Adventure Gamers - Forums

Just wanted to hear opinions on this puzzle from Gabriel Knight 1 that I can’t decide if it’s brilliant or obscure and unfair. I completely fumbled and had to go to the walkthrough but after solving it I started to think it was pretty clever.

It’s on day 5 or day 6 in one of steps for Gabriel to infiltrate the voodoo ceremony. You have to place a signal trasmiter on Dr John little coffin and write on the tomb wall for him to bring it to the ceremony. The words you have to write are dj bring sekey madoule ot dj conclave tonight bring sekey madoule in symbols.

It has some steps, you have to assume the wall writings are messages of Dr. John, guess the missing letters from the sentence meanings, get the transmitter, put the trasmitter in the little coffin in the shop and acknowledge that its called sekey madoule for the sentence to work. The difficulty is that this has to be done, I think, without any feedback of what you’re guessing, so could get stuck in any of the steps.

The other steps to infiltrate the ceremony (body painting, drum tranlation) are easier and the other big problem I had to check was the snake scale in the crime scene (but that’s pixel hunting)

So, great puzzle and solvable or too obscure ? did I miss any other clues? Who solved without checking the walkthrough and how? Also, did it change in remake?

(I know the game is over 20 years but better late than never )

Haven’t played the remake, but I recall it from the original as an excellent puzzle.

In the original it’s probably one of the best puzzle I have ever witnessed; while having a bit of unbelievability since it is absurd a secret society would use such barebone cryptography, I can justify it with the necessity of not making it too absurd for the casual player.
Anyway it’s a great example of: integration of a classic riddle, gathering clues from the plot, reutilization in a more original way.
Haven’t played the remake, but in the original game was by far the standout moment in my experience; I gladly didn’t need to use a walkthrough for it.

Advie - 02 February 2015 02:10 PM

the remake handled this puzzle fairly and easily.

How did it change? They still used the writing on the the wall? Probably had more clues of what the player was doing right.

Danaroth - 02 February 2015 02:46 PM

In the original it’s probably one of the best puzzle I have ever witnessed; while having a bit of unbelievability since it is absurd a secret society would use such barebone cryptography, I can justify it with the necessity of not making it too absurd for the casual player.
Anyway it’s a great example of: integration of a classic riddle, gathering clues from the plot, reutilization in a more original way.
Haven’t played the remake, but in the original game was by far the standout moment in my experience; I gladly didn’t need to use a walkthrough for it.

I agree it is a standout puzzle in the game, The cryptography didn’t bother me, what I think could be more devious is making all the connections, but in the end the clues are all there so it must be satisfying to solve it.

diego - 02 February 2015 02:46 PM

PROPAGANDA ON PARADE!

I voted Grim, I’m only hurting my cause!

This seems like one of the most talked about puzzles on this forum.  I’ve read countless discussions on it over the years.

Personally I think it’s a really good puzzle.  I solved it by myself, in the days before walkthroughs existed.  It’s really not that difficult at all if you look at how most of the other messages are worded.

“DJ. (location), (when to go).  Bring (voodoo item).”

Once you know where to go and what you want him to bring, it’s pretty easy to figure out exactly what message you need to leave to make it look indistinguishable from the rest.  And the name of the items are shown in the recording from the voodoo professor.  And the sekey madoule is the only item you can spell out with the letters you know from the other translations.

(I actually remember the first time I played the game I figured out what I needed to say before I figured out what I needed to do with that item, which then pointed me in that direction)

So yeah, I don’t think the puzzle is the least bit unfair at all.  But it is more of an old fashioned puzzle, that isn’t as suited for modern audiences that don’t like to be stumped at all before giving up and looking up the solution.

Detective Mosely - 02 February 2015 03:11 PM

This seems like one of the most talked about puzzles on this forum.  I’ve read countless discussions on it over the years.

  I searched but didn’t find. Probably somewhere on the old forums.

Detective Mosely - 02 February 2015 03:11 PM

Personally I think it’s a really good puzzle.  I solved it by myself, in the days before walkthroughs existed.  It’s really not that difficult at all if you look at how most of the other messages are worded.

“DJ. (location), (when to go).  Bring (voodoo item).”

Once you know where to go and what you want him to bring, it’s pretty easy to figure out exactly what message you need to leave to make it look indistinguishable from the rest.  And the name of the items are shown in the recording from the voodoo professor.  And the sekey madoule is the only item you can spell out with the letters you know from the other translations.

(I actually remember the first time I played the game I figured out what I needed to say before I figured out what I needed to do with that item, which then pointed me in that direction)

So yeah, I don’t think the puzzle is the least bit unfair at all.  But it is more of an old fashioned puzzle, that isn’t as suited for modern audiences that don’t like to be stumped at all before giving up and looking up the solution.

I agree that is pretty simple and makes sense when you look at it (those are the best puzzle), I think the major problem I had was a relative lack of direction of what to do.
I did feel bad about reading the walkthrough because the one I read just blurted the solution and left me with nothing to deduce. Finding the snake scale I also looked it up but had no problems because the solution has just boring.

Advie - 02 February 2015 03:48 PM

sorry if I mislead you to the conclusion that its changed, it didn’t change at all, but the point and click mechanics and the hintsystem include (which reveals the clues in a smart way) made it more convenient

Thanks. Doesn’t seem bad if they kept the puzzle structure.

I certainly preferred the lack of direction back then; when a character tells you are on the right way during a convoluted solution I find it extremely jarring and immersion-breaker, disconnecting my train of thoughts with the ones of my avatar and sounding like it’s insulting the intelligence of the player.

Of course I am totally pro hint-systems (I did use the walkthrough once at the clock puzzle in GK1), but whoever decides not to use them shouldn’t be poked in the right direction midway, especially in this special case when every single step falls perfectly in place with your overall target; in a perfect world, the elegance of a puzzle should speak for itself.

I played this game when I was 8/9, so at the time I had to use a walkthrough. I recently played it though and did feel like this puzzle was quite logical!

Advie - 02 February 2015 08:53 PM

aaroncarney - 02 February 2015 08:24 PM

I played this game when I was 8/9, so at the time I had to use a walkthrough. I recently played it though and did feel like this puzzle was quite logical!

what walkthrough? there were only the Hintbooks and HintLines

I didn’t actually play the game back in 1994. I would have been a bit too young then haha The internet was around when I played it and i remember my grandad printing a walkthrough out for me for when I got stuck.

Oh man, I remember this puzzle, and it was really difficult when I first pkayed the game, mainly because I never experienced one like it before. I think my friend at the time figured it out and told me about it. It is on the unfair side in my opinion but it brings back great nostalgia.

The main difficulty in cluing here is that it isn’t simply a matter of figuring out what to write. You need to figure out how to create a situation where the writing will be USEFUL, then write a message. The problem, at least in part, is that someone placed in that situation “in real life” might come up with a large number of alternative solutions that the game can’t plausibly acknowledge. It’s an adventure game’s job to steer you away from other plausible answers and make you see why only one or a few can work - and GK does this here… sort of.

Spoilers ahead.

The game tries to create a situation where only one object could be tampered with, and where you therefore need to get that one object to the scene of the conclave. But, at least in the original, that’s clued only via very indirect means (dream sequence, process of elimination, etc). I remember when I first played this, back as a kid, needing to talk it over with a friend, and still being a little unsatisfied at how it fit together. It’s pretty arbitrary, even given the limited number of available letters, that you need to bug that coffin.

I do think it’s a very strong puzzle, overall, given the player freedom allowed and the difficulty in implementing ANY “type anything” puzzle in a graphic adventure. It’s certainly one of the most memorable puzzles in the first game. It’s just a tad underclued.

(It would be an absolutely perfect puzzle in an Interactive Fiction setting that allowed you to bug multiple objects, and name any one of them to bring to the conclave.

Text adventure players probably had an advantage on this one, anyway, seeing as [PERSON NAME], [ACTION Y] is a common format for commands to other characters in text adventures.)