Adventure Gamers - Forums

Yes, the german poem is the best clue, but why would Gabriel read it at that point?
From a storyline perspective it’s a bit off…...I know that in an Adventuregane the story can progress after a silly ‘try clicking on anything’ logic, but I was always hoping there was more to this puzzle :-)

Iznogood - 22 October 2014 01:50 PM

subbi - 22 October 2014 01:09 PM

I’m still not quite sure what clue Gabriel really uses to open the clock.

Yeah that is also something that puzzled me a bit.

subbi - 22 October 2014 01:09 PM

Now in the remake you can, if you want, call Wolfgang before opening the clock aswel..and also he will give you the hint on Heinz, so at this point that would clue you to the poem…but then you open the clock and learn little new, except for the schattenjager thing.

Really?
I tried that very hard myself, mainly because I had forgotten how to open the clock, but no matter what I did Grandma wont say anything about this until you have opened the clock, and Gabriel won’t call Wolfgang until he has got the information from his grandmother.

Ah…i didn’t actually try this path, but as Grace gives you Wolfgangs number in the morning I assumed you could call him right away.

This kind of enforces my earlier assumption that Gabriel wouldn’t use/read the poem prior to opening the clock, because it has no direct relevance at that point.
So the other clues must suffice, however weak they are…

It’s his Schattenjäger sense.

Must be, especially as he does not even know he is one

Well, so much for spoiler protection for new players. Maybe it is a pipe-dream that any of them are browsing this thread, but what the heck, I’ll keep using spoiler tags anyway.

The game says the poetry book belonged to Gabriel’s grandfather (as did the clock, so when you’re essentially looking for a password to the clock, the only place to look is among grandfather’s things). As tomimt mentions, Gabriel reads from a volume of poetry that he always found strangely compelling. Aside from minor differences in wording, and the shelf inset and poetry page graphic in the remake, both the original and the remake are the same in this regard.

I don’t recall any other logical clues besides that. You do use the German-English dictionary to find out that “drei” means three and “drachen” means dragon, so a savvy player may suspect that those words are going to be significant somehow or else the game wouldn’t be emphasizing them—there are other words you can read in the dictionary, but those are the only ones that are also in the poem, IIRC. Still, that’s contrived adventure game logic rather than real world logic.

I agree that it’s not an especially well-clued puzzle. I think it actually may have been meant to be somewhat obscure in the original game to delay the player from solving it (the pacing thing we discussed), which is an old-school design philosophy rather than having a proper puzzle gate (e.g. you lack what you need to solve Puzzle Y until you have solved Puzzle X first). Instead, the obscurity of the puzzle might actually prevent the player from solving it altogether without a walkthrough, or at least feel somewhat unsatisfied by the solution when he or she discovers it. To be fair, personally I don’t recall having trouble with it or feeling unsatisfied when I originally played the game in the 1990s, but I can totally understand that others might.

I missed the hint that the poem book belongs to his grandfather. It makes up for some of the contrived logic :-)
But yes, I do see how that could have been put into the game intentionally to block faster progress, whch what they called gameplay back in the ‘90 ‘s

But the remake presented an opportunity to improve such contrived logic.

Sorry about the lack of spoilers. I’m not even sure how to apply these tbh

subbi - 22 October 2014 03:07 PM

I missed the hint that the poem book belongs to his grandfather. It makes up for some of the contrived logic :-)

Another issue with that puzzle is, of course, that if you speak German, it’s easier . Memory tells me I first played GK1 when I’d been living in Munich for about 2 years and so any and every reference to/in German caught my eye. We definitely did the clock puzzle in day 1

subbi - 22 October 2014 03:07 PM

Sorry about the lack of spoilers. I’m not even sure how to apply these tbh

No worries. The easiest way is to highlight only the text you want to hide and then click the Spoiler button that’s in the editing window. This will surround the text you want to hide with spoiler tags.

Or you can write the code for the spoiler tags manually. For example, typing this:

Yields this:

Visible text. Hidden text. More visible text.

For the clock puzzle we’ve been talking about, I took another look at the game, and there’s actually two more clues that are relevant:

1) I mentioned that Gabriel’s grandfather owned the book of poetry in the bookshop. In addition to this, Grandma Knight says Gabriel’s grandfather (Harrison Knight) wrote her the most beautiful poetry when they were courting and she always thought he should do more with that gift, but he was a practical man who didn’t believe in chasing after dreams. From this, the player learns that Harrison Knight didn’t simply like poetry (e.g. enough to own that Heinz Ritter book) but he also actually wrote some himself in his youth. Of course that doesn’t mean the player is going to jump to the conclusion that Harrison Knight is Heinz Ritter, but it does make the eventual revelation feel like a surprise that makes sense in hindsight rather than a surprise that’s totally out of nowhere.

2) Subbi mentioned already the sketchbook and painting by Gabriel’s father (Philip Knight) with the three snakes from Gabriel’s nightmare. Well, there is a book of snakes in the bookstore. When Gabriel reads it, Grace comments that snakes are what the legends of dragons are based on. This could help the player connect the “drei drachen”/“three dragons” in the Heinz Ritter poem to the “three snakes” in Gabriel’s nightmare and Philip Knight’s sketchbook and painting. While there is not yet an explicit family connection between Heinz Ritter and Gabriel, this is just another detail that makes the book of poetry seem connected to Gabriel somehow, along with Gabriel finding the poetry strangely compelling.

Who do you consider are the three women that love Gabriel?

Caliburn - 23 October 2014 10:57 PM

For the clock puzzle we’ve been talking about, I took another look at the game, and there’s actually two more clues that are relevant:

1) I mentioned that Gabriel’s grandfather owned the book of poetry in the bookshop. In addition to this, Grandma Knight says Gabriel’s grandfather (Harrison Knight) wrote her the most beautiful poetry when they were courting and she always thought he should do more with that gift, but he was a practical man who didn’t believe in chasing after dreams. From this, the player learns that Harrison Knight didn’t simply like poetry (e.g. enough to own that Heinz Ritter book) but he also actually wrote some himself in his youth. Of course that doesn’t mean the player is going to jump to the conclusion that Harrison Knight is Heinz Ritter, but it does make the eventual revelation feel like a surprise that makes sense in hindsight rather than a surprise that’s totally out of nowhere.

2) Subbi mentioned already the sketchbook and painting by Gabriel’s father (Philip Knight) with the three snakes from Gabriel’s nightmare. Well, there is a book of snakes in the bookstore. When Gabriel reads it, Grace comments that snakes are what the legends of dragons are based on. This could help the player connect the “drei drachen”/“three dragons” in the Heinz Ritter poem to the “three snakes” in Gabriel’s nightmare and Philip Knight’s sketchbook and painting. While there is not yet an explicit family connection between Heinz Ritter and Gabriel, this is just another detail that makes the book of poetry seem connected to Gabriel somehow, along with Gabriel finding the poetry strangely compelling.

Excellent points Caliburn.

When I played the original game the 2nd clue described above was in fact how I often solved the puzzle, but was always left with a weird feeling that it didn’t give a satisfactory explanation of how that would be relevant for solving the clock puzzle as it was missing a clear link to Gabriel’s grandfather. It adds to the story and atmosphere rather well though.

However, the explanation that the poem belonged to his grandfather as you explained above works really well. The clue is clear and there is no logical reason that his grandfather had actually to have written the poem for it to become relevant…..Now it makes very much sense that it suffices that it simply belonged to his grandfather and Gabriel found it compelling.

What a great example of a layered structure of clues of which I’m only now (20 years after the initial release) finding out that I’ve missed the primary clue all of these years and still was able to solve the puzzle before just by making use of the secondary clues