Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father® Reviews

Classic game. Great Story.

Gabriel Knight is an excellent point and click its got a really great story, very good visual presentation and some of the best voice acting in any game (though unfortunately the recordings are very crackly and poppy at times) I would recommend this version over the remaster any day* however there are some issues with Gabriel Knight that are unfortunately just general issues specific to point and click adventure games I have NEVER been able to finish a point and click adventure game without a guide at some point. The only point and click i've ever played where I thought it was legitimately "fair" was myst: because all of the puzzles were quite literally flipping switches in the correct order or something similar. that is to say: GK has "moon logic" solutions to problems/puzzles that are complete nonesense. most* of the game is free from that issue but the times you have to deal with BS that makes no sense can be infuriating There is usually some very well designed *hinting at what the player should be doing at any time: and the game is broken into smaller series of challenges with its "days" structure. Essentially each "day" has its own set of challenges to get through; you go through 80% the same environments for most of the game but your challenges will vary and each morning you get some clues that are handed out to you in the morning newspaper or from the games NPCs. ok very good until you hit some puzzles where the answers make no sense at all or where you need to acquire something microscopic based on a very short NPC animation or something.... for example (no spoiler) "hey buddy you have something on your shirt" *NPC takes thing off of shirt you would expect NPC to give you thing stuck to your shirt?? no you have to use your gluestick to pick it up out of the NPCs sink. The hint to do so was said NPCs 3 frame animation of putting it there, the above puzzle was fabricated to avoid spoilers but that's the essence of it is something you will have to do in this game. there's also some death sequences that have ludicrous solutions...and there's a few really nasty puzzles in the game based on codes/messages that I suspect were designed as some kind of copy protection. I don't know because I've never had the box. Sometimes they put stuff like that in these kinds of games to piss off people that pirated their copy (was ez in the floppy disk era) but that reminds me of a game I did have the box for back in the day "Curse of monkey island" which included a full walk through book with the game..because of said moonlogic type issues. it can feel very...cheap... to have to use a walk through fortunately 80% of the puzzles you won't need it. Using a hint book is just part of old point and clicks, surely its one of the reason the genre died for about 10 years ... following a series of instructions rather than figuring it out for yourself in antithetical to the primary game play being "figure this out"... but that's really symptomatic of the issue with adventure game companies: they never seemed to be comfortable with the idea that their product did not have to have 20 or 40 hours of gameplay: it was fine for it to be over in 6. They made alot of those puzzles stupid so that people would not be able to beat the game in a weekend... back in the day people expected to get 40 hours out of a video game (don't believe me? just look how many levels games like doom and wolfenstein had in their full versions) most shareware episodes that were given for free had as much gametime/gameplay as full release video games today. so its clear why adventure game companies wanted to drive people insane for 30 hours trying to piece together what really should be a 10 hour thing. fortunately adventure games have had a good comeback and as expected most are ditching the moonlogic and following a roughly 6-8 hours playtime format. but you cannot expect that with gabriel knight. If you are intent to go through this game without a guide at all....expect it to take you 15 hours to forever and when you do realise the solution you might be angry you wasted so much time because it made no sense. However despite that: its easy to say this is a must play in the genre because of its particular point in time being between the end of hand painted backgrounds converted to pixel art, the emergence of voice acting in the genre and the introduction of much more mature stories and themes really you can follow the gabriel knight series as a marker of what was happening with adventure games in the 90s : from their high point of technicality and design in this game to the weird multimedia experiments using FMV in the second one and the overall identity crises of "interactive movies" and finally the third one where they spent all their development time making worse 3d graphics *thanks quake* and puzzles thought up by crackheads. The genre took a massive charge towards the movie thing losing its identity completely in the process and when it did comeback it did so with resident evil control schemes and terribly blocky graphics meanwhile Diablo 2 used sprites because blizzard north felt that 3d wasnt there yet (they got stung for that in reviews at the time) but people still play THAT game 25 years later so who was right? if you want to study the identity crises of adventure games, this is where you start: with the last GREAT ones that were made so you can get an idea of WHY they chose to nosedive off a cliff after seemingly having the formula 90% right. suffice it to say this is the LAST (along with broken sword 1+2) of the oldschool graphical adventure games that knew they were adventure games before the genre slowly went towards its death its worth playing

Carrying on the tradition of Sierra creating well written and innovative games; Gabriel Knight - Sins of the Father is a enthralling journey of a struggling writer investigating the world of voodoo in New Orleans after voodoo inspired murders start appearing in that city. Combining superb characterization with detective work and the supernatural, players become hooked on Gabriel Knight's story and impelled to follow his story to the end. Rated 7 out of 10.

I stopped playing this game after about an hour of frustration. I remember playing it 30 years ago and enjoying it, but now I am too used to games with better visuals and the ease of the cursor changing when it hit something to look at or pick up. Here, I had to click on every item in every scene to see if it was possible to interact with. And since the screen is so pixelated, it is tedious. I had to consult a walkthrough three times and then I got a fatal error and had to go back to my last saved game. Sorry, I cannot deal with this.