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Gabriel Knight: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned  Released: 1999 Manufacturer: Sierra In Brief: Engrossing game with serious performance issues.
I wrote a review of "Gabriel Knight: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned" for Time Digital (read it here), and I  don't want to repeat what I wrote there, so you can go read that yourself. In brief, I wrote that it was a really good game, with terrific puzzles, an involving plot, and great voice acting by Tim Curry (many people hated Curry's take on the character, saying Gabriel came across as too snide, but I like snide). Unfortunately I was only allowed 500 words, so I'll just add a few thoughts.
GK3 is the game in which Jane Jenson finally figured out how to design puzzles. Both Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers and Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within had serious gameplay issues that marred the game, but while there are still a few places where I got pissed off, GK3 not only has few awful puzzles, it actually has a few I really, really liked. The first major puzzle involving getting a passport is a fun, lighthearted romp, the big research puzzle Le Serpent Rouge is a fascinating exercise in pure analytical thought. The 7th Guest-style chessboard puzzle and the other little end puzzles were also fun.
The game also has a lot of atmosphere, in spite of the rather flat look of its highly detailed but slightly drab graphics. Walking around a winery trying to find a weird, whining cry, shadowing suspicious characters, having sudden visions: It's all pretty cool.
The story and dialogue are up to Jane Jenson's usual standards. Like GK2 this story has a loose historical basis, and in fact involves a real life mystery, which you get to solve. GK3 also follows it's predecessor's time block format, with less times where something stupid mires you in a time zone from which you cannot escape (less times, not no times; there is one particularly egregious puzzle early on).
Easily the best of the Gabriel Knight series, this one makes you hunger for Gabriel Knight 4. Yet, there were still a good many problems, although due to the severe word constraint I had to leave out all my complaints about the game from my Time Digital review. When I mentioned this to the PR lady at Sierra she asked me to send my complaints along to her, and here's what I sent her (shortened):
Complaints: The hideous wait whenever you walk through a door (about 5 seconds with a 400mhz CPU). There should be a way to make those load times smaller. It would have made sense if certain areas were loaded all at once (like loading the museum at the same time as the museum lobby, or the phones the same time as the hotel lobby). I would be willing to have each room contain identical wallpaper if it would have knocked a second off the load time. And playing with the resolution and other controls seems to have little to no effect on this. And for all those insane load times, it's not as pretty as Mortyr. The load time problem would have been helped enormously if there were a way to travel the village by map.
Stupidest thing in the game: In Grace's first time block you have to look up a certain word on Sydney. The word is mentioned in the graphic novel, if you bother to read it (one objection to the game is that to get the whole story you have to read the pdf formatted comic book that comes on disk 1), and once in the game, so it's one of the last things you would think to look up. And the really sick thing is, YOU NEVER USE THIS INFORMATION IN THE GAME!!! I got stuck on "what the hell am I supposed to do now to get out of this time block?" more often than I got stuck on actual puzzles.
Grace Nakamura looks about as Asian as Posey Parker. What's with that?
The keyboard was useless for movement: you could move forward fairly well, but turning around was painfully slow. There should have been an option to change the speed of moving and panning.
The character movement is really way too much like the way people moved in Alone in the Dark, you know, that weird, slow, obviously computer-generated gambol. Minor complaint, but still ...
Madeleine should have been cuter. The game acted like she was sexy, but Grace and the maid were both cuter. And Madeleine's running her hand through her hair just looked weird, like she had a nervous tick.
For all of that, it's still a first-rate game, and I highly recommend it. -- Charles Herold -1999
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