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” (Scott Bilas - Oberon Games Studio - Interview - Adventure Classic Gaming - ACG - Adventure Games, Interactive Fiction Games - Reviews, Interviews, Features, Previews, Cheats, Galleries, Forums). 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%)