Month of Activision: Gabriel Knight retrospective

With the announcement of Activision we couldn't help ourselves not to prepare an in-depth overview of the great games released on GOG.com. We're starting with Gabriel Knight retrospective by Pete Davison.

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers is placing players in the role of the titular Gabriel Knight, a wannabe author who runs a struggling bookstore in the French Quarter of New Orleans, a spate of grisly murders that locals believe to be voodoo-related leads our reluctant hero to investigate. Along the way, Gabriel discovers a number of horrifying truths about himself, about a woman named Malia Gedde, whom he quickly becomes infatuated with, and about the murders themselves.

by Pete Davison

“I dreamed of blood upon the shore, of eyes that spoke of sin. The lake was smooth and deep and black, as was her scented skin.”

Thus ran the chilling opening to Jane Jensen’s 1993 thriller Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, the first entry in a beloved three-part series. From the very outset, it was absolutely clear that this was a different kind of game - one with a mature tone, one that didn’t shy away from the grittiness of TV dramas and movies.

Placing players in the role of the titular Gabriel Knight, a wannabe author who runs a struggling bookstore in the French Quarter of New Orleans, a spate of grisly murders that locals believe to be voodoo-related leads our reluctant hero to investigate. Along the way, Gabriel discovers a number of horrifying truths about himself, about a woman named Malia Gedde, whom he quickly becomes infatuated with, and about the murders themselves.

Speaking with Edge Online in January of 2009, writer and designer Jane Jensen noted that, “marketing had an adverse reaction to the darkness of the concept and even Ken Williams [founder of Sierra Entertainment, the original publishers] said: ‘OK, I’ll let you do it, but I wish you’d come up with something happier!’ Sierra and Ken were good like that, though. They granted us a great deal of creative freedom. It’s something you don’t really see any more.”

This creative freedom was perhaps best exemplified by Gabriel himself, something of an unconventional lead character. While many of Sierra’s previous games had featured memorable – if sometimes clichéd – characters, Gabriel was very much a departure for the developer, being a heavily flawed character, as opposed to the squeaky-clean royal family from the King’s Quest series. He was lazy, he was chauvinistic, and he was a constant source of grief for his long-suffering assistant, Grace. But he was lovable despite all these flaws. As his adventure in New Orleans began, he took on a new-found determination to get to the bottom of the mystery of the so-called “Voodoo murders,” and the player was right there with him. His flaws made him seem like a much more believable character, in the same way as the best graphic novel heroes and heroines engage the reader from the very first page, however odious they may seem at first. In fact, Jensen noted in her Edge interview that he was, “derived from... influences like Sandman and Constantine.”

Gabriel’s characterization was helped to no small degree by Tim Curry’s voice acting - his affected deep, Southern drawl adding a huge amount of personality to everything Knight says. Curry headed a cast of a number of well-known voice actors that included Michael “Lt. Worf” Dorn and Mark “Luke Skywalker” Hamill. The professional voice acting added a huge amount to the atmosphere of the game and set Sins of the Fathers well ahead of many previous amateurish attempts at producing “talkie” adventure games. It helped, of course, that the dialogue was clearly written to be spoken rather than read, and this meant that the actors’ delivery of the lines was rather more natural than the stilted delivery in many earlier CD-ROM adventures.

The voice acting is just the beginning of what makes experiencing this game so special, though. The atmosphere of the city of New Orleans is captured wonderfully through the beautifully-illustrated backdrops and the perfectly-chosen music. Although the music is all MIDI soundchip-based, it still holds up extremely well today. Many of the pieces are excellent compositions in their own right, ranging from the mournful dirge which plays in the St Louis Cemetery Number 1, through four different trad-jazz arrangements of “When the Saints Go Marching In” in the park to the memorable “city streets” theme that plays on the map screen. Trivia fans may also like to note that the music was composed by Jensen’s husband, Robert Holmes, who went on to compose the music for the other two entries in the Gabriel Knight series.

Of course, these presentational elements are all well and good, but the game itself wouldn’t be such a fondly-remembered classic if it wasn’t any good to play. Fortunately, Sins of the Fathers delivers a lengthy, challenging adventure that never seems unfairly difficult. Unlike many of Sierra’s earlier games, where putting a foot wrong or timing something incorrectly would result in instant death (with no auto-save function to fall back on, either), Sins of the Father is much more forgiving. Because much of the game is spent investigating the mystery after things have happened, it is rare that Gabriel finds himself in mortal peril. However, there is a perversely thrilling atmosphere of menace around many of the places that Gabriel investigates, and there certainly are times where our hero can meet a sticky end if he’s not careful - but unlike, say, King’s Quest, where you take your life into your own hands every time you try and climb a ladder, these occasions are both rare and clearly indicated to the player.

Where modern gamers are more likely to get stuck is with the puzzles. Gamers used to an “intelligent,” reactive cursor automatically highlighting interactive spots on the screen will have to adjust to a more traditional verb-based interface, giving Gabriel the option to walk around, pick things up, move them, use them, open or close them and also, unusually, offering the opportunity to both interrogate characters in depth using a topic-based conversation system and to make casual chitchat with them.

Going back to an interface like this after something like, for example, the Broken Sword series, which always switches your cursor to the most appropriate activity automatically, is something of an adjustment to modern gamers, but it soon becomes apparent that it offers a whole lot more flexibility of interaction. Rather than simply clicking around the hotspots in a room one by one to see what happens, the interface forces you to think a little more about what you are trying to achieve - and, of course, how to communicate this wish to Gabriel. The fact that interactive spots on the screen are not automatically highlighted, either, means that you have to make use of those often-neglected powers of observation that have been laying dormant for a few years. Fortunately, despite this, it’s rare that the game degenerates into “pixel-hunting,” with most interactive objects on screen being reasonably obvious to the observant eye.

There are some fascinatingly creative puzzles, too. One that people often cite as one of their favorites is a section where Gabriel must first decipher a message that is being sent by listening to the sounds of a drum, and later send his own message. Later entries in the series would continue this tradition of inventive challenges, with the sequel Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within featuring a wonderful tape-splicing puzzle, and the third entry in the series doing some interesting things with the 3D perspective. There are, of course, plenty of “give object A to person B”-style puzzles, but unlike many more recent adventures, they don’t make up the entirety of the tasks you have to complete.

The aforementioned conversation system provides an interesting approach to interaction, too. Gabriel can chat with any character and occasionally garner some useful information from this, but more often than not it is simply to provide a bit of “color” to the characterization. It is on the interrogation screen that things get much more interesting.

Gabriel gradually builds up a list of “global topics” as he discovers more things about the Voodoo Murders mystery - these are keywords that he can ask to anyone who has the time for an in-depth conversation. Asking about these topics can often open up further avenues for discussion, perhaps with other characters. But besides these “global topics,” there are also “unique topics” that are individual to particular characters. Gabriel can ask his assistant Grace whether he has received any messages, for example, or he can ask his grandmother about his family history (a lengthy, interesting story, incidentally, which becomes particularly relevant later in the game). These conversations can often go on for some time, but they play a key part in telling the story of the game, and they never feel like they are they just for the sake of having some more dialogue. The more you interrogate characters, the more information you have with which to solve the mystery. Every conversation you have is also recorded on Gabriel’s portable tape recorder, so it is a simple matter to go back and check on a clue you think you may have heard earlier, rather than having to backtrack just to speak to the same person again.

The Gabriel Knight saga represents one of the most beloved adventure-game series of all time, and one of the more heavily-requested series to revisit here on GOG - but fans hoping for a fourth entry in the series are still faced with a large question mark. Jensen does, however, disagree with Charles “Broken Sword” Cecil’s contention that the adventure game is dead, noting in her interview with Edge that, “I think our problem is that we’ve been unable to find and reach our audience. Adventures may be dead for young males, but then that was never our core demographic. But with the emergence of the casual gaming industry, things are changing.”

Does this mean we’ll someday see a Gabriel Knight 4 that answers some of those unresolved questions? At this time, it’s unclear. But for now, if you’ve never experienced the series, there’s no better time than now to step into the French Quarter of New Orleans and knock on the door of St George’s bookshop. You’ll fall in love with Gabriel and even after your adventure with him is over, he’ll be with you for a long time.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: Jensen’s comments come from Edge Online, January 2009, The Making Of... The Gabriel Knight Trilogy.