A Fantastic Classic

Posted on 2010-02-23 18:16:52 by Alessar:

In the second installment of the Gabriel Knight series, Gabriel (Dean Erickson) is in Germany where he is coming into his inheritance as a monster hunter. Circumstances soon see his friend and assistant Grace Nakimura (Joanne Takahashi) joining him in Germany to investigate a mystery involving Neuschwanstein Castle, local legends of a werewolf, and a lost Wagnerian opera. You'llread more take turns controlling Grace and Gabriel to unravel the mystery in different locations around Munich. For the time, the game was amazingly well-done. The attention to story, detail, acting, costuming, and sets combined to create a truly breakthrough experience. For a point-and-click type adventure game the engine works quite well and the video does make it fairly realistic; immersive for its time even. If there was anything to detract from it, it was simply some bugs early in the release cycle, heavy system requirements for the time, and the limitations of early optical drive technology. (One particularly dangerous sequence occurred right after a disk swap.) Obviously, none of these will be issues in this all-digital re-release.
I bought this game when it was new and was very happy with the great mystery story. It was a worthy successor to the original. Unfortunately, I never finished the game. I was playing it on a friend's computer (mine couldn't handle it) and he accidentally deleted my savegame when I was on the 5th disk trying to finish the game. I always meant to install it when I got a better computer, but OSes moved on and I didn't think I could get it to play. I actually still have the disks here at my desk and I just pulled my copy of the strategy guide out of storage. I *really* meant to play this one again. I don't think this is one I can say no to...!