Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within

after gabriel knight i preyed for the second game and there it is. I love it and thanks to you gog guys!

All hail gog.com for doing this for us gamers, Gabriel Knight 2 is one of the best games in the genra and if you havent playerd or bought this yet you have to be insane.... :)

It’s impossible for me not to strongly recommend this game. The Beast Within helped define and refine my taste for games in general. It’s production value, especially for the time, shaped my love for Sierra and the 90s Era of FMVs. Solely for its historical value it’s a 5 Star, it’s a classic. Buy it, play it at least once, even if it is to hate it. I cannot stress this point enough: this game deserves your personal take on it, regardless of the verdict. Stop reading now, everything else is just my very subjective take on it. Unfortunately, 25 years later, I cannot give it more than a 3 as a final score. Every time I go back to this game, I remember all the things FMV did wrong, destroying its prospects for the future. The overall cheesiness of some motifs present in the plot (that weird couple in the tavern… Ugh!), the bad acting (sorry folks, everything else is rose-tinted glasses of those good ol’times imho), weird character motivations (Grace’s feelings for Gabriel in this game manifest in such a way as to be described as ‘silly’ by a 12 year old girl). There’s a particularly painful scene to watch after all these years (talking in terms of acting here), where Gabriel and another main character are interacting with a blonde bombshell: juvenile even for a teenager who strongly supports Flat Earth Theory. The cringe factor… Oh, the humanity! The plot also didn’t age well for me. It doesn’t feel contrived or even poorly written, it’s not that. It’s just rushed at some crucial points (major sin in my book). Exposition is done very poorly in my opinion, in overly large chunks with uninteresting spaces in-between. The premise for the final chapter and the finale itself felt rushed too (oh so common in so many games, even to this day). In the end, maybe I’m projecting and not being fair. Maybe it’s a bit of superficial elitism in the face of getting older. Maybe both. Nevertheless, it left a bittersweet taste in the mouth, leaning towards sour milk.

The Beast Within is part of the Gabriel Knight series and the slew of FMV games that burgeoned in the 90s. If neither of those legacies evokes a preemptive groan, this might be an interesting experience for you. You probably need a fondness for adventure games to appreciate GK2. And a willingness to use a walkthrough. Or, if you spurn the thought, infinite patience for obtuse puzzle design. Now that these hurdles are out of the way, let's talk about Gabriel Knight! Yes, the character. Leading man of the series and staple of mysterious bad boy chauvinism. Gabe's played by Dean Erickson in this installment, a casting decision of pure epiphany. Unlike his previous incarnation, a bore with seriously problematic tendencies towards women, this Gabriel is charming and engaged. He navigates on intuition and tends to downplay his intelligence to get people talking, a lost art in this day and age. Dean the actor tends to use pretty broad strokes in his craft, but it totally works. He's not the most fascinating character on display (that would be Peter J. Lucas as Baron Friedrich Von Glower), but his performance carries the FMV. The story is pretty good, overal. Historical facts & phenomena are mounted on an urban fantasy vehicle and you're taken along for the ride. New Orleans/Benin are exchanged for Bavaria. Pro: less room for racist tropes. Con: another really white point & click adventure game. Like it's predecessor, it does deliver the infotainment. The way themes and locality are woven into the story is actually amazing. Gameplay? Easy to navigate, but goals and directions are often vague and occasionaly vexing. The notorious moustache puzzle sequence in GK3 has nothing on the unadulterated folly that is the con with the cuckoo clock in GK2. Grace Nakimura (Joanne Takahashi) as a playable character is a cool addition. Gameplay is the same as with Gabriel, but she approaches the world differently - a nice touch! All in all, an interesting remnant of a bygone era.

The second in the Gabriel Knight series, this one switched to full-motion video, which was all the rage at the time, but it is one of the few games I've seen that pulls off the transition really well. The story (which, as you might expect, involves werewolves) sees Grace and Gabriel travelling to Germany to uncover the truth behind a series of brutal murders.