I think Gabriel Knight 3’s cat hair mustache is one of the best adventure game puzzles in history, for both unintentional but also intentional reasons. Despite being held up as an example of the nonsensical rot killing adventure games each step of the puzzle is grounded in reality up until the final prestige moment of the detective being fooled by the disguise. It’s grounded enough that you could describe the puzzle to someone who has never played a video game and they could follow along with it, and the puzzle’s strength as a story unto itself is where a lot of its strength comes from.
That part of reality where you put a piece of tape on a hole and make a cat run through it in order to get enough cat hair to make a moustache in order to impersonate a man who does not have a moustache
This opening song refrain that starts at 1:03 pounces on me suddenly at unexpected times.
This game is the most prominent educational(?) game in my memory and I only recently thought to search it up again. It’s pretty bad rewatching it today but I think it’d make a good @VastleCania stream.
oh man doing a bunch of edutainment CD-ROM games would be…yeah, very much a me thing
Super Mario Land Goombas have see-through eyes.
I watched this on YouTube and saw it in motion for the first time & in defense of the game the guy does have a mustache on the passport you steal if not in-game.
However, watching someone repeatedly mouse through prompt menus and environments to pick up a single mint, put it on a table, buzz the room, go back up the stairs, hide behind the corner while he is deeply distracted by a single mint so as to pickpocket him to enter his room to steal his passport, I can’t say I necessarily felt like defending the game any further from the accusations in the OMM article
He doesn’t, its just that the person in this video remembers to draw the moustache on the passport photo before he starts collecting cat hair
damn video games are so cool
I think the coolest part of this video game is demonstrated at 6 minutes where there is an actual minute of nothing happening because gabriel knight is walking incredibly slowly across town
roberta williams can call me a mentally deficient prole who plays action games all she wants if this is the alternative
the combo of interface + movement + camera in Gabriel Knight 3 is one of the most nuts ive ever seen, i actually wish more people would talk about it in general and not just in the cat mustache puzzle. you have an omnipotent camera that can travel through walls and around corners like a console command except thats just how the game plays apparently what a fucking wild way to do a 3D adventure game
actually when i first read that OMM article i pictured all the events in question as an FMV game because i knew that’s what The Beast Within looked like. it added another layer to things when i learned you control Gabe like he’s a Sim who’s unusually attentive to your commands
okay but they could of clicked anywhere at any time to speed things up because you materialize just out of sight of where ever you’ve put the camera anytime you click to walk anywhere
bad cat disguise puzzle aside, I think the games a bit underrated for the time block system with gabe and grace taking turns going on the tour or trying to get dirt on the other hotel occupants, overhearing conversations and collecting fingerprints and license plates etc. I wish we’d gotten a hundred of these games where you hang out in some historical location and learn some history and solve some reddit conspiracy theory about it.
They clearly clicked multiple times. The teleport action only works when you are moving to one of the area exits (as demonstrated immediately afterwards in the video), not when you are moving to an interactable pixel
i can totally believe Blood of the Sacred Blood of the Damned is actually lowkey a rad game it just released at a time when adventure games seemed untenable and they had no clue how to adapt
It works anytime you click with the camera not pointed in the characters direction
It appears the gabriel knight 3 video game might have bugs and inconsistencies in its basic functioning
Outer Wilds is the best adventure game of the last decade and plausibly ever, so idk maybe adventure games and imsims needed to to catch up to eachother ?
the camera can’t be pointed in the direction of the character even if there’s walls in the way is the thing. if they’re a million miles off but you’re pointed at where they are they’ll walk the whole way. as long as you’re not facing the direction they’re in wherever you click the character magically materializes behind the camera. which I guess is almost interesting because it’s like you’re creating a cut. there’s also an option on menu to just select several fixed camera angles for every area. they’re really didn’t know what they were doing and would hope you yourself would invent the best way to navigate a 3d adventure game for them.
yeah put that way that’s a really logical progression of their cinematic adventure game style from CGA to FMV to 3D. its just so strange in practice when you as the player are asked to make those cuts. through actions that make broad sense but are ridiculous in miniature
Like cutting in film would get around how stupid it is that Gabe impersonates Mosely, it makes perfect plot sense that he could fake his way pretending hes someone he knows into a scene. It just became stupid as a series of actions the player needs to make Gabriel hoop jump thru
This use of the game camera is amazing and somehow I’ve never heard the game was designed this way and now I desperately want more games that combine avatar and camera movement like this. I’m so glad I posted an errant thought I had while half-asleep in bed that I could barely defend.