Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers (MS-DOS)

Crap, I just realised that it's been almost two months since I've written about a classic DOS game for my site (if you can even call Charly the Clown a classic). In fact I've been letting the '90s down in general lately, so I've decided to do something about that right now... by playing an adventure game from 1993.

The first Gabriel Knight game was released during the golden age of point and click adventures, slotting in between games like Day of the Tentacle and Beneath a Steel Sky, which meant that it came on a whole lot of floppy disks. It was the dawn of the CD-ROM era as well though, so I have a CD version to play instead, filled with voices and video sequences and such like. The music's definitely still midi though, judging from the theme: youtube link.

I've already mentioned about spoilers in the box over on the right hand side of the site, but seeing as this is a very story and puzzle driven kind of game I'll say it again: I'm gonna be spoilin' the shit out of the first hour or so of gameplay and any plot developments contained within.

The game begins with a cryptic nightmare cutscene with the tiniest resolution video I've ever seen. I've presented it here in actual-size clips so you can appreciate the full magnitude of its microscopic nature.

Taken as it is the dream doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but I imagine I'll eventually discover the significance of each element as the game progresses.

Or I could just read the graphic novel that comes with the game and learn everything immediately!

It turns out that 300 years ago in South Carolina, our protagonist's ancestor was working as a witch hunter, investigating a series of ritual murders. Unfortunately for everyone involved he soon found that he had fallen in love with the enemy, and on the day that she was caught and burned at the stake he had an attack of conscience and combined his witch hunter talisman powers with her evil god powers to save her.

What happened next leads me to believe that this move was likely one of those 'sins of the fathers' mentioned in the subtitle.


300 YEARS LATER, NEW ORLEANS.

Great, now I have to look this quote up and see if it's from a famous poem.

And it turns out that it is... not. I am actually surprised.

Here, have a better look at that digitised painted background without DAY 1 scrawled all over it. This is a short cutscene showing a woman walking up to the door on the left, picking up the newspaper, and going inside.

Alright, here I am in the game at last... waiting for another cutscene to finish.

The woman is revealed to be an employee of Gabriel Knight's rare book shop called Grace Nakimura, who is responsible for doing his accounting, minding the shop, and telling women that phone up after him that he's a lout and that they could do better. The two have a friendly antagonism going where he continually hits on her and she continually points out his flaws.

Aside from the low-fi sound quality Grace's voice acting is very good, but Gabriel is performed by Tim Curry putting on a New Orleans accent and he comes off sounding like he's either Bill or Ted. I mean for all I know his accent could be a dead on perfect imitation of one of the dialects from the area, but his 'Californian surfer dude' tone feels a little off target to me.

The narrator on the other hand sounds very legit, as she reads out the description of the items I click on around the room.

I've got a whole lot of commands in this, accessible either by cycling through them with the right mouse button, or clicking the icons on this drop down menu, but I'm not really seeing this abundance of choice as a good thing. Especially as cycling through eight icons takes long enough to be a pain in the ass. At least they had the sense to stop before adding things like 'wear' and 'insert'.

Like in an old cartoon I can tell immediately what objects I can interact with as they're drawn differently to the background. The cup, coat, newspaper, magnifying glass etc. are all twice the resolution of the rest of the art... well if you're playing in VESA 'high res' mode anyway, otherwise it ends up looking like the image on the right.

You might have noticed the two pictures don't quite line up right; that's because the high res version stretches the backgrounds to a little further than double their height, throwing in extra lines to compensate. It gives the art a jittery look, which is a little off-putting.

I guess I'll start in the traditional adventure game fashion, by grabbing everything I can.

After bleeding the room dry of every item I could see I figured it'd be a good idea to exhaust Grace's dialogue tree as well. Gabriel has been researching a series of gruesome 'Voodoo Murders' for his next novel lately, so most of the choices relate to that, though Grace has also been taking phone messages for him.

I selected 'Messages' and learned that some guy from Germany wants Gabriel to call him back, Detective Mosely has some photos for him to pick up from the police station, and his grandmother wants him to look through his dead father's things. Lots of stuff to do.

There's actually two dialogue commands in this: ASK, which brings up this list of topics, and TALK, which makes the characters chat between each other for a second. I'm not really sure what the point of the second one is, except to give me one extra cursor to cycle past whenever I want to look at something.

Hey his bedroom is just next door to the shop floor. I love how there's a unique message for virtually every combination of dumb things I try to do in this, all voiced by the smart-assed narrator. I'm less impressed though by how Gabriel takes forever to walk anywhere. It's taking me a good 7 seconds to cross the screen here!

Okay so my goals right now are:

1. Research gruesome Voodoo Murders.
2. Talk to some guy in Germany.
3. Look through Gabriel's father's things.
4. Pick up photos from the police station.

I tried using the phone on Gabriel's desk to phone Germany, but it turns out that he doesn't know the number, and wouldn't want to pay for for an international call anyway. If it's that important he'll call back he figures.

Leaving the book shop brought me to this map screen where I get to visit all kinds of random locations. Plus there's the police station, a Voodoo drug store and a Voodoo museum. Grace mentioned them earlier so that must be why they've shown up. No clue what Napoleon or the park bench are about.

Hey it's just occurred to me that this is a real map of New Orleans, so I could go to Google Maps right now and virtually drive down Gabriel's road in Street View. I can't help but notice that his grandmother's house isn't marked here though.

Oh there you go, I just had to zoom out. I'll go there and get that out of the way first then.

Live action bike in front of an obviously painted background, nice. I can't decide about that leather coat though. I mean it looks a whole lot like they drew it onto the video later, but why would anyone do that when they could just give the actor a real coat?


LATER, AT GRANDMA'S HOUSE.

Well this trip was a total waste of time then. I can't find anything of his father's stuff that he wants anything to do with (not even the lederhosen). Grandma Knight did mention that I should go visit the family tomb though, so at least I can I'll add that to my list of things to do now.

1. Research Voodoo Murders.
2. Talk to guy in Germany. FAILED.
   
3. Look through his father's things. POINTLESS.
   
4. Pick up photos. 
5. Visit family tomb.

By the way, I'm pretty impressed by the way Gabriel has extra animations for things like walking around a railing or hugging his grandmother on the way out. He feels like a person inside this world rather than a sprite overlaid on top of a digitized painting.


SOON, AT LOUIS CEMETARY #1.

I couldn't find much at the family tomb either, but this is interesting: it turns out that Gabriel has been taping every conversation he's had so far on a microcassette recorder, even the ones with his Grandma! I thought he was just joking when he said he was looking forward to violating human rights in the intro.

Still, it's very handy to be able to go back through the dialogue and remind myself what was said. This is a cool feature, I like it. Though it's making me nostalgic for tapes now, which is crazy because cassettes were terrible.

It's also got me wondering if they'll update his tech in the 20th Anniversary remake they're working on. I mean Google Glass was practically invented for this kind of privacy invasion.

Right, next I'll trying collecting the photos from the station.


POLICE STATION.

It's cool that they went to the effort of redrawing Gabriel with his coat on when he's chatting to people outside the shop. Good attention to detail there.

I'm here at the station to pick up the photos from Gabriel's friend, but there's been another murder so Detective Mosely isn't around right now and no amount of begging will get the desk sergeant to break his sacred oath to the department and tell me where he's gone.

Fortunately Mosely left the photos here for me to pick up so that's one of my goals completed!

Right now I have a photo of a dead guy and a photo of Mosely taken during his graduation from the police academy in my inventory. I'm not sure how this helps me much to be honest.

The game could really use more of a definite goal to work towards, because 'research Voodoo Murders' is way too vague and it's not exactly the kind of thing I can be excited to be working towards. I mean look at The Secret of Monkey Island, it starts out by giving you one very specific goal (become a pirate) and then immediately tells you what three tasks you need to complete to achieve this goal.

In this on the other hand Gabriel's goal is to write a novel, with the Voodoo Murders just being something he's using for inspiration, and 'get inspiration' ain't exactly a task I can break into logical steps.


DIXIELAND DRUG STORE.

I can go to the Voodoo shop and show the crime scene photo around at least, see if the owner knows what the murder ritual is about.

It doesn't help me at all, but I can do it.


HISTORICAL VOODOO MUSEUM.

The Voodoo museum turned out to be equally useless, as the owner is out until tomorrow and the person watching the store knows even less about this stuff than I do. Hey I've got an idea Gabriel, why don't you add a library to the map so we can go hit the books? Or I suppose we could always wait a couple of years for the internet to catch on.

I tried doing my adventure game thing here and went messing around with everything in the room, but all that got me was a telling off. I came really close to agitating a snake enough to make it break out of its glass box though. I've no idea how that would help me at all, but it's something to do at least.

Well I'm stuck. Wait, there's still one last person I can go pay a visit to.

Not actually a screenshot from Gabriel Knight, just so you know.

Voodoo Lady you're my only hope! Shame you're actually stuck in an entirely unrelated Voodoo-themed point and click adventure game franchise and can be no help to me right now.

I suppose I should go visit the other places on my map and see if there's any puzzles to solve. Maybe using the tweezers at St. Louis Cathedral or showing Detective Mosely's graduation photo to everyone in the park will give me the missing clue I need.


JACKSON SQUARE.

Well I found a mime at least.

The game made damn sure I was aware of his presence by forcing me to watch him following people around, so I'm pretty sure he's actually important, but so far all I've managed to do is lure him over to those rotoscoped musicians to annoy them instead.

In fact looking at this image I stitched together from four screenshots, it seems that there's at least one musician at every corner of this square, which has me thinking that there's a puzzle here.

Okay, the musicians lure the mime away from following me, so logically that means that the challenge here is to get him to follow me past all of them, which would leave me standing next to that bike cop on the far end of the park. The only reason I'd want to bring a mime to the cop is to lure him away from his bike, so from that I deduce that my goal here must be to do something with his motorcycle while he's not around.

You know, I'm not sure an adventure game is working right when I can only identify puzzles by figuring out solutions first and then working backwards.


LATER, AT THE SCENE OF THE CRIME.

The bike had a cop radio on it, so I used it to find the crime scene that Mosely is hiding out at! I admit that probably should've occurred to me sooner.

Just as I begin to chat with Mosely about the murder we're both distracted by mysterious woman in an expensive looking car. Is she just a curious passerby, or does she know something about these killings? Gabriel's certainly willing to consider her a possible lead if just as an excuse to harass her with creepy chat-up lines and a tape recorder.

And just like that the cops all pack up and go home, leaving me standing here all alone. I suppose this is my cue to find the one clue they overlooked then.


LATER.

Well so far I've discovered that this is definitely blood. Man, forensics is way harder than I thought it would be.

I guess I've exhausted all my options here then, for now anyway. I guess I could always go back to the museum and harass the snake again. Actually I'll go see if Mosely's back in his office at the station now.


SOON, AT THE STATION.

Who sticks a post-it note on their monitor screen?

Well I'm here in an office, chatting to Detective Mosely, surrounded by stuff that may or may not be part of some puzzle. I managed to trick him into leaving the room once but I couldn't find anything to do before he came back, so... I don't know

I'm not getting too much out of this conversation either. He doesn't know what the deal with the murders is, I don't know what the deal is, and between us we can't figure out shit.

Here's one thing I've learned though: Mosely is voiced by prolific voice actor Mark Hamill, in his first ever video game appearance.

There's an amazingly low res 'making of' video hidden on the CD which features interviews with the actors, and it turns out that the managed to assemble a pretty impressive cast for the game, including Minsc from Baldur's Gate, Alfred from Batman: The Animated Series, Sheila Broflovski from South Park, and Worf (son of Mogh).

The Hollywood Reporter claimed that this is "the first time an all-Hollywood cast of name actors has been assembled for an interactive movie" which might be stretching it, but they're certainly up to the task. Interactive movie though? C'mon, this is an interactive graphic novel at best.

It's not as bad as the tag-line on the box though, which describes the game as being "A Supernatural Psycho-Thriller". Sorry box art text guy, but this is actually a pretty goofy game. Check out the music for this police station for instance: YouTube link.

Aha, I've found a way to lure the officer working outside into Mosely's office and a plausible excuse for me to slip out myself and go snooping while she's gone.

Of course it turned out that there's nothing out there, nothing I can find anyway. So that was a waste of time.

I managed to talk Mosely into letting me peek at the case files in the end, but Officer Franks refuses to let me walk off with them! She won't even let me photocopy a couple of sheets, which is a shame as there's a handy photocopier just over by Mosely's office door.

If only there was some way I could lure her away long enough to get those files and make a copy for myself...

Yep again I've managed to accidentally solve a puzzle before getting up to it, and got another item I don't know what to do with as a reward. I guess I could go back and pester the Voodoo shop guy again. Actually wait, there is something I forgot to do... look up that address of that rich woman who drove past the crime scene.

Uh, so that's the end of this chapter then? I guess that asking Grace to research Malia Gedde for me was the last secret task I needed to complete to move onto Day 2. First though, more nightmares!

Actually I think I'll turn this off now, as I think I have a fairly good idea of what kind of game it is now.


CONCLUSION

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As point and click adventure games go, Gabriel Knight doesn't seem all that bad at all. It hasn't thrown any batshit crazy "glue cat hair to your upper lip so you can pretend you have a moustache" puzzles at me yet at least, but then it hasn't really given me much to work out at all so far. Half my time in the game has been spent going through all my dialogue options and the other half has been spent walking painfully slowly across each room and then pressing right mouse button seven times to look at something because I'm too lazy to move the mouse up to the bar at the top and click on a command instead. The areas don't even scroll across like in most adventure games, you're locked to just the screen you're in unless you find an exit to another area, or more likely the map. Makes the game feel kind of small really.

Visually it's aged really well for a game released 21 years ago, it's just a shame that the art is in such a low resolution. Especially the videos, which could almost fit on a Game Boy screen. Plus the voice work rivals LucasArts games of the era, even if the sound quality isn't all that awesome. I liked the music too for the most part, though it goes to some weird places tonally for a game that claims to be a 'psycho-thriller'. Like most point and click adventures of the time, the game leans more towards comedy overall, with the narrator coming up with smart-assed comments about everything you click on and Tim Curry doing his best to make sure you can never take a thing Gabriel says seriously.

Do I want to keep playing it though? Nah, not really. I'm curious about where the story's going, but as a game it's missing a hook to get me invested and I was rarely left with a clear idea where I had to go next after solving a puzzle. So I might as well go off to some other game instead.

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Well I'm done inflicting my opinion of Gabriel Knight on you, so now it's your turn to tell the world what you think about the game, my humble article, my equally humble website and so on using the comment box below.