That's me, Gabriel Knight

The first Gabriel Knight, released several years ago, made its mark as a sleeper hit with adventure fans. Subtitled "Sins of the Fathers," the first adventures of Gabriel captivated gamers as they helped Gabriel solve the mysteries of voodoo related murders. Not unlike Sierra's other adventure titles (King's Quest, Space Quest, etc.), gamers had to use items and clues to solve puzzles and other riddles to advance the story. What made Gabriel Knight unique was its detective and occult spin on the genre. Interrogating a variety of characters, each with their own motives, is a key aspect of all the Gabriel Knight games. The entertaining mix of private investigation, supernatural, and pure adventure turned out to be a very successful formula.

Poking around the museum

There's Estelle and Lady Howard

A few years ago, Sierra released the second installment of Gabriel Knight, dubbed "The Beast Within." In it, Gabriel fully took on his destiny as a fighter of supernatural evil - the modern day Schattenjager. No no, I didn't say Goldschlager or Jagermeister, you lush. That's Schattenjager, which means "shadow hunter." As it turned out, Gabriel Knight is actually a living descendent of a line of monster hunters. "The Beast Within" was set near the European home of the line of Schattenjagers, called Schloss Ritter. There, players of the second GK game helped Gabriel combat the menace of werewolves.

Nice looking church

View from the front of it

NO! Not FMV!

The problem we had with the second installment is that it came out around the heyday of full motion video. The entire game was live action as a matter of fact, and it came on four CDs, which was outrageous in those days. The time it took to spin up the CDs and watch all the same FMV over and over again was fairly annoying. Adventure games just didn't lend themselves to that style of gameplay. Well come to think of it (Phantasmagoria **shudder**), nothing really lends itself to excessive FMV. "The Beast Within" was still a pretty good story though, and the acting was decent. It was just the task of extracting all the goodies out of the game through the FMV which was somewhat excruciating. Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, takes the series a step forward by putting the game into a full 3D environment, with 3D characters and settings.