Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers

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.

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
"The flesh is weak, Johnny. Only the soul is immortal." (You know what I'm talking about, right?)

The Bad
"I got a thing about chickens" :-P

The Bottom Line
It was the time when Sierra’s classic series had started to lose their splendor and brightness. Lacking the necessary originality and innovation, they somehow repeated themselves without offering something progressive. It was then that Jane Jensen, already an employee of the company, was given the chance to make her designing debut. The result was “Gabriel Knight”, an adventure that took the world of gaming by surprise and arguably is the genre’s finest hour.

The game casts us as Gabriel Knight, an unsuccessful writer who lives in his bookshop in the French Quarter of New Orleans, striving for a breakthrough in his career. He is not the kind of person who takes life very seriously. Also, he often displays laziness, bad manners and a bit of eccentricity. But he definitely has a charming personality to save him. His assistant, Grace, is the exact opposite of him. She is serious, organized and methodical. Very often their strong personalities come to disagreement, but undoubtedly there is an interesting chemistry between them. One of Gabriel’s few and greatest concerns are the inexplicable and horrible nightmares that haunt him and deeply depress him. He is currently working on a book inspired by the so-called ‘Voodoo Murders’ that are taking place in the city during the recent weeks. His best friend, Police Detective Mosely, provides him with some useful ‘inside-information’. In the coming days, Gabriel will meet his destiny. Day by day, a chain of supernatural events will change him forever. The scenario draws elements from the ‘neo-gothic’ lore. It is dark, mysterious, erotic, thrilling and dramatic. It could as well be the script of an actual film.

“Gabriel Knight” is a ‘pseudo-3d’ adventure that utilizes the icon-based system. Specifically, it makes a new approach to this system. First of all, the game introduces a new way of making conversations with other people. Except for the ‘TALK’ one, we now have the ‘ASK’ icon. The first is used for interactions of a more open and general nature. Now the second one brings us in the ‘interrogation mode’. There, between the portraits of Gabriel and of the interviewed person, is a list of subjects for discussion. Most of them apply to all the people we interact with, but there are some that solely concern certain individuals. Talking will usually lead to other subjects that will arise. The immensity and the depth of this procedure are simply remarkable. Apart from giving us clues on how to continue our investigation, it nicely outlines the richly designed personalities of the characters we interact with. We can later hear all the dialogues through the ‘RECORDER’ option. The typical ‘HAND’ icon is here divided in four different ones. There are the ‘PICK UP’, ‘OPEN/CLOSE’, ‘OPERATE’ and ‘MOVE’ icons. This separation makes for more demanding playing, as the player must have a clear idea of what he needs to do rather than randomly clicking on things.

Visually, the title reaches excellence. It is not only that its graphics are brilliantly designed. Above all, it is how successfully they fit its environment. Their dark style, coloring and shading strongly grasp the ‘film-noir’ concept. There are many places to visit. All of them are designed in great detail and with a certain ‘dim’ effect that makes them mystifying and enigmatic. That ‘dark detail’ is present everywhere, in the sprites, in the character-portraits, in the foregrounds and the backgrounds. In some places, like the cemetery, we constantly have the feeling that something unexpected is about to suddenly take place. The graphics include several superb cut-scenes. There are two kinds of them, the first are the ones that appear every night, during Gabriel’s tormenting dreams. They consist of series of still images that succeed each other very fast, radiating a terrifying and sometimes paranoid feeling. The other ones take place during the actual playing time. They are made of small graphical strips that emerge from the left of the screen moving to the right, in a comics-like fashion.

The sound aspect of the game is also superior. The musical score is simply an outstanding classic. It contains distinctive themes for every location and occasion of the game, all wisely chosen to amplify the impact and the sensation. Relaxed pieces of music and more powerful ones appropriately. Also, several high-quality sound effects support the experience.

There are all kinds of puzzles in this adventure. Some of them require the correct use of items. Others are about being in the right place in the right moment. A few are based on close observation of factors. And finally there are those of a larger scale that involve more than one location. They are all based on logic and reason and are made with respect and care for the player and his entertainment. During playing we will also encounter several, full of agony, time-sequences* where swift moving and acting is essential. The game is generally of high difficulty and lasts for many intriguing hours.

Some months after its release in floppy disks, the game became available in CD format. The CD version has two major updates compared with the diskettes one. Firstly, it has full speech support for every person in the game. All the voices are convincing and sound right in terms of acting performance. The voice-cast even includes two quite known actors, Tim Curry and Mark Hamill as Gabriel and Detective Mosely respectively. Tim Curry satisfactorily captures the accent and the mentality of the stereotyped Southerner, overdoing it only in a couple of instances. The second important improvement is that, thanks to the CD’s capacity, the cut-scenes of the dreams now have animation that makes them much more fluid. Needless to say, anyone who wants to play this game is encouraged to prefer the enhanced CD edition.

“Gabriel Knight” had two great sequels. Each one had drastic changes in the technology and method it used. But both of them are inferior to their predecessor. It seems that they could not reach the unrepeatable atmosphere and feel of it. This timeless masterpiece is unlike anything we have ever seen. Recommended to every self-respecting gamer “Gabriel Knight” is, especially for us passionate adventurers, an experience of a lifetime.

• In the sixth day of the game, the use of a slow-down utility (e.g. Turbo) is needed for passing the time-sequence in the police station.