Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers

As an avid fan of point-and-click adventures, I decided to pick up this game on sale and played through it over the course of a few days. I never played this game when it came out in the 90s, so I can review it without any kind of nostalgia and overall I would recommend it. The biggest strengths of the game are the story and atmosphere. The plot is very interesting and made me want to keep playing even when I got stuck. The lovely atmosphere of the game is created by its memorable music and the writing (banter between Gabriel and his friends, street musicians, the sound of Gabriel pouring himself some coffee, other characters' comments on Gabriel's personality... the game is full of these cool little details and they added a lot to the fun I had playing through it.). The gameplay is decent, with a few notable exceptions. Most of the puzzles made sense to me after giving them some thought, and the day-by-day structure of the game always gave me a feeling of making progress when I had done everything I needed to complete an in-game day. However, I ended up disliking two puzzles: 1. At one point, Gabriel has to write a coded message to progress the plot. As far as I could tell, the content of this message is almost impossible to figure out without using a walkthrough, and even then you may not understand why Gabriel has to write down this particular message at this specific point in the story. 2. Close to the end there is a section where Gabriel has to dodge some enemies while running through a certain area, and that was no fun at all. The problem is not the general idea of introducing an action sequence like this, but its execution: The slow point-and-click controls make it very difficult to avoid dying in this part and I had to retry it more often than I would have liked to. Nevertheless, this is a five-star game to me because of the low price and great fun I had with it. Strongly recommended, but be ready to use a walkthrough if needed.

Gabriel Knight was the brainchild of Sierra game designer Jane Jensen, who had previously worked with Roberta Williams on Kings Quest VI with great success. This game..this game is extraordinary. Throw everything you know about "game plots" out of the window and realize this game has characters and a plot that quite simply put pretty much every other game in the genre to shame in terms of their reality, depth, and maturity of outlook. The game's title character is famously voiced by Tim Curry, but the entire voice cast is world class, containing such names as Mark Hamill, Michael Dorn, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., and many others. Few games are this well acted. The game also uses a late-iteration SCI engine, and really contains some exquisite 2D art that pretty much outshines both the quality-but-90s-FMV-crude GK2 and the early-3D-crude GK3. Sins Of The Fathers was made with years of experience in 2D art, and it shows. If you have any love at all for point & click adventure games, you simply must play this game. It's that simple.

I have been playing a slew of adventure games over the past two years, mostly thanks to GOG and their awesome old-school releases. I think I got a little over-saturated with point and click, and I was having trouble really seeing which games stood out. After a year of consideration, I have to say that this game is the best point and click adventure I've played off GOG. GK2 comes close, but it's just not as interesting as this game, nor does it have as good as a story. I actually enjoyed reading every conversation in this game, and I almost never do. I usually just skip ahead through tedious dialog and try to finish the game as quickly as possible. GK is one of the few games that I was sorry to finish, and I actually wanted more dialog from some of the characters. (especially the guy in the bar with his girlfriend) To sum up, GK 1 is pure point and click awesomeness. Buy it, draw your own conclusions.

I absolutely love point-and-click adventure games, as the story and puzzles tend to be on the forefront. That being said, I thought this one had a great story, but was bogged down by gameplay. It took me a while to actually become interested in the story, as the first few days are all about research and interrogation more than action, but once I got past the third day, it really started to pick up the pace and become more enjoyable. As for gameplay, I thought that there were too many controls to use objects / talk to people, (you can look, open, operate, pick up, move, talk, and interrogate) leaving you trying every action on every object just to make sure it doesn't do anything extra. It became tedious after awhile. If you get stuck, (which happened to me quite often) you start showing all of your inventory objects to everyone until someone actually knows about it. As in every adventure game, there are points where the plot has a disconnect, and this happens quite a bit in this game. You have managed to find the objects that are important, but don't know where to use them, who to give them to, or what to do with them. Unless you are an absolute intellectual master (unlike me!) I recommend looking up a walkthrough on Google and keeping it handy (perhaps on your phone) , as it will save you time and frustration. I used one after I exhausted all other options that I could think of, so that I could see what I had missed. NOTE: This game is hard (at least to me) and does not hold your hand like most point-and-click games today. There is no hint button. There is quite a bit of "pixel hunting," especially with today's monitors, as you may have not realized that you could actually pick up that blob that is supposed to be hair gel (and yes, that is something you have to pick up). Everything blends in, and the actions don't always make sense! As an aside, I thought it was amusing that Tim Curry (voice of Gabriel) sounded like the vampire Bill Compton from True Blood!

Well, I recognise the game as undisputable classic, but I have a version with a comic book (about witches, religious groups etc.) Why is it not included in the FREE zone? I have some fading memory, that I had got a soundtrack CD....