Reader reviews for Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within page 4

however various presentation and design issues were such a problem for me that, unfortunately, it seriously affected my overall ability to enjoy the game.

for me, the decision to go for a game presentation centred mostly around the use of full-motion video was very unfortunate. the acting wasn’t too bad, but the way it chops in and out of gameplay made it feel like i was watching an odd telemovie or a mediocre play.

but even worse is the overall look itself. the colours throughout the entire game are so drab it reminded me of the days of old 4-color CGA. i mean, i know it’s not the kinda game where you’d use bright colours, but i felt the palette had no class at all.

all the FMV looked blotchy and grainy (and yes i was using the patch which gets rid of the game’s original video interlacing), like i was watching it through an old television set that’d been badly affected by cyan and magenta magnetic interference.

worse than this though is the non FMV background graphics—they look like very poor lo-res photo realism attempts. but even worse than this is that the characters on top of these backgrounds look like cardboard cutouts throughout the entire game! it makes the game feel incredibly static with all the characters just standing there often with entirely no movement.

The audio engineering is also notably poor. It sounds like the voices were recorded in two different studios—one being fine and the other sounding remarkably muffled and having significant background noise. but this becomes laughable when a character is reading a document and these two different audio presentations change with different paragraphs. not good sierra! not good at all!

the puzzle design was mostly good, but with a few nonsensical exceptions. and while i liked Grace having a prominent role in this second Gabriel Knight game, i found her sometimes acting a little out of character.

i know a lot of the technical problems i had with the video are probably due to the poorer technology available at the time this game was made. but i still feel their over-ambition has really bitten them on this occasion.

and the loss of tim curry playing gabriel really is a huge loss.

Gabriel Knight 2 suffers from most of these problems. It also simplified the interface from GK1 to a single click does everything action.

It didn’t ,thankfully, affect the main reason for playing this series of games. The story and script are top drawer, the characters vivid and the history and locations compelling.

This time around Gabriel is in Germany researching his new book when he gets drawn into the mystery of Werewolves and a charismatic man called Van Glower.

In alternating chapters we control Gabriel and Grace.

Gabriel investigates a series of murders and gets closer to the members of a local hunting club run by Van Glower.

Grace researches the history of the region and Werewolves, visiting museums and castles in the region looking into the past of Ludwig II and Wagner.

Personally I found the Grace chapters to be the more interesting with the in depth history being fascinating. Unfortunately those chapters also highlighted the most frustrating problem with the game interface. To progress in any of the chapters you have to click on every possible hotspot to trigger actions in the correct order otherwise you end up wandering around not sure what you have missed. This is especially apparent in chapter 4 in which you had to click on absolutely everything in the museums and castle otherwise the chapter wont end. Some of those thing were waay too easy to miss.

I still think GK1 is a better game and Tim Curry a better Gabe than the floppy haired Erikson, but overall this is still a fantastic game and one I would play again in the future.

When I first got my hands on this game a while after playing GK1 I was ridiculously excited. I loved GK1 so much that I couldn’t wait to get stuck in to the sequal.

However, I actually initially gave up on playing it after about 20 minutes. And the reason? It wasn’t the transition to FMV, the move to Germany, the different feel and pace.

It wasn’t the Gabriel I knew.

Now I’m not just talking about looks here, clearly even Tim Curry doesn’t look like good old pixelated Gabe from GK1, it was the change in personality.

For me one of the biggest pulls of GK1 was the character of Gabriel. But here in GK2 he was bland, somehow all the edges were rounded off and (I’m sorry but this is my opinion) he was somehow American-sitcom-ised. At first I was so disappointed I stopped playing.

However I did come back and boy am I glad I did. This is, to my mind, the finest example of FMV. Once again the story is excellent but the characters steal the show. Whilst Gabe in GK2 I’m not too bothered about, Von-Glower is a masterpiece. Brilliantly written, exceptionally acted and probably the most intriguing and charismatic game character ever. All the members of the hunt club and their relationships are excellent too, brilliantly written and acted.

The story is a great one and the 2 parallel investigations of Gabe and Grace keep the depth and intellect of the first game with the more visceral parts of Gabe’s investigations. The game draws you in an keeps you interested and the replay value is very high too.

With a better Gabe this would be 5 stars from me. However, I know many people then Dean was brilliant so only half a star goes.

The acting may not be for all and by todays standards the full motion video is a bit bland, but this is the definitive FMV game of the golden Adventure games era