Hello all,

I was wondering if there's anyone among you who managed to play through Gabriel Knight 3 without resorting to a walkthrough?
I know it's been lauded as a great game by many, and I tend to agree with them: the story is great, the characters and music wonderful, and the puzzles, well,t hey're challenging.
I pride myself in finishing these games without the use of a walkthrough. I tell myself: there's a solution out there, it's jut a matter of patience before I find it. In the few instances that I would resort to a walkthrough, I always feelb ad afterwards, because it's usually something I could have found myself.
Not with GK3 though.

Here are the instances where I felt a walkthrough was absolutely necessary, and didn't feelb ad about having used it afterwards because I couldn't imagine finding that myself. Feel free to disagree:

- Pickpocketing Mosely for his passport
Now, I knew I had to pickpocket him, and I knew the candy came into it by dropping it on the table, but when I tried I never managed to get there in time. I tried manipulating the candy so that it would take longer for Muffin Butt to open the wrapper, to no avail. So I needed the walkthrough. It was just a point of positioning and timing apparently. I guess I could have found out without a walkthrough, but it does require luck. Point is: the game made me second-guess myself because of a factor of precise timing, which is quite irregular. The Sierra-roots are made clear though, if you recall the imfamous "jump to catch the bird"-puzzle in the first King's Quest.

- Buying postcards in the museum
Grace mentions having seen St. Paul somewhere before, but the link with those postcards was unclear. The fact you had to select the precise postcards didn't help either, with most of them being useless scenic photos that Grace didn't care about.)

- Using one of the postcards on the cave (necessary to progress in the Red Serpent riddle)

- Finding footprints in the dirt in order to find Wilkes (seriously, they're practically invisible if you don't know what you're looking for, and there's acres and acres to explore in GK3...)

Don't get me wrong, I love this game, but I think some of the puzzles seem to have been made with an aim to make people buy the startegy guide.

hey, I've finished GK3 for like 5-6 gimes and altho it's one of my fave adventure games of all times, I totally agree mainly on two things you mentioned:
-candy/mosely/passport thing - I hated that. one of the worst points of the game imo. illogical and would need some re-design.
-wilkes' footprints - yeah, totally. I loved how the game's excellent 3D camera design actually made searching really fun, but this was unfair.

I guess those would be the two main spots I would repair to make the game fair.

Btw I think you don't actually need to use the postcard on the cave tho to proceed with LSR (plus I think that one is a bit hard, but pretty logical and kinda beautiful)

Yep, played it all the way through with no hints or walkthrough of any kind when it was released. The 2nd time I played it I think I used a walkthrough just a couple times, I forget for what now (the end sequence maybe? and a diagram in the church?), but for the parts you mentioned, I simply remembered needing to do them from finding them in my first playthrough. I have been playing adventure games since the original Zork text adventures, and, before walkthroughs, before I had the internet (I would never buy the guides in the stores, or look at them for that matter), I was really used to spending hours and hours on individual puzzles or at points in games when everything seemed like a dead end and was utterly frustrating to figure out what needed to be done next. There have been many instances when I've spent hours and hours on a puzzle or trying to figure out how to get past a location and then had to give up and come back and play another time only to spend more hours and hours trying to figure it out. I think after games and games of that over years and years most adventure games become a little easier. You're used to exploring ever single nook and cranny and pixel and trying every inventory item with every character and with all sorts of combinations of each other and going to every screen and finding every screen that leads from it and trying everything again and again until utter exhaustion.

I remember Zork: Nemesis being particularly hard (though I've only played it once, I have it here and do want to play it again sometime, because I remember LOVING it for its darkness and mystery, but that the puzzles were a bit much for me (I was 15.) There is a puzzle in The 7th Guest, one of the first puzzles, in the billiard room on the 2nd floor at the end of the hallway, there are a bunch of bishops on a chess board and you have to figure out how to switch them around, I spent more time no that puzzle than any other puzzle, ever (though, I was 12.) I finally figured it out one day, the satisfaction was amazing! I would go back to it at various times, many many times, before I ever allowed myself to finish the game (so I could see all of the cutscenes before finishing.)

I NEVER a walkthrough for an adventure game on the first time through! They are the main games to not use a walkthrough for in my opinion, it spoils the gameplay for me whereas for other games I feel it to be more okay. I'll use them all day long for FPSs or after I finish a map in an RPG to make sure I didn't miss anything or in a platformer that I know what I have to do but am unsure how to exactly execute it or want to find secrets etc. Though I also forbid myself from using one in Portal and Portal 2.

I agree with Drealmer that walkthroughs are to be avoided as much as possible in adventure games since figuring out the puzzle for yourself is half the fun. That being said, GK3 is a really big, unwieldly game with a lot of locations. Too many, I would say, to be allowed continuous access to. I will resort to strategy guides on games that are as sprawling as GK3 simply because going to check 20 different locations in the South of France (how many screens is that?) is really time consuming. As much as I love games, I do have other interests, and I do need to work every now and then.

Also, I'd argue that the GK series consists of some of the most difficult adventure games out there. They have a few rivals for the title of Most Difficult, of course, but I don't think that your adventure skillz are in bad shape if you can make it through any of the GK games with the occasional use of a walkthrough. If you can make it through GK1 or 3 without using a guide, you can consider me officially very impressed with you.

I have used a walkthrough for the first time right now, where I have to unlock a locale beneath stairs at the centre of a study room, to rescue kidnapped baby. How are you supposed to figure what to do with those 5 heads' laser beams, I wonder.

Getting Mosely's passport wasn't easy, but with some perseverance I did it.

with the camera angle move-ability, you simply have to look at the "shape" the lasers make and make it make sense
it took me a while to figure out too, but, then it became clear. can't say I blame you for using a walkthrough, really, but I'm curious how much time you spent on it before giving up?

SPOILER — DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVEN'T COMPLETED THE GAME

Well, you know, there's a fountain nearby in the outside of the castle... and (I guess) they put it where it is also to make people think there had to be some relation between the beams and the fountain's position, lol.

There is a lot of references to the SIX-POINTED star in the game, but, of course!, they start AFTER this puzzle. No way I'd think of a 5-pointed star.

I gave up the day after.. couldn't wait to continue the story

Can't remember exactly where I used a walkthrough when I first played GK3, but I surely did on a few occassions. For parts of the cat moustache puzzle probably and some parts of Le Serpent Rouge puzzle too. But every time I replay this game (about 5 or 6 times by now) I end up using a wt for more or less the complete end sequence, after Gabriel has found the underground area. Every time it amazes me how badly clued, if at all, some solutions to those more arcade like puzzles are. Even after finding the right door, symbols or whatever I cannot understand why it worked. It would have been fine if Grace could share more insight, but generally her answers are riddles in themeselves. One of my top five adventure games, but that end sequence is really badly designed imo.

I had to use it a few times. I used it a couple of times for the Le Serpent Rouge parts. I used it to learn how to use to fingerprint kit (it turns out some things have no finger prints, and you just got to keep moving the brush on the object until Grace or Gabriel says that. How obvious!).

I also had to use it during the devil's armchair part. I was stuck on that part for days. It never occurred to me that there might be a pool of blood somewhere in the area. I don't think you could blame me, because that was poorly hinted at. I assume Gabriel saying "They've been drained of blood" was supposed to be a hint that there may be blood elsewhere in the area. If so, it's a pretty bad hint. You know that you are dealing with vampires. Vampires had already been mentioned more than once in the game and I had read that the game was about vampires in France even before I played it. I had assumed the vampires had drank all the blood. What a silly assumption apparently.


Personally, I think the whole "dress up as Mosely to get a good bike" puzzle is just about the worst adventure game puzzle since the "spell Rumplestiltskin with a backwards alphabet" puzzle. Every part of that puzzle is absolutely absurd. It is crazy that Gabriel is so picky about the bike he wants, that he has to steal a passport from his best friend, steel from a lost and found box, steal from a priest, and disrespect a cat. Come on Gabriel. Grow up!

Like others have said, you should try to avoid using a walkthrough as much as possible when you are playing an adventure game. I hate using walkthroughs. But I have never beaten an adventure game without using a walkthrough at least once, and I've never gotten a perfect score without using it more than once.

Really? Try the King's Quest games. The Space Quest games. The Police Quest games. The Leisure Suit Larry games. The Laura Bow games. I think most of those games are WAY harder. They have winding pathways where you have to walk carefully and a single misstep can kill you. They have dead ends. Some have them have typing. Some of them have absurd mini-games. And many of them don't have hints that are as good as the hints in GK games. "Leisure Suit Larry 2" alone gave me more trouble than the entire "Gabriel Knight" series combined.

I haven't played Larry, so I can't speak to that series, but while I won't deny the difficulty of King's Quest or Space Quest, I don't think the games are more difficult than GK. Text parsers are tricky to learn to use, but aren't too bad once you're used to them. And throwing the harness on the snake or dealing with the yeti isn't any crazier than the cat mustache or the cuckoo clock. And though the deaths in King's Quest, Laura Bow, etc. are annoying, frequent saving prevents them from being much of a burden. In fact, some of the deaths are so funny they're part of the pleasure of playing the games (until you fall off the stairs for the 100th time). The dead ends are really the only part of KQ that are more difficult than GK. Many Sierra titles could rival GK for the title of most difficult, but I don't think there's a blindingly obvious winner in the bunch (unless it's one of the Larry games that I haven't played).

Well, it's not just the absurdity of the puzzles. In "King's Quest," wrong choices like killing the snake with the sword, or eating the pie, can make the game unwinnable and you'll never know until you get stuck at a certain point and have to resort to a hint book or a walktrhough. If Rennes-les-Chateau hotel only had one pack of syrup, and the game allowed you to eat that pack of syrup, and Gabriel just said something like "Yum, that's good syrup" without any warning or notice that the game is unwinnable, then I would agree that puzzle is as bad as those "King's Quest" puzzles. And, while the cuckoo clock puzzles is absurd in and of itself, the game does give you hints for it. The fact that you can interact with the plant is a hint. And if you can interact with things, maybe you can use items on it. When you use a random item on the plant, Gabriel says "Why would I want to put that in the plant?" and that's a major hint. If you couldn't use any item on the plant, trying to do so would give you the standard circle with a diagonal line going through it. So from there you can figure out to try all the items on the plant until you find the one that works. Then you just have to figure out where you're supposed to be. I'll be super-impressed with anyone who actually thought to do the cuckoo clock thing without this kind of help, but solving that puzzle by accident isn't too hard if you figure out the way hints work in that game. "King's Quest" games didn't always give you hints. I don't believe there's any in-game hint for the yeti or the snake.

While we're mentioning funny deaths, I remember the first time I played Laura Bow and I died within about 30 seconds of starting the game, and then spending the next 30 minutes of my life going "WHAT? What happened? Why did that kill me? How was I supposed to know that would kill me? WHAT?" To this day, I still have no idea why taking a shower would make your best friend want to kill you.