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