Of the two point n click adventure games I’ve played this year that concern themselves largely with underground voodoo culture in turn of the century New Orleans, Gabriel Knight is definitely the better experience than Nancy Drew: Legend of the Crystal Skull, but I’m still left wondering if anybody will ever tackle this subject matter in a way that’s not blisteringly racist.

Sins of the Fathers was Designed and written by Jane Jensen, famous among people who care about shit like this mostly for a relatively small but extremely prolific career as an adventure game designer. She’s known for her interest in real life histories and cultures that she uses to inform her stories and for the meticulous research she puts into them, which always makes it into the games – usually in the form of extremely clumsy but by the same token mildly charming gigantic info dumps every couple of hours. This is true in Sins of the Fathers, too, a game that’s very obviously trying to teach people about the rich history of real life voodoo culture and dispel a lot of the popular tropes universal to media portrayals of it, but the success is…mixed, to be generous.

Because, yeah, it’s clear that Jensen did her research, and there IS a lot of cool stuff in the game, and especially early on, the game goes out of its way a lot to separate the silliness of the cartoonish “voodoo killings” of the premise from anything that resembles real life practice, and to demonstrate that the characters know this is a dumb thing to think too. The big obvious problem, though, is that you are playing a supernatural horror game, so no matter how much we hang a lampshade on this stuff, by the end of the game we’re still pretty much checking all the boxes and engaging earnestly with all the same stuff we were proverbially wagging our fingers at a few hours ago. Knowing you’re doing it doesn’t forgive you for doing it later, it kind of just makes you look stupid for not coming up with a different ending!

Additionally, the way characters are written and sources are cited definitely gives an air of…late 20th century academia to the whole thing that makes all of the Bibliographic Authenticity of the game ring pretty hollow, especially in 2021. When your sources are texts pulled from museums and dusty white men giving you judgements and interpretations dressed as objective facts, you’ve gotta take things with a grain of salt and I don’t think that’s a level Jensen was operating on when she was writing this game in 1992, based on the final product.

It leaves the game in an interesting middle ground. Sins of the Fathers is obviously not aspiring to be much more than a moody, pulp mystery adventure - an Indiana Jones for the r-rated fantasy crowd – but Jensen’s interests as a creator mark it with this air of sophistication, almost like an educational game for adults, a vibe it can use for its own legitimacy as a piece of media worth taking more seriously than maybe it deserves or it wants. So on one hand you have this air of legitimacy from questionable sources but on the other hand you’ve still got a story written by white people that hinges around a white guy in 1800 romancing a woman who is a slave and presenting that story only from his perspective and completely uncritically and you are fully expected to just take his word for it and assume it’s true and not consider the power dynamics or other implications, and then also think it’s a bad thing when that woman’s spirit goes on to start slave rebellions after she dies. It all leaves a strange taste in one’s mouth!

Which is not to say I dislike the game! On the contrary, I had an absolute blast, and it’s quite obvious that pretty much everybody who worked on it did too. Jensen and Bridget McKenna’s script is brimming with verve, and a wry humor complimented perfectly by the completely goofy performances coming in from a cast absolutely studded with c-list stars from the 90s. The puzzles are some of the most balanced I’ve ever played from the era, especially surprising given the pedigree of a lot of the people on this team and Sierra’s reputation in general. Music and graphics are out of this world good. As a mood piece it’s unassailable. There are some of the best animations in the genre in this game, from the intensity of the strangulation in key game over sequences to the joyous strut of the asshole mime in the park, every moment of the game is bursting with the exact right amount of personality.

It’s also commendably scary, something that I always really appreciate in this genre. There’s a very slow mount to the tension as you uncover the extent of conspiracy at the heart of this game, and as the days tick by the noose starts to very tangibly tighten around Gabriel’s neck, faster and more confidently than I was expecting. When on the morning of the fourth day there’s just a guy suddenly standing outside your store window, staring in, not moving and not reacting to you, it’s intimidating. When you realize the buskers around town are all in on the evil plot together and use their music to send coded messages across the city, it’s chilling. When the cop you’ve been chatting with every day suddenly tells you that they’ve never had a guy named Mosely on the force when you’re Mosely’s best friend and you were in his office yesterday, it’s openly frightening. They can get away with doing things so overtly in front of Gabriel because they are powerful, actually powerful, and Gabriel is a little piece of shit, and he can’t do a thing to touch them officially. It truly doesn’t matter to them. And that’s scary. It’s really well done.

That kind of craft is all over the game. Gabriel himself threads the needle of being a genuinely despicable asshole, perhaps one of the best in video games, without being completely unlikable or worthy of hate. His supporting cast is uniformly winning, and the only person who really gets short shrift is his love interest (making your guys fated to fall in love does not make their love being shallow more satisfying).

So Sins of the Fathers is TRULY, the DEFINITION of a problematic fave. Cannot understate how fucked up the politics of it are, how intensely and virulently racist it is, even as it’s questionably trying to subvert racist tropes and clearly thinks its heart is in the right place. But if you can stomach it, what else is here is completely compelling. If nothing else you get to listen to Tim Curry do the worst cajun accent of all time for like ten hours and he pronounces words super fucked up in like four different languages. That, at the very least, absolutely rips with no caveats.