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…