So while I’m continuing to jones for Jane Jensen’s new game, Gray Matter, I figured I’d go all nostalgic this week and remember another great Jane Jensen game to keep the Jensen shakes at bay: Gabriel Knight Sins of the Father.
The Gabriel Knight series is one I didn’t actually start playing until…well, until I first moved to Toronto four years ago. Again, most of that had to do with growing up with fairly behind the times computers, but some of it was due to the fact that I just didn’t really know about the series. The only clue I had that it existed was when as a teenager I installed Riven (RIVEN!) and it included a trailer for Gabriel Knight 2. I remember after seeing that trailer very much wanting to play that game, but Sarnia at the time had no real video game store and going out to find obscure adventure titles at Staples was often a big letdown. By the time we got our EB Games, Gabriel Knight was kind of considered old school and so it was harder and harder to find a copy. And admittedly, after that it kind of faded from my memory.
It was only later when I read an article about Gabriel Knight that it sparked my interest again and I hunted down a torrent for the first game, Gabriel Knight Sins of the Father. The game is old school, but it was one of the first games to also come out on CD-ROM so I can assure you it’s not the easiest torrent to download. You have to download other…things…that help CD things run torrent things…and then download helpful things so that the game will run on Windows XP with sound and voices and not give you an error message of doom. Then to even start the game you have to load..things and adjust other things and yeah, you get the idea of how computer illiterate I am. Thankfully, I’m a fiddler and often fiddle around enough that things work for me.
But it was sooooo worth the effort. Gabriel Knight has quickly become one of my favourite game series of all time. Fair warning to those who haven’t played the game: this is going to be rife with spoilers. I would highly recommend you play the game first before reading along. Luckily you don’t have to go through the insane torrent adventure I first went through to get the game. GOG.com is a great website to get old games for pretty cheap prices. Yeah yeah, I know, there are free torrents out there, but when you think about it $5-10 isn’t really all that much to spend especially when these people have taken the time and effort to make sure the game will run on your machine. It saves you about a couple of hours of time, trust me.
Gabriel Knight harks from the glory days of Sierra, amongst the royalty of game companies in its heyday. Most gamers at some point in their life have played a Sierra game, usually from the various “Quest” series (King’s Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest just to name a few). These series are well known for their revolutionary graphics and game engines (at the time of release), fun story lines, extremely obtuse inventory puzzles and the ability to die about fifty billion ways throughout the course of the game. They were incredibly fun but also incredibly frustrating. Anyone who’s played King’s Quest 5 only needs to hear the words “Yetti and pie” to start twitching uncontrollably.
Gabriel Knight, though, strayed from the usual Sierra formula. The story was far darker and more complex. The game kept the popular point-and-click format with an icon bar at the top to choose your action, but the puzzles made far more sense to the story and while you certainly can die in the game, it's not nearly as frequent or as frustrating as previous titles.
In Gabriel Knight you play as...well, Gabriel Knight, a struggling mystery writer who owns a rare books shop in New Orleans. He's pretty much the dashing rogue, flirting unapologetically with anything posessing breasts and spouting off smart ass remarks to his friends all while maintaining a charming smirk. He's joined by his assistant Grace Nakamura, just about the only woman in the game who doesn't fall prey to Gabriel's "charm" and who often helps him do a lot of the research while he's off breaking into some museum or graveyard.
Being a mystery writer, Gabriel is currently researching a series of murders called the Voodoo Muders for his next book. His source, childhood friend Detective Mosley (Mark Hamill), is providing him with information and letting him tag along on the case in exchange for being included in his book and....wait, this is sounding a lot like the tv show Castle now that I come to think of it...huh...Of course, as these things go, what begins as simple research turns into a dangerous and mysterious adventure as Gabriel discovers the dark secrets of New Orleans as well as his own past.
This is one of the best examples of how a great story can make a great game. Jane Jensen's biggest strength is storytelling and in Gabriel Knight it informs every single aspect of the game. There's a compelling mystery, well thought-out characters and great dialogue that pretty much keeps you hooked right up until the finale. It also helps that a very large amount of research went into the various aspects of the story: from the geography and feel of New Orleans to the history of the various voodoo cults.
The game controls mirror a lot of other Sierra games at the time, but one thing that does differ are the cutscenes for the game. Rather than trying to animate detailed cutscenes, Jensen chose to convey cutscenes for the story through a sort of comic book panel style. Likewise, all dialogue spoken in the game is done on a seperate screen where you can see the heads of the two characters talking rather than watching two pixelated blobs staying completely still while talking. This helped break up a lot of the action and let you get a bit more emotionally invested in what was actually going on. The comic book style is a bit jarring at first, but one that I got used to very quickly.
What helps it a lot is the sound design and voice acting. Gabriel Knight has some of the best voice acting I've ever heard. Yes, the attempts at New Orleans accents are pretty hilarious, but I didn't care so much about the accents as I did the intention behind them, and every single voice actor involved brought each character to life wonderfully. It may seem like a small thing to most people, but I got more emotionally invested in those pixelated Sierra blobs than I have for a lot of the graphically superior games you find today simply because the characters sounded like characters. Tim Curry clearly has fun as the sarcastic and charming ladies man Gabriel Knight and Mark Hamill and Leah Rimini also add a lot of fun to the slightly pathetic Detective Mosley and the extremely sarcastic Grace Nakamura.
As for the puzzles, like all classic Sierra games, most of them are inventory based, BUT most of them are linked very closely to the story and there’s little to no pointless fetch quests. A fetch quest feels very different when there’s an actual, narrative reason for doing it and not just because the game designers thought it would be a good idea to send you running in circles. This doesn’t stop a couple of them from being non-sensical, of course. The one downside to the game is that if you ever get stuck on what to do next, there’s no real way of getting any sort of hint on what has to be done. The game is separated into days, and a day won’t end until you’ve finished all the necessary tasks. It ends up requiring a lot of back-tracking and random clicking just to see if you missed anything, but this is kind of a pit fall of most adventure games.
Despite being a Sierra game though, there are delightfully few places you can die in Gabriel Knight. Okay, so I’m a bit of a wimp when it comes to dying in a game, but most will agree that there are altogether far too many ways to fail in the classic Sierra games. Some are obvious, like “Maybe it wouldn’t be a good idea to go into that spooky wood without some form of protection” to the annoyingly obtuse like “you should have picked up that bootlace two hours ago but since you didn’t you’re pretty much screwed”. In Gabriel Knight, the points at which you can die happen mostly toward the end at the climax and it kind of makes sense that you'd be more careful. This makes for a still intense gameplay but a far less frustrating one.
You know what? I could go on and on singing the praises of this game. Go play it for yourself. It's a good old school game that still holds up today (except for maybe graphics, but even then...). It's well written, well designed, and completely immersive. It's one of those games you don't necessarily want to end and that just grows bigger and more epic towards the end. So go. NOW! I have talked far too long.
The game controls mirror a lot of other Sierra games at the time, but one thing that does differ are the cutscenes for the game. Rather than trying to animate detailed cutscenes, Jensen chose to convey cutscenes for the story through a sort of comic book panel style. Likewise, all dialogue spoken in the game is done on a seperate screen where you can see the heads of the two characters talking rather than watching two pixelated blobs staying completely still while talking. This helped break up a lot of the action and let you get a bit more emotionally invested in what was actually going on. The comic book style is a bit jarring at first, but one that I got used to very quickly.
What helps it a lot is the sound design and voice acting. Gabriel Knight has some of the best voice acting I've ever heard. Yes, the attempts at New Orleans accents are pretty hilarious, but I didn't care so much about the accents as I did the intention behind them, and every single voice actor involved brought each character to life wonderfully. It may seem like a small thing to most people, but I got more emotionally invested in those pixelated Sierra blobs than I have for a lot of the graphically superior games you find today simply because the characters sounded like characters. Tim Curry clearly has fun as the sarcastic and charming ladies man Gabriel Knight and Mark Hamill and Leah Rimini also add a lot of fun to the slightly pathetic Detective Mosley and the extremely sarcastic Grace Nakamura.
As for the puzzles, like all classic Sierra games, most of them are inventory based, BUT most of them are linked very closely to the story and there’s little to no pointless fetch quests. A fetch quest feels very different when there’s an actual, narrative reason for doing it and not just because the game designers thought it would be a good idea to send you running in circles. This doesn’t stop a couple of them from being non-sensical, of course. The one downside to the game is that if you ever get stuck on what to do next, there’s no real way of getting any sort of hint on what has to be done. The game is separated into days, and a day won’t end until you’ve finished all the necessary tasks. It ends up requiring a lot of back-tracking and random clicking just to see if you missed anything, but this is kind of a pit fall of most adventure games.
Despite being a Sierra game though, there are delightfully few places you can die in Gabriel Knight. Okay, so I’m a bit of a wimp when it comes to dying in a game, but most will agree that there are altogether far too many ways to fail in the classic Sierra games. Some are obvious, like “Maybe it wouldn’t be a good idea to go into that spooky wood without some form of protection” to the annoyingly obtuse like “you should have picked up that bootlace two hours ago but since you didn’t you’re pretty much screwed”. In Gabriel Knight, the points at which you can die happen mostly toward the end at the climax and it kind of makes sense that you'd be more careful. This makes for a still intense gameplay but a far less frustrating one.
You know what? I could go on and on singing the praises of this game. Go play it for yourself. It's a good old school game that still holds up today (except for maybe graphics, but even then...). It's well written, well designed, and completely immersive. It's one of those games you don't necessarily want to end and that just grows bigger and more epic towards the end. So go. NOW! I have talked far too long.
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