Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers – 20th Anniversary Edition

The game is really nice, but the remake is buggy as hell. The hint system is often plain wrong, suggesting you do some things you don't have to do(or that you've done). It is also often not clear enough, e.g. does not mention that you have to get certain item first. The game is described better by others, but the bugs... Certain cutscenes did not trigger for me. Certain puzzles required me to reenter the place. Right now, I can't progress (the swamp scene) because the "cut-scene puzzle" makes my cursor vanish. I can't select anything or progress in any way. Restarting the game, etc. does not work.

I quite enjoyed the remake of Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. In the big picture it is the same lovely game. "What can you tell me about voodoo?" It is the same captivating story that takes place in the same locations, but some events have been divided more evenly over the 10 days. There is a handful of new scenes and puzzles, also the dialogue has been renewed to some extent, but most of it is still as it was in the 1993 version. I think the renewed police station scene is an improvement, while the new puzzle at Moonbeam residence doesn't enhance the experience that much. One welcome improvement, even correction, is that it doesn't snow in Germany in June. Gabriel's user interface is a simplified version from the original - not all verbs are available at all time, only the ones relevant to a particular hotspot. This undoubtedly makes the otherwise quite hard game easier, but at the same time it doesn't straighten some wrinkles, and maybe sometimes gives a bit too linear feel to the outcome. The biggest success in this remake is done with the background music. What we hear at the back are new arrangements and orchestrations (which of course involves new mixing and mastering)... of the same old tunes, without touching the compositions. Especially the Dixieland Drug Store theme gives me the chills. On the voice acting side, we hear the 2nd best Gabriel Knight after Tim Curry in my opinion. For me Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers - 20th Anniversary Edition has turned out worth the purchase, even of some replay value even though I have the original CD version. Would I recommend this remake to someone who already knows the original 1993 version? Absolutely. Would I recommend this remake to someone who doesn't? I would, but I would recommend the original even more.

Remake is (justifiably) a dirty word these days, so it's nice to see a remake made with care and passion. How does Gabriel Knight 20th Anniversary hold up against the original? It's mostly a mixed bag. Some areas don't carry the "proper" feel of the original quite as well, but some (in particular the hounfor) really benefit from the graphical makeover. The music feels much the same- some themes are as good or better, a few are inferior to the original, but only by a little. It would be hard to match the original voice cast, but the new actors do a great job, particularly Gabriel, and I had few complaints there. The new puzzles unfortunately are all laughably easy and don't add much to the game, but don't hurt it either. The special features, however, are very enjoyable, and a great way to appreciate and learn more about the original game while playing the new. The graphics are beautiful, and the game looks great overall- my only complaints would be the portraits during speech, which have an unnerving head-jiggle that just looks weird if they're not actively talking, and a few graphical glitches, such as a couple doorknobs jumping a foot higher on the door when characters interact with them- stuff that isn't a huge deal, but pulls you out of the story for a moment. I really hope they release a patch to fix issues like that. One glaring problem is that while items in some environments have been changed slightly, the descriptions of the items have not, which leads to things like a wagon wheel being referred to as a bicycle tire, a man's hat as a woman's hat, and, most egregiously, a landscape painting being referred to as a portrait of a woman- it's not even just the narrator in that case, Gabriel comments on it too! This seems like a colossal blunder that I'm amazed is in the game, and while it doesn't ruin it, it shows that perhaps the game wasn't given as much care and time as it needed. The original is still better, but the remake is certainly worth a play.

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers is one of my favorite Point & Click Adventure games due to its story, art style and reasonable puzzles. There was no need to change (m)any of the puzzles or writing, because it was already one of the defining games of the genre. Fortunately for us, the developers of this remake seem to agree! This is the cleanest remake of a game that I've played, in the sense that it doesn't change anything but the graphics and interface! That's just commendable in my opinion. If you consider yourself a fan of the Adventure game genre in general but haven't played the original game because you were put off by it's dated pixel graphics, I think that you will really enjoy this game. That said, I have a feeling that this game was developed under a tight budget, as there were some small, rare, but annoying bugs and a somewhat clunky interface to deal with. While these may sound like huge problems, they aren't deal breakers at all. To be more specific about the issues here, it's just that the game feels somewhat unresponsive at times. The context-sensitive menu doesn't want to disappear sometimes (seemingly at random) when you click away from it and you have to wait just (literally!) two or so seconds for it to disappear. See, little issues like that! Also, at one point in the game, Gabriel needed a few seconds to perform the assigned action, and it was a little annoying, but it only happened once throughout the game. As for the interface, it's just that it doesn't follow the conventions of the post-DOS Adventure game era, and so it may feel a bit awkward to players who grew up with more modern games in the genre. Again, no deal breaker at all, you'll quickly get used to it! Besides that, I also want to warn players who intend to play this in any other language but English. I played the German version, and the translation wasn't optimal at all and felt awkward at times. Also, subtitles fly by too fast to match the English audio.

I originally got this on my tablet to play while riding the subway, but by the end I found myself staying up to play at home. I never played the original, but I'm a fan of all adventure point-and-click, old and new. That said, this is easily in my top five games of this genre. I loved the atmosphere, art, story, setting, and characters. I can't speak on specific technical issues, but if I managed on a tablet I'm sure it's amazing on desktop. If you'd like to give it a try before buying, you can play through "Day 1" through a mobile game service like Google Play for free.