Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers

The Good
Having "The Beast Within" on my desk, it didn't take me too long for me to realize getting other GKs is about to be inevitable for me. That second installment of Gabriel Knight was really a masterpiece in everything, down from the story, acting, animations and details, all the way to the main point of every greatly developed game, sticking your a$$ near the computer until the very fine ending, and more, as long as the influence works.

Well, about just a month after, I got myself GK1 and GK3 (and I don't have to say original GK1 is not that easy to find nowadays, not the SEALED mint box, that is :) I plugged the game in and I was already awaited with the well known music theme up front. I cannot say I was amused by the animation quality, but I sure liked the macho crap from my character all the time, as well as 256 colors nicely painted backgrounds and everything else.

First of all, I'll mention this, I'm by no means fond of any of seen in Gabriel Knight series, not I like Voodoo topics (expect when it comes for Monkey Island), nor werewolves, and especially not vampires. However, Gabriel Knight by some means (especially the good plot, acting and atmosphere) allowed me to like the mentioned all the way to the end.

I have a CD version of this game, so I must admit that speech quality is one of the best ever seen. Same with GK3, and that Tim Curry (Gabriel Knight) has really great voice/accent to be used as main character. Only game that has better voices and speech quality (and I don't mean in technical way) is "Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis". Variety of accents and talks in that game was awesome.

All in one, this is one helluva adventure game with a slight step towards mystical/occult forces and horror, great nevertheless. Of course, as it usually goes for some game series, all three games are heavily connected, so if you haven't played this one or any other GK game yet, this is where you should start.

Oh boy, I just loove that old 2d poin 'n' click adventure games with 256 colors or less, they're just marvelous. However, I have nothing against adventure games with more colors or nice effects and animations like "Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned", "Blackstone Chronicles: An Adventure in Terror", "Tex Murphy: Overseer", "Blade Runner" or others. Anyway, my personal favorite game genre is 'adventure' one, so it's to expect that I'll be more oriented on having such games, but hey, if I continue here, I'll literally go off-topic. This is one in a lifetime opportunity to experience really great story, no matter which GK you pick out of the series.

The Bad
One thing really got on my nerves while playing this game, and that is the witchy female voice that describes everything Gabriel looks or does. However, if you have a floppy version of a game, you'll be spared of that, but you'll also loose many addings.

The Bottom Line
I could never figure how many moves they make for a 2d character in this or such related adventure games, like "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade". Beside the usual walking and facing sides, oh, and yeah, shocking heads when talking (ckech Indy for that, lol), the characters also have some major actions they can do, like slipping, getting fired from the cannon, fighting, reading newspapers,... I mean, is that all in the character's level of actions, or separate aniamtion sequences, beats me. Anyway, something like that can really improve the final score in the game, as well as the sounds if well adjusted, and they are here, in this game.

Dialogues are made a bit different from the other adventure games, it's more like a new image appears with the two characters that talk and you have the stuff to ask/discuss about. Good thing is that you can set captioning while hearing it. I just love that option. Not many newer games have that things, sigh!

"Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers" can be a bit hard at some points, and illogical (not too sided) like "Monkey Island", but is mostly okay to play, with various of locations to visit and people to talk to. Beside your main place, New Orleans, you'll also visit Germany (more about that in TBW) and Africa. Yup, travellin's insurrance included. Try this game, and if you're any kinda adventurer, you'll ask for more and guess what, this time there really is 'more' and it stands in every sence of word, bigger, better, meaner, hehe, I sound like quoting the "Worms" now. Let me put it this way, there is absolutely nothing about this game to give you the slightest reason not to get it, unless you're a true hater to adventure games.

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.

The Good
Gabriel Knight - Sins of the Fathers is a game I knew little about until I bought it on GOG.com along with its two sequels. I also saw Pushinguproses' episode dedicated to the game and after watching her review I was very excited to play the game. Not only did I enjoy it, but Gabriel Knight also revitalized my appetite for adventure games!

In Gabriel Knight - Sins of the Fathers, you play as the titular character, an ambitious but not very successful novelist who lives in New Orleans and owns a book store (that virtually nobody actually visits). Suffering from writer's block, Gabriel decides to help his best friend and police detective Mosely solve a string of murders in which the murder victims were apparently used in Voodoo inspired sacrificial rituals. As our hero investigates the case, he discovers that his German ancestors have quite some involvement in the events happening in New Orleans. He also encounters Malia Gedde, a beautiful woman who gets romantically involved with Gabriel but who keeps a very dark secret away from him.

The game's story is told through the course of ten days and will take Gabriel to various real-life New Orleans locations such as Jackson Square, the Tulane University and the Bayou St. John. He will also visit a castle in Germany and mummy-infested catacombs in Africa. For every day, you have a certain set of puzzles to solve, information to discover and items to find before you can move on to the next day.

The game itself plays like a traditional 90s Sierra point-and-click adventure. So you click all over the screen in order to move Gabriel around, let him interact with objects or people or examine his surroundings. The game also has a score system (a stable feature in Sierra adventure games). You won't get the full score if you only do the actions necessary to complete the game. This adds some nice replay value and encourages you to explore and experiment. When you talk to people, you have access to a huge variety of subjects to talk about, you can ask them important questions in order to progress the story or just have some small-talk with them. It adds great depth to the conversations and helps fleshing out the characters you meet.

Two of the game's best aspects are its story and characters. The story may be a bit unoriginal, but it's told in such a way that it keeps you interested until the very end. Like Gabriel himself, you will slowly but surely discover the truth behind the murders, Gabriel's family and what the word Schattenjäger means. As you play through the game you will also get some nice educational information about New Orleans and Voodoo culture (the real one and not what you saw in the second Indiana Jones movie).

When it comes to the characters in the game, you can expect quite a variety of personalities, both friendly and hostile. Aside from the characters I mentioned before, there's Gabriel's sexy and intelligent personal assistant Grace (who remains professional and level-headed despite Gabriel's macho humor). You will also meet the intimidating and shady Voodoo museum owner Dr. John and Gabriel's relative Wolfgang, who plays a key role later in the game.

Voice acting and music is nothing short of amazing. The game has some very talented actors voicing its characters. For example, Gabriel Knight is voiced by Tim Curry, detective Mosely has Mark Hamill's vocal chords provided to him and Michael Dorn gives life to Dr. John. Virtually all actors did a splendid job at bringing their characters to life and make them very memorable. Gabriel Knight in particular steals the show. He's a flawed and relatable regular Joe, he sometimes lets his impulses get the better off him but his incorruptible sense of justice and fearless daredevil attitude make him really stand out from the crowd.

The music, composed by Robert Holmes, has plenty of variety and always fits perfectly in the situations you encounter in the game. The musical score ranges from joyful fanfare music and blues rock to downright threatening African drumming. It all adds to the game's compelling and sometimes very scary atmosphere. You cannot help but feel that the villains are watching you every move and that they could just kill you when they want to. In particular the moments taking place in the African catacombs really unsettled me. It features the dark and brooding drumming I already mentioned, and seeing all those seemingly dead mummies really made me wonder what will happen next!

The Bad
There are a few moments at the game's final day wherein you may risk getting into an unwinnable situation. I'm not sure whether there are similar situations at earlier days of the game, therefore I highly recommend you to use at least two saves and use one of them to save your game at the beginning of each day.

The game's narrator gets on my nerves from time to time. I believe the developers wanted her to be a Voodoo witch or fortuneteller but she really oversells her role in my opinion. She speaks very slowly and with way too much drama. Fortunately, you can turn her voice off in the game's options.

Just as a little warning, Gabriel Knight is pretty gory at times. The game doesn't shy away from showing you lying on the floor with a zombie on top of you, ripping out your heart and eating it as an afternoon snack! So avoid this game if you're squeamish about blood and guts.

The Bottom Line
Gabriel Knight - Sins of the Fathers is considered among many to be one of the all time greatest games in the adventure genre and I completely agree with that. Like a great crime novel, you really get engaged into the story and want to play on until the very end. This combined with the game's memorable cast of characters, awesome soundtrack and voice acting makes the game a thrilling rollercoaster ride! Now it's your turn to play, Schattenjäger!