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.
