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Yup - I'm playing this for the first time the same year it turns twenty.
God, at the rate I'm going I'll be reviewing Tales of Monkey Island by the time I collect my pension.
God, at the rate I'm going I'll be playing Tales of Monkey Island by the time I collect my pension.
The fact is that I like doing this video series because it gives me an excuse to
go back and scheduled meetings and missed when we first came out.
Being but a nipper I was limited to what my pocket money could afford me, so
I found myself delving through demo discs pilfered from friends and my parents workplaces.
I found myself delving through demo discs pilfered from friends and my parents workplaces.
So it's great to have an excuse to go back to play these.
By luck the draw,
most of the point and click games I DID play were by LucasArts.
Now I know I keep banging on about LucasArts but they were THE company for this back in the day.
Now I know I keep banging on about LucasArts but they were THE company for this back in the day.
Not only turning out title after title but classic after classic.
The biggest competitor was probably Sierra and whilst I did prefer
the family-friendly fare of LucasArts
I can see how Sierra managed to keep up.
They weren't afraid of going in a very different - sometimes adult - direction
from the cartoonist gore of Space Quest to the comedic smuttyness of Leisure Suit Larry
all the way up to today's subject - Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers.
...I need to work on my cosplay.
In GUH-KI-SOH-TFF
you play ten days in the life of struggling fiction writer, failing bookshop proprietor
rampant coffee inhaler and serial charm dispenser Gabriel Knight.
He seemingly wanders around his home town of New Orleans seeking a cure for
his terminal writers block and the recurring nightmares. He's aided by his employee Grace... I say employee,
it's implied that he can't actually afford to pay her lately.
and his childhood friend Mosley,
whose position as a police officer affords Gabriel
a frankly of reasonable level of access to police files.
The story itself opens in the midst of the Voodoo Murders
as the media dubs them
due to the ritualistic appearance of the crime scenes.
Rather than see this as a series of lives cruelly cut short by twisted fanatics,
Gabriel views this as material for his next book
and starts investigating.
Cue mystery, intrigue, deception, street performers and shameless flirting.
Cue mystery, intrigue, deception, street performers and shameless flirting.
Okay - as much as I hate to blaspheme against his holiness Tim Curry...
...I could not stand Gabriel Knight's voice at first.
The southern drawl sounded forced; sometimes it sounded like he was voicing a parody -
and I'm not talking about when they had him speaking German; that's an English actor
playing an American southerner trying to pronounce German? That is damn tough to do.
The narrator annoyed me too, but Gabriel's voice grew on me in a way hers never did.
The narrator annoyed me too, but Gabriel's voice grew on me in a way hers never did.
Fortunately, you can turn her voice off...
...which I only realized after I had completed the game.
The actual character of Gabriel Knight isn't that likeable either; his floundering business
and constant nightmares cause him to neglect fairly major aspects of his life
Which he apparently makes up for by flirting with anything in possession of a pulse and ***.
Which he apparently makes up for by flirting with anything in possession of a pulse and ***.
But the more you play, the more you see some good old southern politeness shine through.
But the more you play, the more you see some good old southern politeness shine through.
Especially with the way he interacts with his grandmother; listening to her stories,
giving her hugs, saying how pretty she is wait what?
Is that a thing? Do people do that? ...anyway,
Gabriel does another thing I rarely see in video games.
If you go to leave when you've been talking to someone, he'll say goodbye.
Not just 'LOL DONE TALKING NAOW'
he ends the conversation properly like you would in real life.
Any other game he'd just wander off without a word...
okay I know it's a weird thing to notice, but it's just nice is all.
Playing this did help me figure out why I didn't play so many Sierra games back in the day.
Up until they discovered FMV, they loved to show you
a big 'ol list of verbs. Granted, it took a damn long time for the rest of point 'n' click developers
to move away from this, but Sierra seemed to stick with it longer than most.
to move away from this, but Sierra seemed to stick with it longer than most.
Still, it was practically a genre staple by this point, so it didn't really bother me.
What DID bother me was the frankly stupid choice of verbs this game gives you.
You get Walk, Look, Take, Open,
Use, Push, Talk and uh... another Talk?
It's such a clumsy selection and I'm pretty sure I only used some of those verbs once
in the entire game.
What I'm saying is they could have merged couple of them together and lost nothing.
But there's something that bothered me even more than that -
they don't have any keyboard shortcuts for these verbs.
For those who you haven't seen a certain blog post on my website, I LOVE keyboards.
You give me keyboard shortcuts, I will use them. You give me a game I can play
entirely with the keyboard, I am the happiest man-child you will ever see.
I even buy my keyboards based on the noise they make!
...yes I am weird, I'm quite aware of that.
I don't want to have to right click through the entire list of verbs or
scan a list to try an remember which talk verb is which because they look the damn same at a glance.
scan a list to try an remember which talk verb is which because they look the damn same at a glance.
As I said before, the verb list is a product of it's time... although SOME modern games
seem to think it's worth a comeback.
but if Monkey Island could manage keyboard shortcuts two years prior to this, there was no excuse.
but if Monkey Island could manage keyboard shortcuts two years prior to this, there was no excuse.
Okay enough of that;
now I'll gracefully segue into talking about the game's good points.
Opening up new locations to visit is a joy - if not for the sense of
achievement then for the lovely wee jingle you get when you make progress.
Sure, you're trudging back and forth between all these places but then that makes it
quick and easy and I found the charm was in going to these new places. meeting
new characters and learning new conversation topics to ask other people about.
The onus is on you to take these new pieces of information and link them back to
what you know so you can figure out what to do next. You really smart for
connecting the dots in the feels much more like real detective work than just moving
between a series of spotlit plot markers. This is helped by another feature I rarely see.
Gabriel has a tape recorder that automatically records conversations
and lets you replay the highlights later.
I like this feature;
it makes sense for the character to have it, it's pointed out in the opening scenes and
it saves you from backtracking to have people reminds you of what they've told you.
That said, you're kind-of forced to use it when asking someone the same question twice
might get your reaction like this.
But I see that as a nod to realism instead.
I mean, I do tech support for my parents - I KNOW how being asked the same question
again and again nibbles away at your soul.
What will keep you going through this game is a group of well fleshed-out characters
who play out an intriguing plot, combining *** mystery with voodoo history.
I feel like the Kojima method is also in full effect here.
The game offers you tons of information about the history of voodoo practices
and culture as well about the history of New Orleans itself.
Mind you, I'm god-awful at geography so I tend to only really know about American cities that have been hit by
some kind of disaster.
Meaning that all this info could be complete horseshit and I'd have no idea.
That, and I need to buy an atlas. But even if half of it was false, that would still be enough to hold my
interest through to the end.
And that's why I don't think it's a shame I didn't play this back in the day;
I was about six or seven years old; this would've gone right over my head.
And my parents would've started asking some very serious questions.
It was a step towards maturity that adventure games and computer games in general needed.
Telling a mature story without devolving into gratuitous gore or blatant ***.
Telling a mature story without devolving into gratuitous gore or blatant ***.
Gabriel Knight is showing it's age now, with it's interface and the way it restricts your progress.
But it sticks to the genre's true strength; storytelling.
And that's why it's worth a look if you've got a bit of patience.