The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery (MS-DOS)

Developer:

Sierra

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Release Date:

1995

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Systems:

PC

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This week on Super Adventures I’m playing a game that was requested in March this very year! It only took me six months to get around to a request for once; I'm very proud of myself.

The Beast Within is second game in the Gabriel Knight trilogy, following on from Sins of the Fathers, so I'm just going to call it Gabriel Knight 2 from now on. The Gabriel Knight trilogy is interesting as each game represents one of the four eras of 90s adventure games:

• Gabriel Knight 1 is a classic 2D style point and click adventure from 1993, enhanced with early 90s advances like voice acting and 256 colour scanned backgrounds.
• Gabriel Knight 2 was released two years later in 1995 and jumped right in to the short lived multimedia FMV fad, where game developers discovered that good actors and real sets are really expensive and video looks like ass when you compress it to fit on CDs.
• Gabriel Knight 3 came out right at the end of the 90s in 1999, during a time where you either made your game with polygons or you picked up your coat and got out. Turns out that the relatively expensive 3D environments and game pad controls weren't a good match for the increasingly niche genre though.
• Finally there’s Gabriel Knight 4, which doesn’t exist... because Gabriel Knight 3 killed adventure games. Actually the truth is that the genre was already on the way out, so at worst its famous cat fur moustache puzzle merely helped hammer a nail or two into the coffin. And the genre eventually rose from the dead so it didn't even do a good job of that.

Due to its high video content Gabriel Knight 2 originally came on a ridiculous 6 CDs, which isn't actually so bad when you had Amiga adventure games coming on a dozen floppy disks. It's definitely not an issue for me as the version I bought online has zero disc swapping! I just had to download it as 7 separate files because I was too dumb to get it from GOG or Steam. The game's not supported by ScummVM by the way, but I'm sure DOSBox can handle it.

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.