Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within

I know FMV is not really popular, but I really love this game. The story is really good and the atmosphere very intense!

The game has the most realistic feel of the series, and it's not just the FMV. In addition to the story, your interactions with the characters and environment make you truly feel like a tourist in Germany. It feels real. The puzzles are mostly logical and are built into your surroundings, so nothing feels out of place. The exception being a awkward sequence at the end. It's too bad that the windows version doesn't seem to get along well with modern versions of Windows (though I understand the issue is more with Quicktime than windows). The DOS version works fine through DOSBox for the most part, but if I remember right, the image and sound quality is a bit better under the windows version.

Gabriel Knight 2 is as good a game as can be made with full motion video technology. It gets away from the big-name stunt casting and instead tells a truly engaging story. But it also shows up all the problems of this genre - trading in intriguing puzzle mechanics for a lot of clicking the screen and watching videos. GK2 basically goes like this: you see an FMV scene and then you move the cursor around to find one a hot spot to click. You see a video clip as your character performs an action or moves to a new spot. And then you repeat: You click. You watch movies. For some, that's the death of an interactive experience. But here's the thing: GK2's movies are generally so good you can’t wait to see the next one. There's a fantastic story here spanning hundreds of years and which has been written to take advantage of the fact that we are seeing real human characters interact instead of low-res pixelated versions. For those who played GK1 it feels like a natural progression from a game which tried to bring different periods of history to life and elicit emotions with very limited graphics. It's not so much that GK2 is a great movie, but it's clearly been made with care and attention both in front of and behind the camera. There are a few high points to the gameplay which are worth mentioning. A tape splicing puzzle is fun - as is the novelty of clicking items on a telephone and discovering you can actually call the numbers. Sadly, the puzzles aren’t intrinsically linked to the FMV format. It would have been great to have a puzzle manipulating security camera footage, or trying to detect if someone is lying. But that demonstrates the limits of the mid-90s technology. Ultimately your experience of GK2 will be dictated by how much you're invested in the story and these characters. Basically - by how much you're enjoying the movie. There probably isn't enough game here to make a convert of anyone, but for those who are already on board: it doesn’t get any better.

I'm honestly sort of surprised by all the 5 star reviews here, as I didn't enjoy this "game" at all! It was a great disappointment after playing Sins of the Fathers. This type of FMV interactive movie leaves much to be desired. Instead of being an adventure game it's essentially a pointless quest of video transitions and running back and forth to figure out who you need to talk to next or what hotspots to click to advance the plot. Puzzles are few and far between and largely consist of, for example, using a newly-found screwdriver on the screwdriver-shaped hole directly above the toolbox. And God forbid you want to ask about something before you've picked up the letter at the post office that makes it blindingly obvious what information is important. In fact, the nature of the game is such that Gabriel, a character I loved in the first game, became a dull-witted Ken doll who couldn't put two and two together to get four. For example, Gabriel has to ask his LAWYER what to do about analyzing wolf tracks instead of letting the player grab a freakin' phone book and look up the university. Grace was also grating, turning from a capable woman that could go toe-to-verbal-toe with Gabriel into a shrieking harpy with zero empathy (really, Grace? Was THAT the time to tell him there was a problem?). Essentially the game is an interactive movie, not a game. I wouldn't mind watching the movie (although the acting is laughably bad at times), but don't ask me to watch countless recycled shots of an actor walking up and down stairs and streets while I run from one end of Germany (nee Bavaria) to the next in pursuit of information that could easily have been obtained all at once.

I remember playing this when I was younger, such an amazing jump beyond "point and click" adventures like the quest series (space, kings, police). Great story, some wonderful locations, and still a good play after these years.