The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery

aka: A Fera Interior: Um Mistério de Gabriel Knight, GK2, Gabriel Knight 2, Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within, Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within, TBW, Ta'alumat Gabriel Knight: Ha-Khaya she Betokho, The Beast Within: Ein Gabriel Knight Krimi, Un Mystère avec Gabriel Knight : The Beast Within
Moby ID: 118
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$5.99 new on Steam

Description official descriptions

The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery is a direct sequel to Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, the first in the supernatural mystery adventure series telling the story of a bookstore owner and writer Gabriel Knight, the last offspring of generations of Schattenjaegers (shadow hunters), whose task is to fight the evil forces that abound in the world.

After leaving New Orleans, Gabriel moves to the Ritter Castle in Bavaria, Germany, his family heritage. One day, a group of peasants approach the castle, and the elder tells Gabriel about a terrible death of a little girl, who was killed by a vicious wolf. Suspecting the wolf could be a supernatural creature, the peasant asks the Schattenjaeger to purge the evil. The investigation brings Gabriel and his assistant Grace Nakimura to the mysterious Hunter Society and to Bavaria's dark past.

The game utilizes a cast of live actors and full-motion video technology: the actors are filmed over photorealistic images of Munich and its surroundings, and nearly every interaction with the environment leads to a FMV sequence. Despite its visual style, The Beast Within is not an interactive movie, but a full-fledged adventure game with many dialogues, detective work to do, and puzzles to solve. Unlike the first game, it is entirely controlled through point-and-click actions - all the icons have been replaced by a single cursor. Both Gabriel and Grace are available as playable characters during different chapters of the story.

Spellings

  • תעלומת Gabriel Knight: ×”×—×™×” שבתוכו - Hebrew spelling
  • 狩魔猎人2 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (DOS version)

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[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 89% (based on 33 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 247 ratings with 12 reviews)

A victim of the dreaded FMV-death

The Good
Gabriel Knight 2 was, for a long time, a holy grail for me. It was that game I never did seem to get my hands on, but always wanted to play, since I loved the first game so much. I even played part three before I played this game. I love the first game, and I like the third, despite its flaws, but would I enjoy this, the series FMV de-tour?

First of all, there is a good story here, buried beneath layers of horrible graphics, disturbingly disgusting design and useless actors. If you're less picky about those things than I am, you might enjoy this.

The music is also pretty good, although a bit over the top at times. The special effects are, although just as bad as in Phantasmagoria, quite amusing to look at (but never ever scary).

The Bad
This really should not have been an FMV-game. The video-sequences are horrible. They might have been fun to look at at the time the game was released. At that time the so called multimedia products flooded the markets. Useless cd-roms full of pixely and crappy videos and bad 3d-graphics. This development was soon revealed to produce hollow and quite crappy products and they soon started to dissapear.

The same goes for FMV-games. They were expensive to produce, sure, but the main reason they stopped making them was that they all sucked, and the audience soon discovered that, just as soon as the initial curiosity was settled.

Gabriel Knight 2 was just produced in the worst of times, and hence, a good game was fundamentally ruined. Just one look at Gabriel Knights butt-ugly shirt and you want to vomit. When he walks around, taking his time doing the simplest thing, because everything has to trigger horrible FMV-sequences of Gabriel opening doors, turning around, walking, etc. It's unbearable.

The absolute worst part, however, is the environments. The illusion that Gabriel is walking around in an actual, living world, is painfully absent. Instead, Gabriel floats around on pixely, badly rendered backgrounds that are so ill designed it looks like some three year old's doll house gone horribly wrong.

You might think I'm superficial to concentrate so much on things like graphics and presentation. Well, my friend, sometimes, the surface contains the biggest depths. Sometimes the look of something is what tells the story, or conveys the message. It's called supersurface, and Gabriel Knight 2 lacks every bit of it. All that's left are promises of what could have been.

The Bottom Line
A great game ruined by its choice of form. FMV-games never was, and will never be, anything but garbage. It's a disgrace.

Windows · by Joakim Kihlman (231) · 2008

More good than bad things

The Good
It was a fantastic idea. I hope Sierra would release another game like that in future (well G.K. III was bad; they made it more action than adventure... and the serie should stay on adventure side). The voice was great quality, images are clear and game is long and complex. There are lots of places to visit and lots of people to meet and trick. The story was really cool. I like those which are not about some weird aliens, but more close to human, more realistic. This game was unreal only about werewolfs (which actually don't exist; or maybe?). It was so good that I had to play it once more and I'm sure I'll do it at least once in future.

The Bad
Bad things were more technical problems. The game is on 6 CD's and it's annoying when you need to change CD's in the middle of the game. They've also fooled it when you need to insert a new CD, play intro animation and then change back to previous CD etc. Also the animations could be a bit more colourful (they're only in 256 colors). And maybe one more thing was annoying. When the speech should begin, it played for a moment somewhere in the middle of it, and then begin the same time with animation normally.

The Bottom Line
It's really great game and I recommend it to everyone who likes adventure games, puzzle solving games and/or watch animations. It has lots of them and they're long. Animations were taken with cameras and were not drawn (only 2 or 3 animations maybe - of many).

Windows · by frin (107) · 2015

Very good, but WHY an interactive movie style?

The Good
The plot was great, the scipting superb and the graphics were quite impressive. The locations were accurately reproduced and the interface was simple.

The Bad
There was no need to deviate from the traditional style, and replace it with poorly made FMV sequences. The guy who played Gabriel wasn't right for the role, and the conversations were too melodramatic, detracting from the game's atmosphere.

The Bottom Line
A thoroughly excellent adventure game, but frustatingly peppered with god-awful FMV sequences for conversations. A good effort, but mistakes were made.

Windows · by Gav Powell (31) · 2000

[ View all 12 player reviews ]

Trivia

1001 Video Games

The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Development

The Beast Within was originally intended to take place over the course of nine chapters instead of six. The additional three would have had the player shift into the past in order to play as King Ludwig II. These chapters were ultimately cut from the game due to time constraints, budgetary limitations, and the fact that this would have required even more CDs for a game that already requires six discs.

The game's backgrounds were created from photographs taken on location in Germany.

German language

Most Germans in The Beast Within are played by American actors. They thus speak German with a bemusing English accent. In the completely localized German version of the game, quite a few "German" characters have a notable American accent, which is even stranger. Additionally, because Gabriel and Grace speak German in the localized version, the translators had a problem in dealing with scenes in which one of the protagonists speaks to a German and doesn't understand him. The problem was solved somewhat half-heartedly by suggesting that Gabriel and company speak High German, whereas the locals speak in a Bavarian dialect.

German version

When the game was first released in Germany it was the un-dubbed and un-subtitled version which had a few scenes censored (for example, a character sitting in his cave and eating flesh from a human bone). The screen would go black and instead of being able to see what was happening the player would instead see a short message on the screen in German simply describing the scene. When the game was later released in its localized German these scenes were uncensored.

French version

Though the game was greeted with excellent critical reviews in France by the time of its release, the French-dubbed version is now quite infamous for its supposed mediocrity, despite being the work of a professional dubbing team. Among the numerous recriminations against the French version, one of the most famous is that you can actually hear several times the dubbing actors making mistakes while reading and then deciding to start again without any kind of editing.

Inaccuracies

  • In the game's opening movie, the camera shows a close-up of a scar on Gabriel's arm (acquired in Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers). The scar is on the wrong arm.
  • There is no sign of the chapel in Schloss Ritter that featured so prominently in Sins of the Fathers.
  • When Grace browses the part of the Schattenjäger library that is supposed to contain books on the occult, she finds a book on Lycantrophy between volumes with such German titles as Das Nest and Der Arzt von Stalingrad. These are novels without any relation to occultism.
  • On looking at a window display of watches in Munich, Gabriel claims that he can't stand wearing things on his wrist. In a later scene, a watch is clearly visible on his arm.
  • German Volkswagen Golf keys have a standardized look. The car key that Gabriel carries around in his inventory will unlock anything except the Golf he drives. His car also has no license plate.
  • Even though Grace doesn't speak German, she has no problem reading loudly from Cosima Wagner's diary, which was most likely not written in English.
  • In the book Lore and Law it is said that in Brazil there's a priesthood society called "Manos Del Sol" (Hands of the Sun). But the language spoken in Brazil is Portuguese, and "Manos Del Sol" is in Spanish. The correct name would be "Homens do Sol", as is seen in Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, when Gabriel researches the same subject on SIDNEY, the computer database of shadow hunter data.

Actors

Kay Kuter (Werner Huber) seems to enjoy playing the role of a bartender; he also plays one (Griswold Goodsoup) in The Curse of Monkey Island.

Novel

Jane Jensen, the series' designer, has written a novelization of this game as well as one of the first game (Sins of the Fathers).

Awards

  • Computer Gaming World
    • June 1996 (Issue #143) – Game of the Year
    • November 1996 (15h anniversary issue) - #17 in the “150 Best Games of All Time” list
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) – #10 Hardest Computer Game
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) – #7 Most Memorable Game Villain (Fredrick von Glower)
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) – #4 Most Rewarding Ending of All Time
    • November 2003 (Issue #232) – Introduced into the Hall of Fame
  • PC Gamer
    • April 2005 - #33 in the "50 Best Games of All Time" list

Information also contributed by -Chris, Adam Schoales, Alan Chan, chiriniea, Foxhack, PCGamer77 and Swordmaster

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Eurythmic.

Macintosh added by chirinea. DOS added by MAT.

Additional contributors: Trixter, MAT, Adam Baratz, Unicorn Lynx, Jeanne, The cranky hermit, formercontrib, Zeppin, Dudujones, Patrick Bregger, FatherJack, RetroArchives.fr.

Game added May 15, 1999. Last modified January 23, 2024.