Pros: - Very, very beautiful graphics and animations. - Interesting story. - Funny dialogs (although there are too much of them). - Good characters. - Nice music. - Some fair and well-constructed puzzles. - One click skips dialogue line, double click gets you immediately to the next room. Cons: - There are too many crazy, unfair and absurd puzzles which have no hints at all and make you feel stupid. I got stuck too much. - It's easy to miss objects or even PLACES, which makes you feel even more stupid when you found them after trying everything on everything (which I did a looooot of times). - The first time you discover such places, the default action is "Look at" instead of "Go to". - Red herrings or useless hotspots make the everything on everything tests much longer. Also, they leave you with the feeling that some important things are not concluded (please, never ever let a key guarded by a big guy next to the door it opens if you don't plan the player to open that door, even if your character says he is scared to go there!). - More than once you have to use something with a place! I mean, with the arrow that points to the next room. I feel that breaks the implicit game rules. Some of these things are impossible to figure out. In Runaway 1 one of these puzzles forced me to look for a walkthrough. This time I choosed to use brute force even with those arrows. And it worked a couple of times! - You must redo some actions after something changed to get new reactions, which makes brute force even harder. - You have to speak with someone again to get new information after an action, which you don't try because you have already repeated the same dialog lines a lot of times when you are stuck looking for relevant info you missed. - Some imes you have to talk to someone and have to wait a long time for a cutscene. But even when there are so many unforgivable cons, the look and feel of the game is so nice that I will have a good (and masochistic) memory of it.
I didn't know about this game when it was released, but I purchased it because of the good ratings here and I must say I am VERY impressed. Besides some pixel hunting and two or three not obvious puzzles, the game has all what a good old adventure needs to have: good atmosphere, good characters, good puzzles, good sense of humor and a very good story. I always associated Sierra with "hard adventures in which you can die", which didn't happened with Lucasfilm, but that's not true here. Well, you can die, but that's not a bothering thing in the game, it's only something occasional and justified. If you are so stupid to get into a party where you know you have not been invited without taking some kind of precautions, that's your fault. I'm even more surprised to see that most New Orleans places and streets depicted in the game do really exist. Maybe there even exists a Gabriel Knight freaky-tour around the city. If I travel to New Orleans some day, I'll go to confess my sins at St. Louis. I need to check something... Really, buy this game! It goes directly to your child memory even if you hadn't played it when you were a child.
