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Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers

Gabriel Knight has a full story; interesting varied characters, New Orleans ambience, elements of comedy, mystery and horror, all the stuff that you want but never get in an adventure game. In terms of character interaction and story it was almost as good as The Last Express. But in terms of puzzles, GK was about as bad as the abysmal City of Lost Children.

GK hits every puzzle mistake that's out there. You're required to use tools that appear as nothing but a few random multi-colored pixels. Clicking on every pixel of the screen is about the only way you're going to find everything. And even if you have the tool, you're not going to know what to do with it short of wild guessing. You're given a variety of locations to visit and, without knowing why in many cases, you have to keep going to them and asking more questions and looking for new things. It was one of those games where you do what the walkthrough says and it works (eventually: I actually used both a walkthrough and a UHS file and still had trouble getting some things solved), but you don't always know why it works and you almost never think, "I should have solved that one on my own." There's only one somewhat clever puzzle involving a mime. Some puzzles involve a tedious series of steps. It's got every evil thing except a sliding tile puzzle.

But the story's involving (which is why I wound up playing the whole thing in one day), the characters are somewhat fleshed out, the dialogue is entertaining, and this from the floppy-disk version of the game, which didn't include the vocal talents of Tim Curry and others that were on the CD-ROM (I wish I could experience the full thing, I think it would be a lot of fun).

Graphically it's somewhere in between, looking similar, but a little better than Monkey Island 1 and 2 but not as good as more recent games. The pixelly look wouldn't be of such concern if it didn't make it impossible to differentiate a telephone from a bar of soap. To make things worse, the makers decided to create the game in a movie ratio, so there's black on the top and the bottom of the monitor, meaning that they could have made everything easier to see if they'd just used the normal monitor ratio.

GK makes you think about the potential for adventure games. What would happen if the person who wrote the story and dialogue for GK teamed with whoever wrote the puzzles for a plotless gem like Riven: The Sequel to Myst? Will it ever happen? One can only dream.

-- Charles Herold -1999

Glitches:There are a couple of major glitches in this game. Sierra has a patch that presumably fixes them, but the patch includes a text file explaining ways to fix problems without using the patch (which reins all your save games).