Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned

The Good
This is the third and final chapter of the Gabriel Knight series for now. In the previous adventure, Gabriel, with the help of his charming assistant Grace, solved the murders of innocent people who were eaten alive by werewolves.

In this latest adventure, both Gabriel and Grace are invited to stay at the remote French village of Rennes-le-Château, where Prince James of Albany tells Gabriel that his baby son is kidnapped and wants him to bring him back safely from the kidnappers. But as Gabriel pursues the kidnappers, a much darker plot unfolds, involving vampires and buried treasure. The in-game introduction doesn’t show much, but if you read the prologue that comes with the game, you’ll see what the main plot is about. If you’ve lost the prologue, you’ll be supplied with a PDF version when you install GK3.

As I said in my review of GK2, you take control of both Gabriel in the odd chapters, and Grace in the even ones. In GK3, it is the same deal, but we’re not talking about chapters here. Instead in GK3, you only have three days to find the baby and solve several vampire killings, but each day is split into timeblocks, and this is indicated in the game (eg: Day 1, 10am-12pm). Each timeblock ends when either Gabriel or Grace completes a certain amount of tasks. Some are short, while others are quite long. Also, you won’t be able to control Grace until Day 2 as she arrives at Rennes-le-Château on the tour bus the previous evening.

Joining them at the hotel is your average tour group. These include Estelle and Lady Howard, the two British lasses who get worked up over something; Vittorio Buchelli, the Italian; Emilio Baza, who is of Middle East origin; and John Wilkes, the Australian who would like to get his hands on the treasure before anyone does. Leading the tour group is the beautiful French woman, Madeline Buthane. Everybody involved with the tour group is a suspect. Both Gabriel and Grace are not restricted to investigating inside the village, but once they get access to the Harley, they may continue their investigation elsewhere.

During the investigation, as both characters, you have to do some detective work such as speaking to people about both the kidnapping and the killings, and dust objects for fingerprints then put them into a plastic bag. You then scan those fingerprints into SIDNEY (Schattenjäger Informational Database) that Grace brought with her when she first comes here. SIDNEY is also useful for receiving new e-mail, researching topics, making false IDs, and analyzing items that are scanned into SIDNEY.

The interface is easy to use. You use the mouse to click on an object, which brings up the verb menu basically consisting of icons. Depending on the object, you can use, move, climb, and look at, and much more. You can even inspect them to see a close-up view of the object, and this works for all characters as well. I’m glad that Sierra decided to stick with the mouse, and not use the keyboard-only method that LucasArts stuck with in their adventures such as Escape from Monkey Island and Grim Fandango, where you have to figure out which key does which. Furthermore, you can view the game at several camera angles by sliding the mouse up or down, forward or backward, to adjust the view. This makes it useful for getting objects that you can’t see at a certain angle.

The graphics in GK3 are great and make full use of 3D. GK3 does not require a 3D accelerator, although one is recommended. Without one, the graphics appear much darker unless you adjust the gamma slider included in the graphic options. If you find the resolution too big, you can adjust this to either 800x600 or 1024x768. With the 1024x768 resolution, I found that I couldn’t read what score I’ve got so far properly, so setting the resolution to 800x600 did the trick. The resolution wasn’t a problem for me in the other two GK games, as one had a fixed resolution at 320x200, and the other 640x480. The sound, on the other hand, is excellent as well. The music can be quite dramatic at times, such as when Gabriel inspects crime scenes or being pursued by kidnapped. GK3 comes on three CDs and each one of them has a day on it (eg: CD 1 has Day 1, CD 2 has Day 2, etc.).

The Bad
The speed slider that controls the speed of your character is not present in the game, so I had to suffer watching Gabriel and Grace walk slowly toward their destination. Even GK2 doesn’t have a slider, but at least Dean Erickson walked a lot faster. Like the last two GK games, GK3 tends to be a history lesson rather than an adventure game. In GK1, Gabriel asked for information about Voodoo and in GK2, Grace had to visit German museums where she researched about King Ludwig and Richard Wagner. In this game, you access SIDNEY and research topics, then when the results come up, you have to click link after link to get the information that scores you a lot of points.

When you install the game, you can access a promo of the Nightmare of Elm Street series, digitally remastered, but this has nothing to do with the game.

On its current setup, my system also can’t take the heat. First, when I played this game for long periods of time, and then left the game, many programs refused to work, and when I shut it down, Windows decided to lock up. There are many Easter Eggs in the game, but I can’t access them. When I do this, GK3 reports “unrecognized fatal exception”.

The Bottom Line
Apart from the history lesson, this game is very good. ***½

The Good
I'm a big fan of the Gabriel Knight series. I admire Jane Jensen, the creative talent behind them, and all the designers and programmers who managed to turn deep and complex stories into engrossing and fascinating games.

Gabriel Knight 3 is no exception. The two previous games did wonders in combining the natural and the supernatural, or, better to say, in making the supernatural look completely natural, feeding the player information on history, religions, philosophy, and occult sciences without becoming boring. In the third game, the story goes even deeper, into the heart of Judaism and Christianity, and shocks you with unconventional ideas about their origins and historical development. If you are, like myself, interested in this kind of stuff, you will be amazed at what Jane Jensen has achieved in this story. Of course, she didn't invent the most shocking revelations; she took them from the same sources Dan Brown later did for his poorly written and overrated Da Vinci Code. The alternate history of Christianity and speculations about apocryphal biographies of Jesus are not new; but it is commendable that Jane Jensen was not afraid of treating such stuff in a video game narrative.

What's more, she treats the material much better than Brown; she doesn't engage in cheap and badly motivated attacks on the Catholic church, or presents fictional accounts of Gnostic philosophy which anyone who has some knowledge about the matter will immediately deem ridiculous. She also adds some cool plot twists which are most probably fruits of her own fantasy. For what it's worth, Gabriel Knight 3 is a great and rare example of a very ambitious narrative that actually passes the test for credibility.

But don't think the story is all about Jesus and the Masons. As much as the historical part of the game is interesting, there are also plenty of more "earthy" moments, mostly involving the relationship between Gabriel and Grace. The new supporting cast is perhaps more interesting than in both previous games; but for the sake of nostalgia, you also meet an old pal from first game's New Orleans.

The gameplay is for the most part even deeper and more varied than it was in the previous games. The game lets you perform many actions which are not necessary to complete it. In fact, it is possible to finish the game and miss a good deal of non-vital, but interesting information. You can really play the detective in this game, spy on everybody, lurk at places that you know will be visited by somebody, take pictures and fingerprints, work with data on your laptop, and so on. The amount of pure adventuring here is huge, from tricky inventory-based puzzles to logical detective work and clue-gathering. Many puzzles need to be solved with the help of your special computer, using all the data you managed to gather. Some puzzles are extremely tough and are sure to give you a headache, but most are fascinating and unusual - such as, for example, connecting particular locations on the map to create a hexagram.

The game is divided into small time periods, that will end and begin according to the actions you performed in order to trigger this change. Although it is not real-time in sense of Last Express, it is quite refreshing and makes the game more realistic.

The game's world is done entirely in 3D, with great graphics and a fantastic engine that allows you explore the world with the camera, and also move Gabriel around - so to say, a combination of first-person exploring and third-person navigation. This works really great, allowing more immersion into the game world and also more interesting gameplay possibilities, such as being able to examine from different distance and angles everything you see on the screen. I could never understand why adventure games kept stubbornly refusing to incorporate real-time 3D. Under a Killing Moon clearly showed the way, but only few followed it; this game is one of those few.

The Bad
The game's biggest weakness are its so-called "traditional" puzzles. The detective/spying work and all the stuff you could do with the computer was really cool. On such background, the few "classical" puzzles, taken directly out of old-fashioned comedy adventures, looked completely out of place. The obvious example is the infamous "cat mustache puzzle" - I won't give you the details for fear of spoiling you this product of mastermind puzzle design, but if you imagine a kind of a weird, illogical, and downright silly action you would normally avoid even in Day of the Tentacle, you'll get the idea. Now imagine you'll have to solve such a puzzle in a game with a highly serious, detailed narrative that deals with religion, mythology, horror, and vampires. This is the equivalent of being kicked out of the story for the duration of the exercise.

This is unfortunately not the only inappropriate puzzle in the game, though probably the most notorious one. There were some other tasks that just made me shrug my shoulders. On the other hand, some of the more clever, narrative-influenced puzzles were extremely hard. The work with the computer was fascinating, but often I was simply overwhelmed by the research possibilities, without always knowing exactly how to conduct this research.

The narrative has some problems with the pacing. Sometimes days pass before you are able to learn anything interesting; at another time, plot twists are thrown at you from all the sides. In particular, the final confrontation felt rushed and not fully satisfying.

The Bottom Line
Cat mustaches and other minor problems don't change the fact that this is an awesome game. Gabriel Knight 3 should have become a bright beacon for adventure games to come; unfortunately, the rapid decline of the genre's popularity brought the series - and the genre in general - to an undeserved demise.

The Good
I have been a Sierra adventure game fan for 15 years, since the release of the original Kings Quest. I have purchased and played every game they have put out. In recent years I had moved out to other companies due to Sierra's (uh-hum) lack of quality. But with the third release in the GK series Sierra has reclaimed the crown (or at least showed that it still remembers how to put out a good game when it wants too).

Gabriel Knight 3 is a revolution for adventure games. While modern machines have far surpassed the traditional adventure game layout the genre has stagnated, urging many to claim that the end was finally near for adventure games (I think this argument started about the time that Kings Quest 2 came out). The game has taken what was best about adventure games, added in the brilliant writing of series creator Jane Jensen, and mixed with a new graphics engine that is close to the one used in Kings Quest 8 but moved beyong just killing everything that moved.

The world is fully 3D and the control of the game is based on a camera system. While I have seen this approach fail miserably in other games Gabriel Knight finally uses it not only well but exceptionally. The puzzles reqire intelligent use of the camera and rethinking of the traditional adventure game approach (pick up everything that is sharper in the background, indicating that it is important). The interface is quick to learn and once learned is very easy to navigate and use.

The graphics are also wonderful. Scaled to adjust to your machine automatically upon startup, the game graphics played beautifully on my Pentium 233 with a voodoo 2 card. On a higher end machine they are even more stunning (Pentium 2, 450 at work).

But even with the graphic and interface this game would be nothing without gameplay. It has that in abundance. The Gabriel Knight series has been the thinking man's adventure game for years and this installment only reinforces that. In addition, Jensen appears to have really had her time to develop the story as it is more detailed and rewarding than the first two games (which is saying a lot).

The Bad
Nothing. Not a thing. Other than it eventually ended.

The Bottom Line
Sierra seems set on recasting their image. With the release of both HalfLife and Homeworld they have demonstrated that they can still make games worth playing. This game is Sierra's demonstration that they can still make adventure games. If you ever were an adventure game fan, this is worth your time. If you ever wondered what the fuss was about, this is your game. If you played Mist (God help you) and wanted more, this is your game. Basically, if you are a computer game player you should check this game out. You will be seeing more just like it over the next few years and will probably hear enough about it to justify a good play through.