’t like it if you don’t put them far enough apart or too close together. Basically, this puzzle sucks.

Once we’re done with that, we can leave the room to see Buchelli walking off with what is probably the same newspaper that Mosely had earlier.

We can also go to the dining room and listen to Estelle and Lily gripe about nothing. It’s worth points, but I’m not even going to bother posting it.

What we need to do now is go to the map. You’ll notice that there’s two new locations: the Southwest Arm of the Hexagram and the Northeast Arm of the Hexagram (top-right). We need to head Southwest first.

Way the hell up in the corner of the map (seriously, what is it with this game and hiding stuff in corners)…

Is a little cave with a red thing on it.

Okay, so now we have at least some reason why Wilkes was killed. Probably got too close to the secret vampire lair. Now, you’re never going to guess what we need to do next.

Surprise! It’s the Bad Controls Puzzle!

Thankfully, this one is different. As long as we use it here, the game will give us a pass. Not like the first time where you could be standing in the right spot and the game wouldn’t give it to you.

It’s not exactly obvious what you have to do, but you need to use the shovel on the rocks.

Oh look, another mystery letter.

Hmm. It’s not like it could be… say… an immortal Jewish guy?

From here, we need to head to the other point of the hexagram.

I’m not saying it’s the Wandering Jew, but it’s the Wandering Jew.

Next on today’s agenda is visiting the “holy of holies”, which has its own spot on the map yet brings you to the Blanchefort parking lot if you try to go there.

This is because it’s across this bridge from the parking lot. Note that you can absolutely see this earlier, but Gabriel/Grace won’t go there.

Ahh, out of the crappily-textured hills and into Call of Duty. You can probably already see what we’re here for.

There’s another Bad Controls Puzzle here, and this time I didn’t know exactly where the point was so I spent a few minutes dicking around trying to find it. It’s right here, in this corner across from where the note is. I honestly was afraid it’d ruin the speedrun.

Just like last time, she draws an X with her foot. I haven’t counted, but I think we’ve used the shovel on things more than we have used any other item.

Our next location is right back across the street, specifically at the ruins on top of the mountain. There’s exactly one reason we’ve ever come here, and that’s exactly what we’re doing.

The game’s a bit finicky about it, but there’s an orange rock in the distance we can zoom in on.

Now, from what I understand, getting the license plate numbers is not mandatory. I know this because the guide I’m using now mentions that there’s a few spots where if you didn’t get one of them, you get another shot at it. I’m guessing this line doesn’t play if you don’t have Buchelli’s license plate.

We can also zoom in on Madeline watching us from the observation tower, but this isn’t worth any points.

With that, we’ve unlocked the “orange rock” as a location to visit.

If we go ahead one screen and pan around the rock, you can see a patch of dirt that is WAY more visible than the one Larry made burying his manuscript. And yes, in case you’re wondering…

Buchelli was enough of a dipshit to bury it. Not that he could’ve known that Larry did the same thing, of course.

Just like the last time we picked up this report, we have to fingerprint it. This time, there’s three prints to take - and if you were paying attention throughout this update, you’ll know that one set belongs to Mosely, one set belongs to Madeline, and one set belongs to Buchelli. What I don’t think the game designers understood is that in reality, this would be a contaminated mess of prints: Larry’s, Gabriel’s, Grace’s, and the three other people who touched it.

\Moreover, what are the chances that the one fingerprint left on the report cover is from the same finger we have a print from?

We then need to make a visit to Estelle and Lily’s camp before going back to the hotel to do more TEDIOUS DATABASE MANAGEMENT. This IS worth points, and even though it seems like total bullshit, it’s worth points. You might ask why - and the answer has to do with that object behind Estelle’s elbow. You can probably guess at this point why we need it, but we can’t get it right now.

I think the point is, the game is trying to show that we need it.

Back at the hotel, we finally meet one of the major players in this plot that has been essentially on the backburner since the start of the game.

Meet Prince James, the guy who has had a grand total of maybe five minutes of his voice being on the other end of a phone up until this point.

I’m not sure, because this time segment ends shortly after this part, but I THINK the Villa Bethania is in Rennes-les-Bains, which is I think the one location on the map we’ve never visited.

And now, it’s DATABASE MANAGEMENT! This time, we get to not only wait for the “scanning item” animation…

But once we’re done, we have to go to the “Suspects” screen to compare them. The fun part about this is that there’s a ten-second animation of a red box moving around the image, and then it goes through each character in the order they’re listed in SIDNEY. This means that Mosely (near the bottom) will take several additional seconds even if you have his profile up, as I did here.

Anyway, the first print is Buchelli’s.

Second is Madeline’s.

And of course, third is Mosely’s. So yes, as far as I can tell, this “puzzle” is the entire reason we’ve been collecting fingerprints. I’m honestly kind of disappointed - the devs thought to put in stuff like the Big Bullshit Puzzle and the Anagram Parser, but didn’t think to make a bullshit puzzle around comparing everyone’s fingerprints manually. For shame!

For a second I thought it was going to break into Iron Maiden’s “Number of the Beast” and I’m disappointed that it didn’t.

And, that’s the end of this time segment. I’ll just drop a small hint about what happens at the beginning of the next time segment, which is infinitely more interesting than any of the bullshit that has happened in this one. In case you’re wondering, I had to play ahead a bit because the game crashes my PC if I try to quit out via the task manager and there was no way to quit the game until after a cutscene.

Join me next time for Update 15: A Big Guy (For You).

Points Breakdown:

Previous Update: 686 points

Read the gamebreaking email: 2 points (688)
GEOMETRY MANAGEMENT: 35 points (723)
Watched Buchelli steal the manuscript from Madeline’s room: 2 points (725)
Listened to Estelle/Lily complain in the dining room: 2 points (727)
Found Wilkes’s handkerchief at the Southwestern point of the star: 2 points (729)
The Bad Controls Puzzle, Part 2: 7 points (736)
Got the note inside the cave: 2 points (738)
Picked up the note on the fence at the Northeastern point of the star: 2 points (740)
Picked up the note at the Holy of Holies: 2 points (742)
The Bad Controls Puzzle, Part 3: 4 points (746)
Spied on Buchelli burying Larry’s manuscript: 5 points (751)
Found Larry’s Manuscript (again): 4 points (755)
Fingerprinted the Manuscript (again): 6 points (761)
Talked to Estelle at her dig site: 2 points (763)
Met Prince James: 2 points (765)
DATABASE MANAGEMENT: 6 points (771)

Total: 771/965 points (~79.9%)

[Timrod]

With just three time segments left in the game (counting this one), we still haven’t found any vampires first-hand and haven’t gotten much closer to finding out where the kidnapped baby is.

This time segment is actually fairly short points-wise, but long in that it has several cutscenes in it.

Now, if you read my Dagger of Amon Ra LP, you’ll probably remember the part at the end where the coroner quizzed us on how well we understood the mystery and we basically just said fuck it and pinned all the blame on the Irish. This segment is essentially Gabriel Knight 3’s equivalent to that.

What we’re being asked to do here is to recall the chain of people we saw take the manuscript.

Our options are, from left to right: Buchelli, Madeline, Emilio, the Hotel staff, Mosely, and “I don’t know”. If you’ve been reading the LP, the answers should be obvious. The first one is Mosely.

You think Mosely’s smug right now? You haven’t seen shit yet.

There’s a second pop-up here, but it’ll be obvious which options I’m picking. By the way, this entire recap is worth 20 points. You can get it wrong and still continue (I think) but 20 points is a huge chunk out of a max score run.

I don’t even know why they bother to ask you this when you have to have found the manuscript to progress.

I hope you’re ready for the major revelation of this game. I’m not even talking about the whole Pierre Plantard Priory of Sion conspiracy bullshit train.

Dr. Pavel, I’m CIA.

No one cared who I was… until I put on the Schattenjager Talisman.

: “If I took that mask off, would you die?”

: “It would be…”

You’re a big guy!

: “For you!”

Yes, I just spent far too long making these. No, I regret nothing.

You know, maybe I should’ve just kept on going with that.

So, when I first saw the CIA line, I figured Mosely must be joking - making an explanation so bullshit no one’s going to bother questioning it with all the other dumb shit happening. Nope! The actual, canon explanation for why Mosely is here is that he somehow got hired by the CIA.

Oh wow, I actually called it. Gabriel’s really crashing this plane, with no survivors.

Now, I think the fun part about this is that the only way Gabriel could know most of these things (the fact that Madeline had a gun or the fact that Buchelli is a priest) required him to break into their rooms.

Basically, the Vatican really, really does not want anyone finding out about the whole bloodline thing.

The French want to keep a lid on the bloodline to stop Prince James from taking over the country.

The Knights of Malta is a real organization… sort of. They’re actually called the “Sovereign Order of Malta”, and they’re one of a number of groups that claim to be descended from the Knights Hospitaller. They’re not, as far as I can tell, affiliated with the government of Malta (the country) but they’re a group that’s kind of like Doctors Without Borders only everyone has an ostentatious title.

Interestingly, one of the groups claiming descent from the Hospitallers is the Most Venerable Order of St. John, which according to Wikipedia was originally made up of aristocrats who basically gave themselves titles and then got a royal charter.

By the time this LP is over, I’m starting my own goddamn LARP order called the Order of Fuck Ni No Kuni 2 and Also Fuck Geometry Management.

Also what I don’t think Mosely realizes is that no CIA agent would ever reveal themselves as a CIA agent.

So wait, you’re telling me the French intelligence service has had people working on this stupid riddle for years and Grace basically solved it in two days.

There’s a bit of a recap after this which I’m going to go ahead and skip. Most of this time segment is going to be about talking to everyone and finding out which secret organization they’re with.

I thought Prince James was in Rennes-les-Bains, but in fact he’s right next door to the hotel. I don’t even know why the game lets you visit RLB if nothing happens there.

This scene is… probably the worst-animated thing in the game. Everyone is super fucking stiff, and Larry really has no reason to be there at all.

Larry’s VA mutters something that’s not in the subtitles, but I couldn’t pick up what it was.

Prince James has nine different topics to ask about, and while most of them are worth points, there’s very little here we don’t already know.

This is the meat of the first question, about the bloodline.

He never really explains much about it, but essentially, the Freemasons have certain artifacts they’d need to get Prince James on the theoretical throne of the UK. The Priory, on the other hand, has the stuff buried in the Rennes-le-Chateau area - or at least they would if they existed. I didn’t really think about it much until this update, mostly because I didn’t know the whole Pierre Plantard bullshit train story, but if you think about it, Arnaud is basically a stand-in for Plantard. I’d like to think he’s the only member of the Priory.

Oh god dammit. Is this going where I think it’s going, that the vampires kidnapped the baby so they could try to make ultra-pure Jesus blood and drink it? Like Everclear, but it’s Jesus?

Prince James also confirms (and Arnaud will when we talk to him in a minute as well) that the Freemasons and the Priory are the two groups requesting large-scale excavation permits.

Yes, what an extraordinary man, who can act like a 12 year old at all times. Our next destination…

Is the roof of the observation tower to see Arnaud. We already know that he’s Priory of Sion by process of elimination.

Probably because the Priory is the only secret society in this game to be a hoax. Arnaud is basically an exposition dump, but only some of what he has to say is important.

I still can’t believe that guy’s actual first name is Excelsior. However, this essentially confirms my theory about him being a vampire.

There’s also a tidbit about what the actual difference between the Priory and the Freemasons is, and really? It’s not much. They’re both trying to get their own bloodline descendant on the throne. That’s about it.

He also confirms that yes, the Freemasons and Priory are fighting over excavation rights…

And that while there IS a treasure, the Priory forgot where it was.

So yeah, that’s Arnaud’s plot dump in a nutshell. We still have one really long cutscene coming up, which is why I want to keep the plot dump to a minimum.

The other important thing we want to do is visit Estelle and Lily’s site quick to grab the prints off that water bottle Estelle had earlier, which is now on the bike. We also have to talk to her for full points, but like every conversation involving them, it’s not important.

Anyway, our final stop in this time segment is Chateau de Serres, where we’re going to get a very big, very dumb cutscene that caused me to miss out on two points and have to do around 40% of this update a second time because I clicked the wrong thing. No, I’m not at all bitter, why do you ask?

The gate’s locked, but the weird spikes on it allow Gabriel to climb right over.

Unfortunately, we get spotted almost immediately by the butler.

Since we’re pretty near the end of the game and are going to find out who the villain is before the end of this update, I went ahead and did some research on the development of this game.

One thing I found out is that I was wrong when I said it uses a modified version of the engine they used for Mask of Eternity. That’s actually not true, because as it turns out, the truth was even dumber than that. At the time Mask of Eternity and GK3 were in development, Sierra was working on FOUR DIFFERENT rendering engines. At once.

The other problem was that the development team, much like Shigesato Itoi’s team that initially worked on the N64 Mother 3 prototype, were not able to adapt to a 3D environment. According to one of the developers who was brought in later on the project, they had to basically re-make the game from scratch after a bunch of cost overruns and delays.

Interestingly, in one of the interviews I read through, they mentioned that the Big Bullshit Puzzle was not originally part of the game. They were over budget and behind schedule, and needed something to fill a hole so they just kinda plugged that in there and let it go.

Also, Jane Jensen apparently wanted an action sequence “where you had to stomp on rats and whack bats, or something like that” (http://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/interviews/261/). Fortunately, I found a screenshot from a secret prototype version of Gabriel Knight 3 where they were able to stretch their godawful engine to cover action sequences.

Side note: Never have I been so glad to have LPed Alf on the Sega Master System. Alf is truly the gift that keeps on giving.

The other thing that I found out is that the original script for the game had an entire sequence at the start that explained the plot. As it turns out, Sierra included a comic that explained the whole intro plot, but it wasn’t scanned in with the GoG version’s manual.

And now we’re in low-polycount cutscene land.

Honestly, this is so dark even when playing that I couldn’t tell what the fuck was going on.

Basically, he’s trying to bait Montreaux into revealing that he’s a vampire.

Oh, whoops! Oooh! I dropped my monster condom that I use with my magnum dong.

I don’t quite get why Montreaux would care about Gabriel’s neck, given that he seems to be some sort of bullshit Castlevania anime vampire where he just cuts people’s heads off. Also, he’s immune to sunlight.

Now, here’s my problem with this. At this point, Gabriel must KNOW that Montreaux is a vampire, given that he drinks wine that was mixed with Gabriel’s blood. Why the hell didn’t he just whip out the Schattenjager dagger and stab him?

Now, you might think the first thing we’d want to do is run away and get, say, a French intelligence agent who is known to have a gun, a CIA agent who is also probably armed, and a priest. Nope! We want to go investigate the garage, which is unlocked now.

You can’t see it at all in this picture, but there are bats hanging out on the ceiling. More notable, however, is a certain black sedan we know the baby was kidnapped in. Interestingly, I thought that looking at the bats prevented you from getting points for looking at the car, because I was two points short at the end of this time segment and the guide implied you got two points from looking at the car and two more from looking at the bats.

Here’s the same shot with the gamma jacked up to maximum. It’s… significantly more visible, but you can still only barely see the bats. It works a LITTLE better in-game because they’ll open their wings in front of the light bulb.

As if the game hasn’t confirmed it enough, vampires can indeed go out in the sunlight. What I love is how the vampire closest to Montreaux’s butler is very clearly just a color edit of Gabriel’s model.

Gabriel just starts running, and for some reason the gate is open.

Apparently, the vampires have their own car. If they had their own car… why did they need Montreaux to pick them up at the train station?

Now, you might ask, “If you didn’t miss the two points in the garage, where’d they go?”

DATABASE MANAGEMENT, that’s where.

I went back and fixed it so we’re now at maximum points again. This is going to make the speedrun real annoying because I don’t think you can do this with Grace if you miss it here.

Points Breakdown:

Previous Update: 771 points

Correctly answered the quiz: 28 points (799) [2 points per correct answer, 20 bonus points for 100%]
Talked to Prince James: 8 points (807)
Talked to Arnaud: 6 points (815)
Got a fingerprint off Estelle’s water bottle: 2 points (817)
DATABASE MANAGEMENT: 2 points (819)
Climbed the gate into Chateau de Serres: 5 points (824)
Got into Montreaux’s garage: 2 points (826)
Saw the bats in the garage: 2 points (828)

Total Score: 828/965 (85.8%)

[Timrod]

Second to last update. I hope you’re ready for a long, boring cutscene that comes right out of nowhere!

The first thing we want to do, of course, is DATABASE MANAGEMENT! We first need to read the final email from SIDNEY.

I like how dedicated the writers were to telling us shit we already know.

We can then match the print from Le Serpent Rouge to… Estelle!? Honestly, this makes zero sense, and you’ll see why later - Estelle outright never had this copy of LSR and someone else tells Grace they left it there and not Estelle. Why Estelle’s prints are even on it is a mystery is probably the result of the game being remade from scratch.

Speaking of Estelle, she’s in the lobby by herself now. This is another spot where you can get screwed out of a max score run very easily.

Estelle has two topics of conversation: Egyptian Artifacts and Le Serpent Rouge. Now, here’s the thing. We have no reason to ask about Egypt or Egyptian shit - the only connection to Egypt we’ve seen so far is the vampires at the end of the last update mentioning something about Cairo. If you click this first, you lose two points.

The thing is, this isn’t a bug. There’s slightly different dialogue if you ask about the artifacts first (Estelle will just say she doesn’t know anything) and then Grace will offer her LSR in exchange for these artifacts she shouldn’t know anything about.

So again, I have no idea where the devs were going with Estelle’s prints being on it.

NOW we can safely ask her about the Egyptian artifacts that Grace should know nothing about.

If we had asked her about the artifacts first, this is all we would’ve gotten. It almost feels like a sequence break, but it’s probably a boon for speedrunners doing an any% run.

Shout-outs to that picture on the wall which I’m pretty sure is what Junji Ito thinks a penis looks like.

Yeah, I’m sure he accidentally cut his own neck open and drained out all of his blood. Purely by accident. Could’ve happened to anyone.

I don’t know if this is supposed to be a reference to something, but it doesn’t look like a character from any Sierra game I remember.

Wait what. Did you just say “Atlanteans”? You were talking about fucking Egypt, not Atlantis! Get your story straight! This shit makes Ni no Kuni 2 look coherent! You are actually raising my opinion of Ni no Kuni 2! I didn’t think that was even possible!

So yeah, I have zero idea what any of this has to do with the rest of the game. It feels like they made it, put it in the game, forgot why it was there, and just kinda left it.

I feel like Estelle worships Mormon Jesus.

Grace will use her hooves to shuffle through a couple of stock photos of Egyptian stuff before she lands on this thing.

No, in exchange for you getting your irrelevant ass off the screen so we can move on with the game.

If we try to leave the hotel, Emilio will walk up right next to us… and then start heading off somewhere.

Oh look, he’s meeting with… that’s Mesmi, Prince James’s assistant.

This scene is also not going to make a whole lot of sense. I have a theory as to what it was supposed to be, though - which I kind of hit on just as a guess way earlier in the LP.

This entire bit is largely superfluous, and you’ll see why immediately after we get done with it.

I mean, we already know what the vampires want - they want Jesus blood so they can turn into Jesus furries.

So, in case there’s any doubt, Emilio is the one who left the Le Serpent Rouge copy on the museum door. He’s also the one who left all those notes for Grace to find. In fact, he apparently had all of this shit figured out before Gabriel even got here.

This particular line is what makes me think Emilio WAS originally intended to be the Wandering Jew. It’ll make way more sense in a bit.

So… I’m just gonna go ahead and fast-forward this a bit. You have to follow Emilio all the way back to his room to talk to him.

God dammit I want to dump my theory but the game just keeps dropping these stupid exposition bombs.

Secret Brotherhood. Right. This is the first time they are ever mentioned. There’s no entry in SIDNEY for them - I actually went back to the beginning of this time segment after this and searched “secret brotherhood”, “brotherhood”, and “secret”. Nothing came up for any of them.

Grace, we’ve already figured this shit out!

Hope you’re ready for a long cutscene in which the writers make a desperate last-minute asspull to make this plot work.

I apologize about the subtitles - for whatever reason, the game has severe timing issues with them in this cutscene, and tends to dump large paragraphs at once.

So yes, Jesus in Gabriel Knight 3 is basically Superman, only instead of being an alien he’s a magic wonder baby.

I played a lot of City of Heroes after the private servers were released a few months ago, and this sounds like something the writers for that would’ve used as a backstory.

So, here’s why I think my theory about Emilio being the Wandering Jew was spot-on. We know that Jesus in this universe is basically Golden Age Superman only somehow even more bullshit.

He’s also basically a limitless reality warper, which means that it’s not infeasible that he could actually give someone else immortality. Plus we have the whole thing with Mesmi just kind of assuming that Emilio could predict the future, and Emilio saying he’s not part of the Secret Brotherhood, whatever that is. THEN we have the part where he doesn’t want the vampires knowing he’s here. Why? Because he’s an immortal.

The story even kind of backs this up, creating a character who refuses to betray the Brotherhood to get some cheap Jesus blood.

I think someone just showed Sinay the script for Gabriel Knight 3 and he’s just horrified at how bad it is.

So again, Ali - Jesus’s boyfriend. It would make PERFECT SENSE for him to also be immortal, only the story gets written down wrong and people think he’s the Wandering Jew.

You know, why didn’t Jesus just… I dunno, warp reality so these guys don’t want the blood?

I also realized there’s an issue here, which I suppose could be explained by Ali. If Jesus is a reality warper and wills himself to die, how does the whole resurrection story in the Bible make sense? Would if the person who came out of the cave was actually his boyfriend.

And also drinking Jesus blood apparently turns you into a mutant. This plot is dumb as fuck.

Now, here’s something I REALLY don’t get. The vampires want Jesus blood to become immortal. Jesus’s descendants aren’t immortal. How would this… it doesn’t even make any sense. It would’ve made more sense if they’d used some kind of “drinking the baby’s blood will somehow make theirs like, pure Jesus blood and they could use this to take over the EU and then the world” thing.

Next time, we’ll do another Colossal Bullshit Puzzle, and finish this game (with no survivors). I hope you like chess.

Points Breakdown:

Previous Update: 828 points

Read the email about the cult symbols: 5 points (833)
Matched the LSR print to Estelle: 4 points (837)
Talked to Estelle in the correct order: 4 points (841)
Got the photo from Estelle: 5 points (846)
Followed Emilio to the graveyard: 10 points (856)
Listened to Emilio’s bullshit: 5 points (861)

Total: 861/965 points.

[Timrod]

Oh man, I hope you’re ready for a big helping of BULLSHIT, because this game is about to go right down the toilet in terms of quality. Remember that interview I posted two updates ago, where the dev said that Jane Jensen wanted action elements? What if I said… she got them?

By traps, he means the worst part of this already bad game. I want you to imagine something worse than the Big Bullshit Puzzle. Worse than the Bad Controls Puzzle. Worse than DATABASE MANAGEMENT or GEOMETRY MANAGEMENT.

If you’ve ever played Broken Sword 3, that’s pretty much the level of bullshit I’m talking about. Broken Sword 3 was a point-and-click adventure game that came out a few years after GK3 did. It has, among other things, QTEs and a forced stealth segment. I was never able to get past that stealth segment because of how extremely bad it was.

Get ready, because it’s almost bullshit time.

Insert Tim Curry doing the absolutely lamest excuse for a scream ever. I think even he realized that at this point, he was the only thing holding this half-baked excuse for a game together.

Welcome… to the Bullshit Action Puzzles.

You’ll notice that Gabriel has a radio headset on. I don’t know how they’d expect that to work underground. There ARE ways to get radios working underground, but they rely on people placing repeaters and having line of sight between everything. We can use that radio to contact Grace to get information on most things we can look at.

You get absolutely NO hints about what to do here, so I’ll explain. What we need to do is touch every tile that has a sword on it. Tiles with the skull and crossbones are death, while any tile without a sword on it will collapse if we step off of it - you can step onto it safely, but it’ll cease to be a valid tile after that.

The answer here is a stupid pun. We’re playing as Gabriel Knight, so we have to move… like a chess knight.

I kinda got partway through it and fucked up, but I’ll use the first image to show you what the solution is in case you decide to do this godawful bullshit yourself.

I don’t know how you’re supposed to figure out that you’re supposed to end up at position 27 instead of position 14, because I tried radioing Grace and looking and thinking at everything and there is ZERO indication that’s what you’re supposed to do.

Once we get through the door, it slams behind us and we get stuck in a room with a rotating disc and a pendulum.

You’ll notice that certain tiles have symbols on them. These tiles are the ones the pendulum will swing over. What we want to do for the quickest cycle is be on the blue tile to the left of that one with the circle on it.

This allows us to grab onto the pendulum when it gets close. This part is easy every time, as long as you know to go on the tile one left of the circle.

THIS is the bullshit part. It’s nigh-impossible to get good screenshots of, but basically Gabriel is holding onto the pendulum and needs to land on that small central pillar.

Figuring this out is bullshit, largely because of how the controls work… or don’t. See where my mouse cursor is? This is where your cursor has to be in order to get the “jump” icon to show up briefly when Gabriel is on screen.

However, simply clicking it when Gabriel is over the pillar won’t work. Instead, you die. You have to actually time it when the pillar is swinging left and click a second or so early so that he lands on the pillar.

By the way, this is what happens if you die. “Retry” puts you at the beginning of the pillar room.

Now for another bullshit puzzle. The objective is to get the scale to balance. What we need in order to do that is to place three objects on the scale. The ones we’re looking for are the top-left one (an apple), the top-right one (an egg) and the infinity symbol in the bottom-left.

Oh man, I totally called it. I hadn’t played this game before, hadn’t read a plot synopsis even, but I called it from a mile away. My guess is that if you’re not doing a max points run and also looking at everything you might not notice the signs.

Shout-outs to the missing “to” in the subtitle.

Last night, when I went through the gameplay for this part, I started thinking about something on the way upstairs to bed. If consuming blood is all it takes to gain weird powers in this universe, how come there aren’t like, thousands of clones of Spider-Man from all of the people who wind up eating a spider in their sleep? What about people who eat black pudding or other blood sausages? Do they get pig powers? Strange urges to roll around in mud? Is this supposed to explain the world’s obesity crisis?

Also, this means that Emilio is a vampire, yet he’s not horribly mutated.

And honestly, how far does this go? Like, if someone cuts themselves while they’re shaving and a little bit of blood reaches their mouth? What about eating maple syrup, which is technically the blood of a tree? What about people who get a blood transfusion? Are they vampires at that point?

What I’m saying is that this makes zero fucking sense! Zero! None at all! Like, if there was at least some kind of dumb ritual involved or something that’d explain why none of the above scenarios would happen, but Emilio here just straight up drinks the blood.

I really, really wish they had just gone with the much simpler explanation of burning his fingerprints off with lye, like in Fight Club.

I love how Grace is just glaring at him like “You could’ve prevented all of this, you stupid fuck!”

God, Emilio is just a giant fucking dick! “Oh, sorry dead kid, I could’ve prevented this with my reality warping Jesus powers but I won’t, not mine to use, sorry!”

Let me tell you, if I had reality warping powers I’d have made it so this game never existed.

It’s funny because in the VO, you can tell that Tim Curry is getting increasingly fed up with this game.

… And the ancient order or whatever only thought to put that warning AFTER multiple deathtraps? Honestly, what was even the point of building this bullshit? The vampires can fly. All it really does is make it harder for us.

We also need to have Grace “look” at the statue of Solomon here. This is different than the rest of the game - instead of using the headset on the left-click verb menu (as I did to translate the text next to the statue) you have to right-click instead.

Emilio could’ve warped reality so that Gabriel has laser eyes and chainsaws for hands. Emilio is a fucking dick.

I’m not going to bother translating the other text in this room because it’s not worth points. Right away, you’ll notice a pair of gloves on a pedestal. We want the one on the right.

Over here is a second pedestal with a fire and a thing of water. What we need to do here is not at all obvious.

If you use the “automatically move camera to inspect” button, you’ll notice there’s something in the fire.

This… leather glove apparently allows Gabriel to just reach in and grab it.

He puts the glove back automatically, which seems like a waste.

The only other thing in the room is this pair of statues. Gabriel is very on-point here. This is basically a Resident Evil puzzle - what we need to do is stick the piece of gold we got from the fire in the correct statue’s hand.

Hint: It’s not that one.

This causes Gabriel to go into a new room. Here’s our next objective, this pair of mirrors over here.

What we need to do is step on the pedestals and look in the mirrors.

The solution is to say you’re a zombie.

I have no fucking clue how you’re supposed to figure this bullshit out. It took me several minutes to realize what I was looking at, even WITH the guide. I was like “Where the fuck are the mirrors?” and then I figured out you have to place the gold first.

This opens up… yet another pedestal. This is the last one of these.

I don’t know why Gabriel didn’t just bring a camera to document this shit.

There’s three buttons here - a sun, a demon, and a yin-yang. We want to press the yin-yang.

Welcome to the Megaman 2 Disappearing Blocks Puzzle. I’ll admit, I stopped recording once I reached Solomon’s room (had to go to bed) and then watched the any% speedrun. I saw this room and went “FUCKING BULLSHIT” almost immediately.

Jane Jensen apparently brought up the idea of kickstarting a Gabriel Knight 4. I hope to god it never happens.

Wait, what? How the fuck… how the fuck did they get past the pendulum room? There were no stairs and the pillar was on the bottom floor!

Now, let’s say we do the obvious thing and use the “cross” verb on the bridge.

Yep. Too obvious.

What you have to do is manually walk Gabriel up to the space between the two pillars on the left side, which causes a series of yoku blocks to appear.

This is way more annoying than it looks - due to the way the game lags a bit, you can tell Gabriel to jump on a tile which will then disappear when he goes to actually jump on it.

Oh no, it’s one of those European fashion shows!

This absolutely looks like a JRPG fight is about to break out.

Gabriel tries to approach, but a force-field blocks his way.

Honestly, Montreaux totally should’ve just done it. There’s no reason for him NOT to - even Emilio admitted that if the baby isn’t a Super Jesus he can still get power from drinking the baby’s blood.

This entire section is timed, and the timing is fairly tight. We can back up slowly from the demon, but it won’t do us any good - after the timer runs out, he’ll just rush forward and kill Gabriel. We have exactly two options: use the Talisman or use the Dagger. We want to use the Talisman first.

This briefly stuns the demon, which allows us…

To climb that sarcophagus in the back. Now, why would we want to do that, you ask?

It’s so we can have Grace tell us what to do.

Well, isn’t that a convenient plot device? This makes ZERO sense to me. Montreaux is invincible behind his force field. He could’ve just killed the baby, drank the blood, and then just flown off while his buddies take care of Mosely and Mesmi. Instead, he sends this big stupid demon at us.

Showing it the Talisman stuns it again.

This allows Gabriel to cut its throat with the dagger. How you’re supposed to figure this out, I have no idea.

I love how Mosely has clearly seen the giant dead demon, and he’s still questioning the existence of vampires. Dipshit.

Oh look, it’s that crow from several title cards ago. Also that scene with the sarcophagus. I love how there’s technically spoilers for the game in the title cards.

Jesus just fucking exploding over here.

I have no idea what happens to that sword. It’s not the Schattenjager dagger, though I guess the gold handle could’ve been melted down into it.

Fuck you, Emilio!

Remember: When you’re done LPing what is probably Sierra’s worst adventure game after King’s Quest 7 and Gabriel Knight 2, you get to LP YIIK. That’s my next LP by the way. People voted on Twitter, so look out for “YIIKES!: Let’s Dunk on YIIK: A Plagiarism RPG” in the coming weeks.

Oh, so the treasure was Jesus’s corpse, just like in Steel Ball Run.

Begone, thot!

Is this loss? I feel like it’s loss.

965 of 965! We fucking did it! Max score run achieved! I’ll get to that speedrun… probably in the coming week.

Points Breakdown:

Previous Update: 861 points

The Bullshit Chess Puzzle - 10 points (871)
The Even More Bullshit Pendulum Puzzle - 10 points (881)
The Somehow Even Dumber Scale Puzzle - 10 points (891)
Had Grace look at the Solomon statue - 2 points (893)
Picked up the glove and got the gold from the fire - 7 points (900)
The Mirror Puzzle - 5 points (905)
Placed the gold in the statue’s hand - 5 points (910)
Pressed the yin-yang button: 10 points (920)
The “Fuck Whoever Thought Yoku Blocks in a Point-and-Click was a Good Idea” puzzle - 10 points (930)
The Final Battle - 35 points (965)

Total: 965/965 points (100%)

Thanks for reading this godawful LP and sticking with me through 965 points of absolute bullshit. I’d like to thank noted vampire Devious Vacuum, noted not-vampire RJWaters2, whoever wrote the intro to The Dark Knight Rises, and Alf on the Sega Master System.