Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers

aka: Gabriel Knight I, Gabriel Knight: Die Sünden der Väter, Gabriel Knight: Les péchés des ancêtres, Gabriel Knight: Lucha Contra Las Fuerzas Sobrenaturales, Gabriel Knight: Pecados dos Pais, Gabriel: Zikhronot Afelim
Moby ID: 116
DOS Specs
Buy on Windows
$5.99 new on Steam

Description official descriptions

Gabriel Knight is a wise-cracking bookstore owner and would-be author. He is the last in a long line of Shadow Hunters, those fated to fight supernatural forces of evil. Tormented by terrifying nightmares, he must spend every waking moment scouring the side streets and back alleys of New Orleans for the key to his dark past. One day, a blood-chilling murder shocks the inhabitants of the city. The police detective assigned to investigate the crime is Gabriel's friend. In the beginning Gabriel collects evidence in hope of using the material for his new novel; but soon he finds himself personally involved in the investigation, and plunges deeper into the world of secret societies and murderous cults.

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers is a third-person puzzle-solving adventure game. Created by Jane Jensen, the game differs from Sierra's Quest games (e.g. Space Quest) by having a realistic setting and focusing (despite its supernatural elements and humor) on mature themes and detective work. In this way it is more similar to the company's earlier Laura Bow games.

The game's icon-based interface is the same as in Sierra's previous titles, with verb commands that allow interaction with the game world and its inhabitants. Though the game still has plenty of inventory-based puzzles characteristic for classic adventure, its gameplay is heavily inclined towards dialogue. Typically, Gabriel will have to interrogate other characters, choosing conversation topics and thus gradually finding clues and advancing towards the mystery's solution.

The game's locations are done in hand-painted style. The CD version of the game adds full voice-overs to the dialogues, as well as narrator's voice to text descriptions.

Spellings

  • גבריאל: זיכרונות אפלים - Hebrew spelling
  • 狩魔猎人 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (DOS version)

99 People (91 developers, 8 thanks) · View all

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Reviews

Critics

Average score: 86% (based on 33 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.2 out of 5 (based on 307 ratings with 18 reviews)

A shadow lurks on New Orleans...

The Good
Who said video-games were a kid thing? The one who said that should see Gabriel Knight to keep his mouth closed, we are in front of a game (nearly a film) which has been worked on every department with extremely great care. When i first thought about writing this review, the first thing that came to my mind was: Where the hell i am gonna start?! Obviously Gabriel Knight isn't a common game, first you get spellbound by that great atmosphere in St. George's Library (that main theme surely is brilliant!) then you know Gabriel some more and feel some kind of sympathy towards him, then you see the wonderful plot develop... and well, what comes later is a rollercoaster of feelings comparable just to just a few great films. Almost everything in that game is good.

The Bad
Maybe some of the sprites could have been better worked, it is hard to know what object is lying on a table when you only see four pixels of the same tone... but anyway the good points beat that.

The Bottom Line
Tired of silly games with easy and meaningless plots? Try Gabriel Knight, maybe it will change your conception of gaming. It is a great antecedent to the maybe even greater sequels.

DOS · by Depth Lord (934) · 2005

One of the Few Great Gaming Stories

The Good
Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father introduced anew level of story-telling to video games. For the first time, a game could have an elaborate, detail, adult storyline including a deeply trouble protagonist.

The cutscenes are amazing. Stylistically, they hold up even today. Presented in a quasi-comicbook mode, they truly moved the story along. Also, the fully animated cutscenes were similarly fantastic. And the video-captured moment where Gabe gets on his motorcycle -- in '93 this had me going!

The Bad
The windows 3.x version had a few nasty lock-up bugs. Patches became available.

Some of the conversations were long-winded. I recall the dialogues with Gabe's grandmother (while discussing family history) being a little much.

The Bottom Line
Gabriel Knight should be played by all adventure game fans. The game truly was the birthplace of artful storytelling in the video game world.

Windows 3.x · by Game22 (35) · 2004

This review is brought to you by the letter V... for voodoo

The Good
If you've played King's Quest VI, you will know that it was co-designed (and written) by Jane Jensen, who was praised for her storytelling techniques, and it was part of the reason why KQ6 is the best-selling KQ game of all time. Impressed by her talents as a writer, Sierra gave her a chance to spear-head one of the best series ever to come out of the company. Each of the three games in the Gabriel Knight series focuses on a particular style and subject; and Sins of the Fathers, the first game in the series, is a point-and-click adventure game and focuses on Voodoo, a far cry from the fantasy setting.

Gabriel Knight is the last in the long line of Schattenjӓgers – shadow hunters – whose purposes are to fight the dark forces of the supernatural. He is also researching a book about Voodoo that causes him to have nightmares. He has to spend every moment in New Orleans searching for the key to his dark past. One day, a ritualistic murder torments the city and Gabriel attends the crime scene hoping to collect material for his new book, but ends up going down a dangerous path of secret societies and murderous cults.

Sins of the Fathers is quite a long adventure game. It consists of ten days, and each one starts off with a part of a poem by Gabriel himself, and you won't see how it ends until the final day. You should pay attention to these snippets as they tell you what is going to happen on or what you are supposed to do. For instance, the part on the first day refers to Gabriel's initial sighting of a mysterious woman he meets. Having said that, I like the stuff Gabriel has to do on most of the days, stuff such as attending the crime scene, sit on a police interview, write his own coded message, and attend a conclave out in the swamp (at his own risk).

Gabriel will meet up with many characters throughout the game. Some characters will help him while some will be hostile toward him. Grace, his assistant, is the first of the major characters we meet. She is primary there to help Gabriel with his research. I like the chemistry between her and Gabriel, with him making these great one-liners and Grace having none of it. She gets more and more worried about Gabriel as he gets closer to danger. The next major character we meet is Mosely. He is a police detective who happens to be a close friend of Gabriel. He's happy to help Gabriel with any information for his book. I enjoyed how Gabriel proves to be a smart-aleck toward Mosely (in a nice kind of way, of course).

The game comes on both floppy and CD versions, with the latter featuring full speech, high-res art, and a “Making of” video. In the CD version, most of the characters are portrayed by Hollywood actors (such as Tim Curry and Mark Hamill) who deliver top-notch performances, and the minor characters are portrayed by the same actors. Curry returns in the third game as Jensen believed that he represented the real voice of Gabriel.

The amount of research put into the game is just amazing, and the manual makes mention of the references that Sierra used. Because of these references, I learned about certain Voodoo terms that I never heard before, such as Hoodoo and Vodoun, as well as names that refer to objects used in the voodoo conclaves. This wasn't the first time Sierra put research into the game. They did it with The Dagger of Amon Ra, as well as Gold Rush! before that.

Gabriel can die, just like any other protagonist in a Sierra adventure game. However, having him just roam around and not having him die until halfway through the adventure is a stroke of genius, and this is a technique used in the two other games. I think GK is death-free until around the fifth day. The box doesn't warn that the game contains “adult subject matter” for nothing. In Sins of the Fathers, there is a fair amount of blood and hideous deaths, and there is one scene in the game where I was about to get turned on by the sight of the female antagonist dancing around wearing nothing but a loincloth.

The game was the last of the Sierra adventure games to use true, hand-painted backgrounds before the company turned its attention to interactive movies and Disney-style graphics. There is a certain palette Sierra used that gives Sins of the Fathers a dark and sinister feel to it. The character portraits are great and don't suffer from the “ventriloquist bug” that plagues characters in other Sierra games (the hermit from King's Quest V, for instance).

The soundtrack is done by Robert Holmes (Jane Jensen's husband now), and he did a brilliant job making sure the soundtrack blends in with the situation that Gabriel is in. I enjoyed listening to the title tune, which can only be heard in the CD version. The sound effects are a mixed-bag in both versions of the game. In the disk version, they are OK, but nothing to get excited about. They are on par with those found in Sierra's games that use the SCI1 engine. In the CD version, they act as ambient sound effects, since they are stored in .wav files and played throughout the game, adding to the atmosphere. But there is a problem with this as I will discuss in “The Bad” section.

Finally, both versions of the game come with a graphic novel about a murder that took place in South Carolina three-hundred years ago, written by Jensen and illustrated by Terese Neilsen. It is about one of Gabriel's ancestors who falls in love with a beautiful witch, then betrays her. I enjoyed reading this and it sets up the game nicely. I recommend you read this, even if you have no plans to play the game.

The Bad
Sins of the Fathers has an extended icon bar where there are extras icons such as “Open”, “Operate”, and “Move”, as well as those we are familiar with in a Sierra game. This creates confusion for new players. When I played this game for the first time for example, I ended up using the hand cursor on the bike in Jackson Square to eavesdrop on some radio chatter. The game wouldn't let me do this, as I needed to “operate” it instead.

As I said before, the CD version contains ambient sound effects that are stored in .wav files. But when these are played, there is a significant pause before the dialogue is spoken. When you restore a game in both versions, the game's volume is automatically set too high instead of the volume you set yourself.

If you are on Day 6 and you got anything higher than a Pentium, you will have problems getting into Mosely's office when he is not there. If this happens to you, you need to use DOSBox or go into your BIOS and disable the L2 cache. There was one time where I tried playing the Windows version (that is included on the CD) while the L2 cache was disabled, but it behaved like a dinosaur resulting in my computer locking up.


The Bottom Line
I like to think of Sins of the Fathers as Monkey Island 2 with a much, darker tone since it has the same amount of humor while maintaining a dark and sinister atmosphere. What is unique about it is death occurs much later in the game, and this is carried over to the next two GK games. Sins of the Fathers is an excellent adventure game from Sierra, and one that I recommend you having in your collection and played at least once.

DOS · by Katakis | カタキス (43092) · 2016

[ View all 18 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Gabriel Knight Multimedia CD-ROM Edwin Drost (9295) Feb 4, 2017
The game gets stuck at day 5 Nowhere Girl (8680) Apr 28, 2016
A GK remake and no one's talking about it chirinea (47504) Nov 11, 2014
I really dislike the narrator SnubPollard (62) Feb 8, 2013

Trivia

CD version

The CD version of the game includes a 20 minute behind the scenes avi file depicting the creation of Gabriel Knight. The file also included interviews with most of the cast, lead designer/writer Jane Jensen and others.

Covermount releases

  • The full, original game on CD was bundled with the 1/2001 edition of Computer Gaming World magazine.
  • The full, original game on CD was bundled with the July 1997 edition of CD-Rom Today, a Brazilian computer magazine.

German version

The German CD-ROM version has a major bug, which causes to crash the games at at least three points during the game. The program obviously hangs, because of a corrupted soundfile. Turn off voices & music in the crashing scenes and you can go on playing.

Leilani Jones

Leilani Jones (Malia Gedde) seems to like the Voodoo Priestess gig. She also plays one in LucasArts' Curse of Monkey Island.

Novel

Jane Jensen> has written a novelization of the game, first printed in February 1997, through Penguin's ROC imprint. The game's sequel was also given the novelization treatment.

References

  • It could be a coincidence, but there is a real life blues musician from Lousiana, named Dr. John. Perhaps the character's name came from a fan.
  • On day 3, you’re able to attend a (pretty boring) lecture at the Tulane university. Take a walk in the lecture hall and read the bulletin board. After looking at it a few times, you’ll get the message “There's a notice for a lecture on Investigative Reporting techniques to be given by octogenarian Pulitzer Prize winner Laura Bow Dorian." This refers to two game characters from the Laura Bow II – Dagger of Amon Ra adventure: Laura Bow en Steve Dorian. In the game, they fell in love. An octogenarian means someone between 80 and 90 in age, so this assumes the two of them got married in the end.

Awards

  • Computer Gaming World
    • June 1994 (Issue #119) – Adventure Game of the Year (together with Maniac Mansion 2: Day of the Tentacle
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) – #7 Best Way To Die In Computer Gaming (get the heart ripped out by a zombie)

Information also contributed by Alan Chan, chirinea, Chris Mikesell, Isdaron; Pseudo_Intellectual, Sciere and Zovni

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Eurythmic.

Windows added by Picard. Windows 3.x added by MAT. Macintosh added by Katakis | カタキス.

Additional contributors: MAT, Andrew Hartnett, Unicorn Lynx, Jeanne, Daniel Saner, chirinea, Sciere, Xoleras, Boston Low, 1gnition, Zeppin, Patrick Bregger.

Game added May 13, 1999. Last modified January 21, 2024.