Gabriel Knight - Dr. Frank-N-Furter, Investigator

Written by Michael

Time for us to sit down together again and talk about this game.

Glad to be back with you as we finish out another day in the life of Gabriel Knight, investigative author.  Earlier in this game day, I visited Dr. John at the museum, voodooienne Moonbeam at her residence, and then spent some time at the park.  There’s got to be more to this day.  The formula for the game seems simple enough: research enough until you find at least the one trigger that causes you to ask Grace to do research, and then the day ends.  So, I figure the best plan is to do as much research as possible each day before returning to the bookstore.  From some of the comments I’ve seen so far, it seems some items can be done sooner or later, so I might be front-loading the game and taking away later tasks, and I’m certainly fine with that.

Well, that eliminates one possible solution...

I suppose we won’t be needing this then.

A new place I need to visit is Malia Gedde’s mansion.  A quick motorcycle ride out of the quarter brings me to an elegant southern house that looks very familiar.

"To understand the living, you got to commune with the dead."

Oh, wait, this game is based in Louisiana, not Georgia.  My mistake.

I knock on the door, using the brass door knocker, and a servant answers the door.

Sadly, while I’m given a dialog tree, none of the choices are about selling leather jackets.

I try to get in, to see Malia, but the butler doesn’t let me pass, and since I can’t figure out a way to make an appointment, I have to come back on official business.  Maybe my cop friend can help with that, although he seems too scared of her (and her money) to try anything.

It turns out I don’t have a prayer of getting in, so let’s check out the church.

Decorated much like a 1980s International House of Pancakes

Inside the church, I start to explore, and find that I can enter the confessional.  Gabriel atones for having impure thoughts about a woman he met.  Extreme thoughts about sexual relations.  “Well... not involving animals or anything.”

I find a door off behind the chancel.  Of course, like most people, I have no idea what a chancel is, but thankfully, we have an electronic dictionary at our fingertips at all times.  Isn’t life swell?

Is this a hint or a red herring?

Behind that door is essentially the priests’ dressing room.  We check ourselves in the mirror, and then help ourselves to a black priest’s shirt.  Nothing else appears to be takeable, so I go on.

Or maybe it’s time to call an exterminator.

I visit our unhelpful friend in the drug store, but before anything can really happen, a crusty old lady named Madame Cazaunoux comes in to request a gris gris to help counteract one placed on herself.  She asks for the candles and other odds and ends to be charged to her house account and delivered.  Also, she wants some revenge on someone who put an upset stomach powder in her tea, and Mr. Walker suggests a spell and gris gris to be placed under the other person’s front step.

I suspect I’ll be needing to do something like that to someone at some point in the game.

After the lady leaves, I ask the clerk some more questions.  He won’t tell me anything about his customers, like the lady we just saw, but I am able to talk to him a little about animal masks.  There’s one for sale in the store, for a hundred dollars.  Willy Jr.  It’s a mask made from a real crocodile head.

If I’m going to do their job for them, I’ll do it right in their lobby.

I head off to the police station, and as soon as I get there, I realize something I should have done in the last post.  I use the magnifying glass to compare the snakeskin from Moonbeam and the scale I found at the lake.  No match.

I talk to the desk sergeant, who is still the laziest Keystone Kop you’ll ever meet, and learned nothing new, but asked to go back to see Mosely.  I’m told to go back there, still unescorted.

When I first arrived, there was a repairman working on the thermostat.  I need to keep that in mind.  But for now, I head into my friend’s office.  I ask him about all the new topics in the list, and revisit some I think may have progressed, but he has almost nothing for me.  So, I leave.

I really do need to rewatch Beverly Hills Cop sometime.

When I step out of his office, the repairman and his tools are gone.  I look at the thermostat, and he left the cover off of it.  (Honestly, I never noticed the thermostat before now.  Shame on me.)

I jack up the heat and decide to go into Mosely’s office again.  He complains about the heat, and takes off his jacket.  Obvious solution to a puzzle:  get access to Malia by showing a badge.  So, I ask Mosely to get me a coffee, he leaves the room, and comes back in just as I finish swiping the shield.

Gabriel obviously likes the portrait of Malia hanging over the fireplace.

Malia joins me, and we sit and chat.  I ask about everything, and she isn’t much help, but she IS easy on the eyes.  When I ask about voodoo, she suggests I check out the museum.  Perhaps this is another way to introduce the location to me, if I missed the dialog clue from Grace earlier.  Regardless, I’ll go back later on.

I ask her a lot of personal questions, and learn a lot about her family.  I exhaust every conversation tree, until I hit the last one that I don’t really want to try: “Flirt with Malia”.  She calls me out for impersonating a cop.

Uh oh.

I really hope I didn’t screw myself over in the game, but given that the readers say I probably can’t be dead-ended, hopefully I’m safe.  She has the butler escort me outside.

True sign of insanity: talking to inanimate objects.

In my travels of revisiting locations today, I visit the park again.  This time, as I walk through the screen with the artist, the wind kicks up and blows his artwork away.  The artist leaves the screen, so of course my first thought is to steal his tools while he’s not looking.

Really, Gabriel should have said something about THIS habit in confession before.

Gabe won’t take anything; this time he seems to have scruples.  So, I walk over to where the artist went, and it turns out his paper blew inside the narrow-slatted fence around the Jackson statue.  I’ll need some help or a tool or something.

One screen away is our friendly hot dog salesman, who lacks the ingenuity of Nathan Handwerker, and the breakdancing young boy.  I try something I should have tried yesterday, to trade the gift certificate for a hot dog.  It works, and then I give the hot dog to the kid.

A solution to a puzzle seems obvious when I talk to him now.  He offers to take requests, and one of the things I can ask of him is to crawl through the narrow bars in the fence.  He gets the artwork for me.  I bring it back to the artist, he’s appreciative, and now he’ll actually give me the time of day.

I ask him about the patterns left at the crime scenes, and after I give him both pages (the photocopy of the earlier ones, and the sketch I made at the lake) he promises to work on combining them back to their original state, and tells me to come back tomorrow.

Now back to the museum.  I ask Dr. John about Malia (after all, she referred me there) but he claims to know nothing of her.  After all, “Many have read about our museum in the newspapers, Mr. Knight.”

I need to stop dicking around and get back to the game.

I also revisit the cemetery, and talk some more about the topics.  I learn about Dr. John visiting often, and I also learn that people leave strange offerings outside of other prominently named tombs other than Voodooienne Marie’s.  Since the only others are my family’s and Gedde’s, I check those out again.  I still can’t do anything with the locked plate, so I still need to find a key.

No, it doesn’t seem to be at the bottom of any flowerpots.

Back at the bookstore, I check out the cash register to see if a new gift certificate magically reappeared there for me to do more bartering, but sadly I only found cobwebs. So, I talk to Grace, ask her about new topics, check that I have no messages, and then ask her to research Madame Cazaunoux.  She suspect I have an ulterior motive, but I assure Grace the lady is old enough to be my grandmother, and she appears to back off.

Yes, I’m listening to more 80s music as I write this.

Grace leaves for the day, so I go to bed.  I have the same nightmares again, this time adding a twisted dagger that morphs into a pair of intertwined snakes.

Is she really that shallow?  Maybe we’ll find out.

The new day starts, the paper is delivered, Grace arrives a split-second later, and I eventually get up and have some coffee.  Grace doesn’t believe me when I told her I got to talk to Malia Gedde, but she warns me all the same.  She’s getting some bad vibes.

Just for that, maybe I’ll say no.

As we finish that talk, the obnoxious neighbor, Bruno, strolls in and again asks me to sell my father’s painting.  Game recently saved, this time I decide to take the offer, against the advice of Grace.  If I’m wrong, I’ll restore, but I suspect this falls under the “no dead end” ruling?

Also, part of the reason I said yes?  Painting = $100.  Crocodile mask = $100.  Following rule #39, I can’t resist.

I also can’t resist a good night’s sleep, so I think I’ll stop here.  Next time, we’ll continue day 3.  I need to visit the park, buy a mask, and we’ll go from there.

[A housekeeping note:  A combination of my writing style and the amount of dialog in this game is probably going to push me to a record number of posts for this game.  I know that, traditionally, we aim for less on the blog, but I’d rather handle this in smaller chunks so that I can keep up with the writing (and nor leave you hanging).  Feedback, good or bad, is always appreciated.]

Score: 104/342

Session Time: 1 hour 15 minutes

Total Time: 4 hours 45 minutes