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:
https://collections.artsmia.org/art/2278/the-temptation-of-st-anthony-david-teniers-the-younger
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%)