Cat hair mustache puzzle

Last updated

Gabriel Knight, wearing the cat hair mustache and trying to pose as Detective Mosely on the passport Gabrielcat.png
Gabriel Knight, wearing the cat hair mustache and trying to pose as Detective Mosely on the passport

The "cat hair mustache puzzle" is a colloquial name given to a puzzle in the 1999 adventure game Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned . The puzzle involves disguising the protagonist Gabriel Knight with hair from a cat, in order to steal a man's motorcycle rental. It was created by the game's producer, Steven Hill, after a puzzle designed by the game's lead designer, Jane Jensen, was cut due to budgetary reasons. The designers disliked the puzzle, but because of time constraints, it had to be left in.

Contents

The puzzle received generally negative reception. It has frequently been identified as one of the worst puzzles in the adventure game genre, with one writer going so far as to call it partly responsible for the decline in overall popularity of the genre.

Puzzle and solution

The puzzle appears in Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned , during which the eponymous character is required to impersonate another man, Detective Mosely, and take his motorcycle rental. To do this, Gabriel must collect a variety of items. [1]

One of the requirements of the puzzle is to create a fake mustache using cat hair. The cat hair is acquired by first attaching a strip of masking tape to a small opening at the bottom of a shed door. Then a water bottle sprayer (or 'spritzer') is used to spray a cat, causing it to run through the shed door opening, leaving some of the cat's fur stuck to the tape, which Gabriel then retrieves. Gabriel then uses a packet of maple syrup to attach the cat hair to his face, creating a fake mustache.

Gabriel must also steal Mosely's passport to use as ID. A piece of candy is used to distract Mosely, allowing Gabriel to steal his passport from his pocket. Using a magic marker, Gabriel then draws a mustache onto Mosley's passport photo, despite Mosley lacking a mustache. Gabriel then heads to Mosely's room to steal his gold coat and don it, along with a red cap he finds in the lost and found to hide that he is not bald like Mosely. He then returns, disguise complete, and is given Mosely's motorcycle rental. [1]

Concept and creation

The puzzle was created by Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned producer Steven Hill. It came as a result of a puzzle created by the game's designer, Jane Jensen, needing to be removed due to budget concerns. [2] [1] The cat hair mustache puzzle was unpopular with the game's lead technical designer, Scott Bilas, as well as other members of the development team, but was included due to time constraints. [2] Jensen attributed the difficulty of the cat hair mustache puzzle to both the length of the puzzle and the lack of hints, though felt it was overblown, even though she did not like it herself. [1]

Reception and legacy

The puzzle was criticized for the differences between Gabriel and Mosely, particularly the lack of a mustache on Mosely. Gabrielcat2.png
The puzzle was criticized for the differences between Gabriel and Mosely, particularly the lack of a mustache on Mosely.

The cat hair mustache puzzle has received negative reception from critics, coming to be known as shorthand for "obscure and illogical actions" players may need to take in adventure games. [2] PC World writer Hayden Dingman called it an "infamous" puzzle and emblematic of how difficult Sierra games can be. [3] Kotaku writer Kirk Hamilton identified it as an icon of terrible puzzles in adventure games, and felt that no one would be able to solve it without a strategy guide. [1] In their review of Gabriel Knight 3, Computer Gaming World writer Tom Chick identified it as the most notable aspect of the game, despite finding puzzles later in the game more difficult. They explain that the earlier appearance of the puzzle caused a greater impact as a result. [4] Gamasutra writer Christian Nutt felt that the puzzle was obtuse, stating that it was not something a player would ever think to do. [5] Hardcore Gaming 101 writer Kurt Kalata called it the game's most "infamous" puzzle; he felt that such an "odd" puzzle would be appropriate for a more cartoony game like Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle , but that the Gabriel Knight series is more firmly grounded in realism, making the puzzle seem "absurd." [6] A puzzle in the video game Broken Sword 5: The Serpent's Curse requires players to make a goatee and mustache using adhesive strips and stuffed dog fur, spurring IGN writer Chuck Osborn to speculate whether it was a reference to the cat hair mustache puzzle. [7]

Jane Jensen took some blame for the decline in the popularity of adventure games due to Gabriel Knight 3, with game designer Erik Wolpaw placing blame on her for the puzzle's poor design. [2] Wolpaw was critical of the puzzle for requiring people to make a fake mustache in order to impersonate someone without a mustache, and described the actual process of constructing the mustache as "deranged". [8] GamesRadar+ writer Charlie Barratt included it in their list of the "stupidest puzzles" in video games, suggesting that the puzzle was "illogical and irrational" and that the puzzle contributed to adventure games dying out. [9] Despite the blame laid on the puzzle for killing adventure games, author Grant Bollmer disputed this notion, instead placing blame on corporate restructuring, "meddling in the creative process", and an "increasing scale" in video games' popularity. [10]

The puzzle has also been criticized by other game designers. Campo Santo designer and programmer Nels Anderson felt that adventure games from the 1990s were good in spite of their gameplay, claiming that no one plays them for their "obtuse puzzles", citing the cat mustache puzzle specifically. [11] Anderson was critical of the puzzle particularly due to the game expecting players to don a fake mustache to impersonate someone who does not have one. [12] Frictional Games co-founder Thomas Grip identified the puzzle as a "shining example" of what gameplay designers should not do. [13]

See also

Related Research Articles

Gabriel Knight is a series of point-and-click adventure games released by Sierra On-Line in the 1990s created by Jane Jensen. The titular character is an author and book store owner in New Orleans who is investigating a strange series of murders when he learns he is descended from a long line of Schattenjäger. After undergoing a spiritual trial, Gabriel becomes the new Schattenjäger, called on to stop those who use supernatural methods to threaten others. To signify this, he wears the Ritter Talisman, a protective medallion. Not having supernatural abilities himself, Gabriel mainly opposes his enemies with cunning and insight after investigation and research. In the first game, he is assisted by Grace Nakimura. In the two sequels, the two act as partners against evil, with Grace being a playable character.

An action-adventure game is a video game hybrid genre that combines core elements from both the action game and adventure game genres.

Jane Jensen is an American video game designer and author. She is mostly known as the creator of the Gabriel Knight series of adventure games, and also co-founded Oberon Media and Pinkerton Road video game development companies. Jensen also writes under the name Eli Easton.

Game Developer is a website created in 1997 that focuses on aspects of video game development. It is owned and operated by Informa and acted as the online sister publication to the print magazine Game Developer prior to the latter's closure in 2013.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Goichi Suda</span> Japanese video game designer and director

Goichi Suda, known by his alias Suda51, is a Japanese video game designer, writer and director. Affiliated with Human Entertainment from 1994 to 1998, he founded Grasshopper Manufacture in 1998 with a number of other Human Entertainment staff to produce their own titles. His best-known work has come from Grasshopper Manufacture, including The Silver Case (1999), Killer7 (2005), the No More Heroes series, and Lollipop Chainsaw (2012).

<i>Kings Quest VI</i> 1992 video game

King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow is a point-and-click adventure game, first released in 1992 as the sixth installment in the King's Quest series produced by Sierra On-Line. Written by Roberta Williams and Jane Jensen, King's Quest VI is widely recognized as the high point in the series for its landmark 3D graphic introduction movie and professional voice acting. King's Quest VI was programmed in Sierra's Creative Interpreter and was the last King's Quest game to be released on floppy disk. A CD-ROM version of the game was released in 1993, including more character voices, a slightly different opening movie and more detailed artwork and animation.

<i>Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars</i> 1996 video game

Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars is a 1996 point-and-click adventure game developed by Revolution Software. It is the first in the Broken Sword series, co-written and directed by Charles Cecil. The player assumes the role of George Stobbart, an American tourist in Paris, as he attempts to unravel a deep conspiracy involving a sinister cult and a hidden treasure, seeing him travel to various locations around Europe and the Middle East. The game's storyline was conceived to feature a serious tone and heavily influenced by research on Knights Templar by Cecil, but was also interlaced with humor and graphics in the style of classic animated films.

Jon Ingold is a British author of interactive fiction and co-founder of inkle, where he co-directed and co-wrote 80 Days, and wrote Heaven's Vault and Overboard!. His interactive fiction has frequently been nominated for XYZZY Awards and has won on multiple occasions, including Best Game, Best Story and Best Setting awards for All Roads in 2001. Ingold's works are notable for their attention to the levels of knowledge that the player and player character have of the in-game situation, with the effect often depending on a player who understands more than the character or vice versa. Ingold has also written a number of plays, short stories and novels.

WayForward Technologies, Inc. is an American independent video game developer and publisher based in Valencia, California. Founded in March 1990 by technology entrepreneur Voldi Way, WayForward started by developing games for consoles such as the Super NES and Sega Genesis, as well as TV games and PC educational software. In 1997, they relaunched their video games arm, placing the company as a contractor for publishers and working on a variety of licensed assets.

<i>The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery</i> 1995 video game

The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery is a point-and-click adventure game, created by Jane Jensen, developed and published by Sierra On-Line, and released for MS-DOS, Macintosh, and Microsoft Windows, in 1995. The sequel to 1993's Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, the game's story focuses on a new investigation for Gabriel Knight, adjusting to his new life as a "shadow hunter", as he investigates a spate of killing around Munich believed to be the work of a werewolf, with assistance in his work from Grace Nakimura, who looks into a link between the killings and the final years of a Bavarian king in the 19th century.

<i>Portal</i> (video game) 2007 video game

Portal is a 2007 puzzle-platform game developed and published by Valve. It was released in a bundle, The Orange Box, for Windows, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and has been since ported to other systems, including Mac OS X, Linux, Android, and Nintendo Switch.

<i>Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned</i> 1999 video game

Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned is a point-and-click adventure game, created by Jane Jensen, developed and published by Sierra Studios, and released for Microsoft Windows in 1999. The sequel to 1995's The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery, the game's story focuses on the lives of Gabriel Knight and Grace Nakimura, as they become involved in a case to track down a kidnapped infant, becoming embroiled in a mystery that involves vampires, the Knights Templar, the Holy Grail and Jesus, within the Languedoc province of France; the story itself is inspired by a real-life treasure conspiracy associated to the area.

<i>Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers</i> 1993 video game

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers is a 1993 point-and-click adventure game, created by Jane Jensen and Roberta Williams, developed and published by Sierra On-Line, and released for MS-DOS, Macintosh, and Windows on December 17, 1993. The game's story, featuring the voices of Tim Curry, Leah Remini, and Mark Hamill in the CD-ROM version, focuses on Gabriel Knight, a struggling novelist, whose decision to use a spate of recent murders around New Orleans as material for a new novel, leads him into a world of voodoo magic and the truth about his family's past as supernatural fighters.

<i>Portal 2</i> 2011 video game

Portal 2 is a 2011 puzzle-platform game developed by Valve for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. The digital PC version is distributed online by Valve's Steam service, while all retail editions were distributed by Electronic Arts. A port for the Nintendo Switch was included as part of Portal: Companion Collection.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GLaDOS</span> Video game character from the Portal series

GLaDOS is a fictional character from the video game series Portal. The character was created by Erik Wolpaw and Kim Swift and voiced by Ellen McLain. GLaDOS is depicted in the series as an artificially superintelligent computer system responsible for testing and maintenance in the Aperture Science Computer-Aided Enrichment Center in all titles. While GLaDOS initially appears in the first game to simply be a voice that guides the player, her words and actions become increasingly malicious as she makes her intentions clear. The second game, as well as the Valve-created comic Lab Rat, reveals that she was mistreated by the scientists and used a neurotoxin to kill the scientists in the laboratory before the events of the first Portal. She is apparently destroyed at the end of the first game but returns in the sequel, in which she is supplanted by her former intelligence dampener and temporarily stuck on a potato battery, while her past as the human Caroline is also explored.

<i>Limbo</i> (video game) 2010 video game

Limbo is a puzzle-platform video game with horror elements developed by independent studio Playdead and originally published by Microsoft Game Studios for the Xbox 360. The game was released in July 2010 on Xbox Live Arcade, and has since been ported by Playdead to several other systems, including the PlayStation 3, Linux and Microsoft Windows. Limbo is a 2D side-scroller, incorporating a physics system that governs environmental objects and the player character. The player guides an unnamed boy through dangerous environments and traps as he searches for his sister. The developer built the game's puzzles expecting the player to fail before finding the correct solution. Playdead called the style of play "trial and death", and used gruesome imagery for the boy's deaths to steer the player from unworkable solutions.

An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story, driven by exploration and/or puzzle-solving. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media, such as literature and film, encompassing a wide variety of genres. Most adventure games are designed for a single player, since the emphasis on story and character makes multiplayer design difficult. Colossal Cave Adventure is identified by Rick Adams as the first such adventure game, first released in 1976, while other notable adventure game series include Zork, King's Quest, Monkey Island, Syberia, and Myst.

Old Man Murray (OMM) is a UGO Networks computer game commentary and reviews site, known for its highly irreverent and satiric tone. Founded in 1997, it was written and edited by Chet Faliszek and Erik Wolpaw. Old Man Murray was critical of games that received strong reviews elsewhere, Common targets of OMM news updates included John Romero and American McGee. Old Man Murray was a significant early influence in both the world of game development and internet comedy, and is often considered to have "helped birth online games journalism".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Goat Puzzle</span> Puzzle in Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars

The Goat Puzzle is a puzzle featured in Revolution Software's 1996 point and click adventure game Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars. In the puzzle, protagonist George Stobbart must gain access to an underground dig located in a castle in Lochmarne, Ireland, while avoiding a fierce goat. The puzzle's perceived difficulty is due to it requiring the player to think in a different way to their approach to previous puzzles in the game. Many gamers and critics consider it to be one of the hardest video game puzzles of all time.

Le Serpent Rouge puzzle is a puzzle found in the video game Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. It is a puzzle which surrounds a document of the same name, where protagonist Grace Nakimura attempts decipher riddles found in 13 different passages of the document. The puzzle was created by Jane Jensen, who also designed the game, and was inspired by the real-world poem of the same name, although she modified parts of it to make it solvable for players. Jensen was inspired in part by the works of author David Wood as well as the book The Tomb of God. The new fully controllable 3D camera was also a factor that went into the puzzle's design.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Hamilton, Kirk (April 21, 2012). "How We Survived Adventure Gaming's Most Hair-Tearingly Ridiculous Puzzles". Kotaku . Archived from the original on June 19, 2020. Retrieved July 5, 2020.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Salter, Anastasia (2017). Jane Jensen: Gabriel Knight, Adventure Games, Hidden Objects - Influential Video Game Designers. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. ISBN   1501327453 . Retrieved July 5, 2020.
  3. ↑ Dingman, Hayden (October 21, 2014). "Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers 20th Anniversary review: Haunted by the past". PC World . Archived from the original on November 5, 2016. Retrieved July 5, 2020.
  4. ↑ Chick, Tom (April 2000). "Third Time's a Curse". Computer Gaming World . No. 189. pp. 74, 75.
  5. ↑ Nutt, Christian (September 9, 2011). "SpyParty And The Indie Ethos: Chris Hecker Speaks". Gamasutra . p. 3. Archived from the original on June 18, 2020. Retrieved July 5, 2020.
  6. ↑ Kalata, Kurt (November 22, 2010). "Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned". Hardcore Gaming 101. Archived from the original on December 5, 2019. Retrieved July 5, 2020.
  7. ↑ Osborn, Chuck (December 24, 2013). "Broken Sword 5: The Serpent's Curse Review in Progress". IGN . Archived from the original on November 20, 2018. Retrieved July 5, 2020.
  8. ↑ Wolpaw, Erik (September 11, 2000). "Death of Adventure Games". Old Man Murray . Archived from the original on April 5, 2020. Retrieved July 7, 2020.
  9. ↑ Barratt, Charlie (September 29, 2008). "The Top 7... Stupidest Puzzles". GamesRadar+ . p. 4. Archived from the original on June 3, 2020. Retrieved July 5, 2020.
  10. ↑ Bollmer, Grant (April 18, 2019). "The Kinesthetic Index: Video Games and the Body of Motion Capture". InVisible Culture. Archived from the original on June 22, 2020. Retrieved July 5, 2020.
  11. ↑ Ore, Jonathan (February 13, 2016). "Explore Wyoming forest and uncover a mystery in Firewatch". Canadian Broadcasting Corporation . Archived from the original on December 7, 2019. Retrieved July 5, 2020.
  12. ↑ Anderson, Nels (May 5, 2009). "Without Readability - The Decline of Adventure Games". Gamasutra . Archived from the original on June 20, 2020. Retrieved July 5, 2020.
  13. ↑ Grip, Thomas (April 29, 2014). "4-Layers, A Narrative Design Approach". Gamasutra . Archived from the original on June 19, 2020. Retrieved July 5, 2020.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.