I had a good time playing through Gabriel Knight: Sins Of The Father. It’s one of those 90s classics in the point and click genre I never played in the past, and it’s often listed as one of the best ones.

You are playing as Gabriel Knight, a struggling author who also runs a private bookstore. He has an assistant clerk working for him, Grace and a friend in the police, Mosley. The setting is there has been a succession of unsolved voodoo murders in town, and it’s pretty uncertain what is going on. Is it actually real voodoo? Or just murders made to look like they are? The police considers them fake voodoo, but your role is to do your own private investigation to write your book. Another part of the plot is Gabriel family history, which may or may not be connected to the story. Gabriel himself is a weird kind of person. Haunted by nightmares, a bit of a mess, and strangely sleazy to most women. Since the game is written by a woman I suppose it’s by design. Voiced by Tim Curry, which was an interesting choice.

I can see why GB is so beloved. There’s a very realistic feeling to New Orleans, and the characters and the setting that sets it all apart. The music is fitting, and the voice-acting is superb. There is a lot of dialogue though, but it’s extremely well written, and you’ll learn a lot about the history of voodoo and the everything else. I also liked how it’s divided into days.

The best part is when you meet an old lady who tells you about what is going on in town, and you learn about the voodoo scene in town, and how they are on to you and even people you know. One days a creepy guy looking through the window of the store. That was a great touch. It’s creepy and tense, and it get’s worse as the plot unfolds. The build up is masterful. I do however think there’s a slight disappointment when the mystery is revealed, although I’m not sure why I think so. It works, I’ll admit, but it’s a bit far out. Perhaps it reveals too much? Not as detailed as the earlier parts?

The very last part of the game also has a bit of the same structure as Kings Quest 6, where you can get to the ending, but if you missed something you can’t properly finish it while you have no way of knowing. I am personally not a fan of these, but seemed trendy at Sierra in those days. I also thought the zombie parts were a bit annoying.

I got stuck around 3-4 times in the game before having to use some minor hints at Uhs-hints.com, which is quite much for my «no hints allowed» standards. So the game was fairly hard at times for me, I’d say, but if you are patient most puzzles can be solved like with most games in this genre.
Either way, recommended.

The story's super interesting (outside of the very forced romance between Gabriel and Malia Gedde), the mystery is fun to watch unravel, it legitimately taught me a lot about voodoo, and the giant dialogue trees are so extremely well written and voice acted (well, Tim Curry in the titular role is honestly pretty bad and couldn't do a New Orleans accent to save his life, but everyone else is great! Especially Michael Dorn as Doctor John!) that I'd have probably been content with if the game was just dialogue and didn't have any its adventure game aspects. It's also presented in such a nice way, with beautiful 1993 adventure game graphics that still look great today (and with some shockingly good lighting!), and a fantastic, atmospheric soundtrack where there isn't a single song that feels out of place or fails to enhance the mood of any given situation.

It's just too bad that actually playing Gabriel Knight just wasn't a particularly positive experience for me. These old adventure games did have a habit of being sort of nonsensical and you'd really have to know the language of the genre to get on their wavelength, and even then they're still very clearly made for a market where not as many games were coming out constantly and there weren't really resources to make particularly long games while still maintaining these production values, so they're fairly short, but extremely obtuse so that they'd last a long time. This is definitely the case with Gabriel Knight as well, sadly.

First of all, the game is set over ten days and there are things you can do as early as the first day, but that are actually supposed to be done later, so there's no feedback whatsoever when solving one of those puzzles, and they're also just noise that makes it confusing which puzzles you should be doing to end the day, and the game is so bad at giving directions at what Gabriel's supposed to do that even finding those correct puzzles can sometimes be even harder than the puzzles themselves (though a lot of the puzzles are complete BS. Strangely enough most of the worst ones are in the first half of the game, though.)

This also isn't helped by the very egregious pixel hunting the game forces the player to do, which is made a lot worse since there is no text to tell you what you're highlighting. You just have to use the "look" action on basically everything and hope that Gabriel has some interesting reaction to it, because it's almost impossible sometimes to even see a relevant thing since it just completely blends in with the rest of the background. Sometimes the puzzles also don't really don't give any clear feedback when completing them, but are still mandatory to do that day despite not showing their relevance until several days later, so there's really no consistency there.

Overall I feel like I'd have wanted more subtle hints from the game regarding what it wanted me to do, because while the puzzles would still be really hard most of the time, not even knowing where to go and what I should be aiming to do when I'm even at the right spot gets really frustrating after a while. Of course, there are guides these days and I definitely used one for this game (not for the entire thing, but probably for at least one or two puzzles every other day), which I'd usually say lessens the experience a bit since figuring out these puzzles are a big part of the genre's charm, but when I don't even know where to start it's pretty hard to make any sort of progress. That sekey madoule puzzle in particular would probably have just been the end point for me if I'd played the game 30 years ago (and that's if I'd even get past the part where Gabriel has to guide a mime to a cop in order to listen to a police radio.)

So no, I did not have a great time with Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. I do, though, still want to play the sequel since it seems to be one of very few FMV games that a lot of people seem to really like, and as much as I disliked the gameplay here, I really wouldn't mind more of Jane Jensen's writing. Hopefully she can write a better romance in that game, though, or maybe just not have one at all. I do, however, hope that Gabriel still asks everyone what they know about Voodoo and New Orleans (despite him being born and raised there.)

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2022/03/05/gabriel-knight-sins-of-the-fathers-1993-review/

‘Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers’ is a point-and-click adventure game that came out in 1993, and was developed and published by Sierra On-Line for the PC and Mac and was released at the beginning of when Sierra was trying to break into more mature games, with both ‘Phantasmagoria’ and ‘Shivers’ being the companies other attempts at games aimed at older audiences, which were released 2 years later in 1995.

‘Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers’ was written and designed by Jane Jensen, who was given a great deal of freedom when writing and designing the game, with some help from company co-founder Roberta Williams. Jensen was previously a designer for ‘EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus’ and the writer and co-designer for ‘King’s Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow’ along with Roberta Williams, as well as working on ‘Police Quest 3: The Kindred’ by doing some additional writing, and helped design ‘Pepper’s Adventures in Time’, which came out the same year as ‘Sins of the Fathers’.

Thankfully, the game is pretty easy to set up, as it runs in ScummVM just by selecting the folder that the game is located in, so you don’t have to fiddle with DOSBox, unless that’s your method of choice. The GOG version already comes pre-packaged with ScummVM.

But to tangent for just a moment, for some reason ‘Sins of the Fathers’ was released in one of the weirdest boxes for a game I’ve ever seen. While it did ship in the regular rectangular box that most games shipped in at the time, one of the boxes that ‘Sins of the Fathers’ came in was designed by a madman. Some even came in a trapezoid shape, which was already pushing it, but ‘Sins of the Fathers’ came in something completely different. I have no idea what shape this is. If the trapezoid shaped boxes already had trouble fitting on your shelf, then you’re going to need a whole shelf dedicated to putting this on it.
The puzzle box from Hellraiser wasn’t this complicated.

My pet theory is that someone at Sierra accidentally sent the work for the box designer to the puzzle creators instead and the puzzle creators didn’t question it and thought that it might be an Raster Rgg and sent it back without questioning it, and the person who sent it out in the first place okayed it assuming it would look like every other box for a video game, and by the time it was being printed it was too late to change and they were stuck with a bunch of copies of this game that looked like this.

‘Sins of the Fathers’ follows the titular character Gabriel Knight, a failed novelist with a string of unsuccessful paranormal mysteries under his belt that currently has writer’s block and owner of a book store located in New Orleans that sells rare books that’s barely any more successful than his novels. To overcome his writers block, Gabriel gets in contact with his childhood friend, Detective Mosley, who is currently working on a case referred to as ‘The Voodoo Murders’, hoping to use it as inspiration for his next novel. At the same time, Gabriel has been having vivid nightmares involving voodoo sacrifices that seem all too real.

To expand on the game’s story, ‘Sins of the Fathers’ came with a prequel graphic novel in the game box, back when games actually came in a physical box instead of being released onto current digital store shelves, that follows an incident from 1693 and follows a Schattenjager, German for Shadow Hunter, named Gunter Ritter as he investigates a series of brutal murders involving witchcraft. While it isn’t necessarily required reading to enjoy the game, it does fill in some of the background details as to what is going on in the game.

While it is a bit hard to find these days, it was eventually uploaded to Sierra Studio’s website, whis is unfortunately no longer up. But this was before the turn of the millennium and the comic is pretty low resolution compared to more modern scans of it. While digital version of the original game don’t come with the graphic novel for some reason, it should be fairly easy to find online through various websites. Eventually it was released with the 20th Anniversary Edition of ‘Sins of the Fathers’, which is nice, but that version of the game is for another day.

There was even a novelization for ‘Sins of the Fathers’ which was later released in the ‘Gabriel Knight Mysteries’, which included the first and second games, written by Jane Jensen herself. However, good luck buying a second hand copy of this collection or book, let alone at a reasonable price. It didn’t get re-released like the graphic novel did by being released as an extra in the 20th Anniversary Edition of this game, but there are digital copies of it floating around online and I don’t think anyone would mind people getting a copy of this book since there is no other way to get it.

I’d figure that I would briefly mention that ‘Sins of the Fathers’ uses a lot of real world history, including real life people, locations, and history as a basis for it’s story. The developers for ‘Sins of the Father’s have clearly done their research into the history of both Voodoo and the history of New Orleans and it’s entirely feasible that you could learn something about both Voodoo and the city of New Orleans from playing this game. Although, it has been more than 25 years since it’s release so it’s entirely possibly some information has been corrected and some blind spots have been filled in, but it could still be used as a jumping off point for it’s subject matter.

Gabriel’s rare book shop is even located on the famous Bourbon Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans, and looking at Google Maps, the game looks pretty accurate to the real world locations that are featured on the game’s map, barring Gabriel’s book shop of course since that isn’t real. Well, accurate for 1993 at least. I might actually write up something about the real world locations in ‘Sins of the Fathers’ since I had fun looking it up for this game.

The game obviously follows the previously mentioned Gabriel Knight, a womanizer and ladies man who has enough charm to work his magic on any woman he fancies. Mostly. Did I mention that this game was written by a woman? The only person to resist his charms is Grace Nakimura (outside of that one female cop later in the game), Gabriel’s assistant. It’s pretty obvious that Grace was written to be Gabriel’s inevitable love interest who is clearly in denial about her feelings towards him, but we don’t actually see Grace actually falling for him at any point, which is refreshing. Grace is smart, sarcastic, and doesn’t take any of Garbiel’s shit, which makes her my favorite character by default.

During Gabriel’s investigation, we soon come across several other important characters, including Detective Mosely, which is Gabriel’s Childhood friend and the sole reason that Gabriel is able to not only get information about the Voodoo Murders, sometimes Mosely giving up the info freely, but mostly Gabriel getting it through other more less than legal means, taking advantage of their life long friendship.

But there are more interesting characters related to the events of the Voodoo Murders. One of those people is Malia Gedde, who Gabriel Knight first notices as she is passing by one of the crime scenes of the Voodoo Murders, taking interest in both the crime scene and Gabriel the moment she see’s him. The other is someone who claims to be a distant relative of Gabriel and is trying to get into contact with him, but Gabriel brushes it off.

You’ll also meet several more characters throughout the game, all of which are unique and memorable in their own ways. Some of which are a lot more dangerous than they seem.

When ‘Sins of the Fathers’ was original released, CDs were becoming the hot new thing, allowing for up to 700 megabytes per disc instead of the incredibly limited 1.44 megabytes that the floppy disc had. And while ‘Sins of the Fathers’ came out on floppy discs, it also came out on CD. But instead of simply taking advantage of the extra space that CDs allowed by reducing the game from a whole 11 floppy discs to just putting 1 CD into your system, it also came with a bunch of other neat additions too. Not only did the Cd version come with a fully animated intro (well, fully animated by the standards of 1993), but it also came with a short video detailing the making of the game, which is a rarity for games in the modern era, let alone in the early 90s. Unfortunately, it doesn’t come with the digital re-release of the game.

But the biggest addition with the CD version of ‘Sins of the Fathers’ is that it adds voice acting for every single line of dialogue throughout the game. All 3700 lines of dialogue.And not only did Sierra put up the money for voice actors, but they went all in and hired actual movie and TV talent for the game.

The titular Gabriel Knight was voiced by Tim Curry (Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)), Detective Mosely was voiced by Mark Hamil (Star Wars (1977)), Grace Nakimura was voiced by Leah Remini (The King of Queens (1998-2007), Dr. John was voiced by Michael Dorn (Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994)), along with Desk Sgt Frink and a few miscellaneous characters throughout the game being voice by Jim Cummings, who has had over 550+ voice credits as of writing this review and has voiced everything from Whinnie The Pooh to Pete from Goof Troop to Darkwing Duck

And finally, the character of Wolfgang was voiced by the late Elfrem Zimbalist, Jr., who has voiced Alfred from “Batman: The Animated Series” (1992-1995), starred in the movie “Airport 1975” (1974), along with the long-running show “The F.B.I.”, which lasted 241 episodes over 9 season, and ran from September 19th, 1965, to April 28th, 1974, a whopping 9 years.

But despite playing as Gabriel Knight, the developers decided to go with a narrator to read all of the descriptor text instead of having the character read all of it. Which, considering the amount of text in this game, it’s pretty reasonable.

The narrator is played by the late Virginia Capers, an accomplished actress who has appeared on Broadway and has made various movie and TV appearances throughout her career. From everything that I’ve read about the game, the narrator is the only character (she’s not really a character, but she leaves one hell of an impression) that people seem to complain about, and by the end of the game, I sadly kinda agree, at least to some extent.

Virginia’s line readings can be a bit slow and I had already read through whatever line she had been reading before she had even got half way through it. But I did still enjoy her line readings, which were wonderfully sarcastic at times, even if they were still a little bit long in the tooth by the end of the game.

There is an option to turn the narrator off in the game’s settings, so if her performance does grate on you, you don’t have to listen to her throughout the game.

‘Sins of the Fathers’ looks great for an adventure game of it’s time, mixing film noir with the styling of a graphic novel, and it does it quite well. Sure it wasn’t going in on the shiny new pre-rendered 3D like a lot of the adventure games were doing at the time, like “Myst”, “The 7th Guest”, and even more obscure adventure games like “Gadget: Invention, Travel, & Adventure”, or going all in on the FMV trend like “Dracula Unleashed”, “Return to Zork”, and “Police Quest: Open Season”, which was also developed by Sierra, along with the previously mentioned “Myst” and “The 7th Guest”, all of which came out the same year as ‘Sins of the Fathers’, but the mix of pixel art and obviously painted backgrounds used as a basis for the backgrounds holds up a lot better that the now incredibly dated early pre-rendered 3D and cheesy acting of the FMV games.

There are even times in the game when an important even happens in the game and it switches to a graphic novel style cutscene made up of comic panels that highlight turning points in the story or feature important information for the plot, and they really add to the games atmosphere. The game also draws it’s inspiration heavily from the 1987 film “Angel Heart”, obvious from the way the first day of the game starts, an excellent film that anyone who is a giant fan of this game should check out if you haven’t yet.

If you’re a newer point-and-click adventure game fan deciding to leap into some of the point-and-click classics, then fair warning because ‘Sins of the Fathers’ uses something called a ‘dumb cursor’. A ‘smart cursor’ automatically selects whatever action is required for you to interact with something, where as a ‘dumb cursor’ is a cursor that lets you pick what action to use with whatever object, person, or place you’re trying to interact with.

A boot is or walking, the mask is for looking, the text bubble with a question mark is for asking questions, the text bubble with exclamation mark is for talking, the hand is for picking up, the door is for opening a door to something, the gears are for using something like a light switch or chair, the hand knocking something is for moving something, the pouch (it looks like an envelope) is the inventory, and the tape recorder is obviously the tape recorder.

Some of these cursors could have easily been combined. I feel like it’s pretty obvious that when I hover my cursor over the point on the screen where you have to either move to a different area or screen that I clearly want to move to that area, and the fact that I have to differentiate between opening a door and walking through a doorway that is already open is kind of annoying. Clearly I don’t want to unscrew the door from the doorway and take it with me.

There are points where I naturally want to use the hand icon to either use something or pick something up, but you have to use the ‘operate’ cursor instead. As much as I’ve always appreciated the fluff dialogue in older point-and-click adventure games, I’d rather seek it out than have to hear it every time that I accidentally use the wrong cursor.

You can right click to cycle through all of the cursors, but I quickly found myself just using the drop down menu not only because I found myself accidentally cycling past a cursor that I wanted to use by accident, doubly so when I had to do something in a quick time frame, but using the drop down menu paused the game to let you properly find the cursor that I wanted to use without having to worry about finding the right one in time for the small window of opportunity to narrowly dodge an event that would have killed me and given me a game over screen.

Apparently the cursors were designed like this because Sierra was getting letters about how ‘smart cursors’ assume too much about what the player wanted to do, like instead of just picking up a jar the character just opened it instead, and the players just wanted more control over the game.

Also, there are also several points throughout the game where you’re required to use something from your inventory and use it on something in the environment or with another character.

But my favorite part is having to learn Voodoo Code. At one point in the game, you’ll need to learn how to use Voodoo Code and Drum Code, the Voodoo Code to write a message, and Drum Code to translate a message, both requiring you translate to corresponding symbols and sounds to letters and words. It adds an extra layer to the puzzles to make them feel like they were properly designed around the plot and subject matter instead of just shoving puzzles in simply because it’s an adventure game.

Unfortunately, some of the puzzles still have a touch of the classic Sierra moon logic going, but I guess there wasn’t any escaping that from even the most sensible Sierra games.

I know that this game was released in 1993 when adventure games were still known for having some moon logic puzzles, but Gabriel Knight is clearly trying to tell a proper story, and some of the more out there puzzles cause a slight whiplash when it comes to the tone.

For example, one of the first puzzles in the game requires you to use a thermostat in the police station so that Detective Mosely takes off his jacket and puts it on the back of his chair so that you can fish out his detectives badge from it’s pocket. The way you do this is after he’s taken his jacket off, you have to ask him ‘politely’ to get you a cup of coffee.

This is all in character for Gabriel to do and makes logical sense. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t really get across that this is what you’re supposed to do. The game could have easily had Gabriel, or the narrator, to mention it offhandedly directly or indirectly in a line of dialogue. It doesn’t help that the thermostat blends in with the background of the game and the only way you’re going to know that it’s there is to mouse over it and for it to pop up with text.

Which also highlights the fact that there is some minor pixel hunting in this game. For the most part, the game does a fantastic job conveying the player what is what, but the game still has some limitation with the hardware from the time.

Thankfully, there is some wiggle room with what you can do on which day of the game that you’re up to. It’s like whoever developed the puzzle went went through all of the hoops to make sure that the puzzle made logical sense, but tripped up at the finish line and completely forgot that there was an audience playing the game and forgot to tell them about the puzzle.

Thankfully the game doesn’t put you into any death traps that you’re completely unaware of, setting you back hours and undoing all of your hard work and progress where you don’t have the slightest clue what you did wrong. But of course, you still have to go with the old adventure game adage of “Save and Save Often”.

I could easily see someone taking a peak at a guide or walkthrough at some point during their playthough, and I wouldn’t really blame a few people who had no experience playing older point-and-click adventure games.

But both the most important and infamous part of the game is the interrogation mechanic. While you’re interacting with other characters, there will be several characters important enough to the story that when you use the ‘Ask’ cursor on them, a list of questions pops up that allows you to ask very specific questions about any relevant information that you’re looking for, and any information you get about a subject that you get from one character can be used when asking questions to another character, meaning you’ll have to go back and forth between a few characters before you’ll get all of the relevant information.

Thankfully at the beginning of the game Gabriel does get a tape recorder in the mail which automatically records all of the conversations that you have with other characters throughout the game, meaning that you don’t have to constantly take notes. I know that some long time adventure game fans love their note taking, but when you have no idea what information is relevant and when, this is a godsend.

And it also lends to more realistic conversations too, as some characters tell you in an annoyed tone that they don’t want to have to repeat themselves over and over again, which pokes fun at the fact that adventure game protagonists are know for repeating themselves when asking a question by having the characters give realistic reactions to how annoying this would be in the real world.

There are still a few minor nitpicks I have with the game though that I thought that I should mention. These might not bug you like they do me, but I thought that I should bring them up anyway.

You have to wait for some animations to complete before you’re allowed to do something else like use your inventory or interact with something or someone else. I think this is more a weird quirk of the engine more than a bug, but it’s mildly annoying at times when you’re at the more time sensitive moments.

Gabriel’s walking speed is also a tad slow. It took so long for him to get from A to B in some places that I used this time to make notes for this look a the game that during these moments, including this complaint that I’m making right now.

A later part of the game has you going through not quite a maze, but it can get slightly confusing if you’re not paying attention and get turned around, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing.

While Gabriel Knight: ‘Sins of the Fathers’ did receive great reviews when it was released, it wasn’t a commercial success, only selling around 300,000 copies by December 1998, a whole 5 years after it’s initial release, which was depressingly low even at the time. One of it’s competitors in the adventure genre, Myst, sold millions of copies and got people to adopt a whole new technology with the CD. But thankfully due to it’s positive response Sierra decided to greenlight multiple sequels anyway, which is great because it would have been a shame if Gabriel Knight ended at one game.

this game does have some of that 90s point n click bs, from obscure puzzles, to timed sequences that can result in game overs, to, well, being able to even get a game over, to the pixel hunt, to the excess mouse functions that could have really been streamlined (seriously when do you ever use push in this game?)
but
the story, the writing, the visuals, the voice acting, everything else comes together to make this one of the best point n click games of the 90s... just play with a guide and have a separate save for every day (you'll thank me when you forget to leave the snake scepter under the cushion and screw yourself over on the final day)