So good but yet so, so bad.
Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers is generally considered to be one of the greatest point and click adventures of all time. If true, it's a telling indictment of why the adventure game genre almost died out and is kept hobbling along these days by the life support machine of indie developers and hardcore fans.
First of all, the good. The story is excellent, revolving around murder and voodoo practises in New Orleans. There's a huge amount of well-researched detail about voodoo and most of the cast, especially the main characters are well-written, interesting and charismatic. The quality voice acting helps here enormously. Another plus is that you need to complete all the day's tasks before the game will move on, so there doesn't seem to be any chance of falling into that old adventure game nightmare of finding the game uncompletable after days of play because you overlooked something back at the very start.
The problems come with the actual gameplay and while this might read as a bit of a rant against adventure games in general, it's all relevant to Gabriel Knight. My first big beef is that the game requires you to behave in the most illogical manner possible. You're constantly lying, betraying people's trust and stealing from friends and strangers, even when you have no in-character reason to do so because it's the only way to move the game forward or get items you'll need to use days later. Need to trick a devoutly religious old woman into letting you into her home? Hey, it's lucky you stole that priest's outfit from the church and have been carrying it around for two days for no good reason whatsoever.
Backgrounds are detailed with descriptions for most things you can see. Unfortunately, now and then a seemingly innocuous background item is the key to a puzzle solution or opens up a dialogue option you need to progress so every single thing on every single screen needs clicked on with the look icon, then the take icon, then the operate icon, then the open icon...just in case it turns out to be usable or relevant. Miss something like this early and later you can be left with no idea what your next objective is, wandering back through all the locations trying to find something you might have overlooked.
The other problem with these games is the often illogical puzzles. It might have seemed perfectly obvious to the designer that the way to distract a certain character was to get a mime from two screens away to follow you back to annoy them, but to me it wasn't even clear that the certain character needed distracted in the first place, let alone that the mime was anything other than background colour like all the other musicians and street performers in that area.
I expect a lot of people would argue that what I see as problems are just classic genre tropes. I'd argue back that sticking to these genre tropes is why so many people gave up buying adventure games. Unlike other genres, adventures didn't evolve better gameplay mechanics and suffered as a result.
So, the story is excellent and involving but the actual game play is little more than a frustrating chore. This is par for the course for this type of game, unfortunately, and you'll probably know if this appeals to you or not. If it does, then sure, this is a classic. If it doesn't but you like good story driven games it's well worth picking up cheap and keeping a walkthrough or hint guide at hand to help you past the worst of the design problems.
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