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