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.)
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.)