The Priest and the Rennes Alignment

The conspiracy theories around the secret treasure of Rennes-le-Chateau are incredibly well-trodden ground in pop culture in general due to the eye-popping (and occasionally head-scratching) success of the Da Vinci Code, but this potboiling tale of Templar riches and esoteric secrets also got a definitive workout in gaming, via the third Gabriel Knight game, though it’s largely remembered these days for the dumb cat-hair mustache puzzle rather than its take on the whole lost-bloodline-of-Jesus (plus there are vampires) thing. Heck, the topic is even relatively top of mind for me at the moment since Jimmy Maher recently wrapped up his five-part look at the conspiracy theories and the tawdry men behind the hoax.

So a threshold question for a new game offering yet another run at good ol’ Fr. Sauniere, his mysteriously-acquired riches, and the various cults and heresies of the region, is whether there’s sufficient juice to be worth the squeeze after all this time. I think The Priest and the Rennes Alignment manages to clear this bar, albeit it’s a close-run thing. Wisely I think, the game doesn’t harp on the traditional trappings of the conspiracy: we get the church and the villa that the eponymous priest built, with their creepiest elements intact, and the geographic alignments that are a significant strand of the more bonkers side of the hoax are an important part of gameplay, but besides some brief gestures towards the end, we don’t get into any of the Church history stuff, there are no secrets encoded in paintings, and the only coded message is entirely optional, and it uses the world’s simplest Caesar cipher.

In place of all that hoary rigmarole, we get a bit a bit more of an Indiana Jones plot – the protagonist is an older treasure hunter whose academic colleague goes missing, while another, more mercenary tomb robber flits menacingly around the background. Meanwhile, most of the puzzles are largely agnostic about their broader context, medium-dry-goods stuff involving locked doors, magnetism, digging in the dirt, and so on. The exception is the sequence of puzzles alluded to by the title – unlocking the endgame requires using surveying tools to take sightings from a series of important landmarks around the village in order to identify a major geomantic axis.

It’s a cool idea – speaking of Indiana Jones, I’ve loved these kinds of puzzles since I encountered them in Fate of Atlantis – but I found it a bit anticlimactic because, while all the individual steps were fun to work through, at the end I think all it does is point the way to a locked door I’d identified near the beginning of the game by examining a suspicious bit of scenery. It’s a symptom of the way the game sometimes suffers from brushing past the more esoteric edges of the Rennes conspiracy and as a result stretches a relatively small quantity of esoteric hoo-ha across too broad a swathe of gameplay. There are tons of documents to recover from nooks and crannies across the village, and I enjoyed uncovering them, but after the first one or two they pretty much just all restate the same hints about geographic alignments, crystals, and light – it gets repetitive, and none of it actually provides any hints or knowledge you need to progress through the endgame (at least said endgame does ramp things up into an appropriately-silly Grand Guignol finale).

The implementation is similarly a mixed bag. The game is coded in the ThinBASIC Adventure Builder, which has a solid-enough parser but suffers from the inability to recall previous commands with the up key. Character interaction is also mostly solid but occasionally finicky, with attempts to TELL them about important subjects often not working – sometimes I realized that’s because SHOWing a relevant object was the intended path, but sometimes reasonable-seeming interactions didn’t seem to be implemented.

The prose is well-judged, keeping things moving at a thriller’s cadence while throwing in some lurid details at appropriate moments:

"You examine the famous carved devil. The figure is grotesque yet strangely compelling - a hunched, demonic Asmodeus. His expression is one of grim resignation, as though he has been forced to serve a higher purpose against his will."

The puzzle design sometimes did bring me up short, though. While most of them are reasonably clued and fun to work through, there are a couple that are a bit obtuse: there’s one that can only be solved by examining a particular object twice, without any specific prompting that I noticed, and I was stuck for a long time on the penultimate puzzle because I kept trying to remove an obstacle to progress when all I was supposed to do was to keep trying to move past it, which leads to it being automatically removed. The biggest issue I ran into, though, was that after solving all the puzzles I could find the game prevented me from entering the endgame area, based on a general vibe that there was more to be done. I went back over the full map and found one or two optional locations I hadn’t previously explored, but they contained no additional items or relevant information, at which point I was allowed it, but it was still an annoying roadblock.

I don’t want to overly harp on these complaints – the game is pretty well put together, and I generally enjoyed my time working through it, even if there are some places where some more polishing or rethinking of the approach could have made things smoother and more engaging. As a matter of personal preference, I do like my supernatural archaeology mysteries to be deep and abstruse, so the streamlined approach the game takes isn’t as much to my taste, but it’s a perfectly reasonable one that will probably resonate better with other players, and given how much of a punch-line Rennes-le-Chateau is these days, in objective terms it probably was the right call. Still, I find myself with a hankering to replay Gabriel Knight 3 – the deep-down-the-rabbit-hole puzzles charting landmarks and doodling lines over oil paintings really do hit the spot for me…

But I'm really not sure whether they're good together. A strange thing. Maybe that helps the theme of dualism above all else that's here.

The first game is pleasantly concrete but lacking somewhat in mechanics. Explore a French village, grab items as they appear, keep most of them and use one or two in one or two nicely designed puzzles, then use a large number of them in the right order when prompted. Your end goal is, effectively, (Spoiler - click to show)to obtain a key and transport it to open the endgame area, after acquiring a collection of items needed for the endgame. This is all nice clean fun.

The second game is the gradual investigation and discovery of the secrets of Saunière and the town, and this is executed more clumsily, but still satisfying. It is not quite like assembling a jigsaw puzzle from gradually discovered pieces, or like drawing connections between information- for the most part, it's more like discovering a pile of puzzle pieces first and then slowly uncovering a dozen different ways to fit them together. Into the same picture, at times. After a certain point the novelty of discovery wears off and there's only so many ways the same information can be presented.

That sounds very strange without spoilers, so- (Spoiler - click to show)By the first few discoveries, the player will likely know that the Cathars are involved, that Saunière found some sort of secret, and that there's a hidden meaning in the landscape of the town and its environs. And then in many other ways, these themes will be reinforced without much elaboration. Showing materials to the bookseller will offer somewhat more elaboration but it doesn't feel qualitatively new.

If it weren't for the fact that the player is arbitrarily prevented from doing so, they could stumble into the endgame sequence after almost zero investigation of the town and the tower. And their experience would be worse for it- but not that much worse.

(Spoiler - click to show)Because that endgame culminates in an uninspired 'monster hiding in the cave' ending that bears no particular relationship to any of the mysteries the player has been uncovering so far. And that's the thing that cleaves the two games in twain for me and most severely hurts the experience here. On the technical level, nothing here ruins the feel or becomes distracting. There's a few fiddly aspects to the manipulation of certain objects but nothing out of the ordinary. All in all - I still recommend giving this a play. It's relatively short, and I may be getting too pedantic about criticizing the implementation of the story.