Gameology 2.0

Review Of

Sierra. Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. USA: Sierra, 1993.

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Many fans of Sierra's graphical adventure games have told me that the Gabriel Knight series marked an important turning point in that company's development strategy. Gone were the zany, fairy-tale spoofs. Suddenly, Sierra was making games for adults. After recently completing the first GK game, Sins of the Fathers (SotF), I can see why Sierra fans are enthusiastic about this series. With voice talent like Tim Curry, Michael Dorn, Mark Hamill, and Leah Remini, all it took was some decent writing to really pave the way for a new, more mature GAG.

SotF does right what so many other Sierra games do wrong. The pacing moves along smoothly, and the player is never overwhelmed with too vast a space to explore or too many variables to juggle in a command tree. There's always a fairly clear sense of what Gabriel needs to do next, even if it's not clear how he'll do it. The puzzles are generally interesting, based on codes, object manipulation, dialogue, and timing. What's really nice here is a little "twinkle" sound effect that plays whenever Gabriel does something right. Little touches like this really add to the reward structure and increase playability.

Obviously, the key strenths of SotF are storyline and characterization. The game feels like a dime-store detective novel with a dollop of magical realism tossed in. I won't bore you with the details, but suffice it to say I've read worse stories in print. The atmosphere takes most of its substance from New Orleans' French Quarter, and relies heavily on voodoo for flavoring. Graveyards, moldy book stores, plantation homes, Tulane--it's a really nice gameworld. The narrator has a distinct Louisiana accent, which complements the game nicely. While there aren't that many locations to explore, the ones included are managed well. There's not much backtracking and new locations tend to pop up consistently, gradually expanding the gameworld.

The characters are fairly developed and are quite likeable. Gabriel's "ladykiller" charm might feel a bit strained at times, but he's able to poke fun at himself and is generally fun to play. His assistant, Gracie, has some great lines, as well, as does Gabriel's friend, Detective Mosely. Bear in mind, I'm not talking Academy Awards here, but the characters here are better fleshed out than in most GAGs, particularly circa 1993.

Truth be told, I did have to rely on a hintbook to get me through this game. The biggest problem is with the "day" structure of the game. The game is divided into ten days, or levels. Players can only advance to the next day after they have satisfied a certain number of objectives. Since it isn't always clear to the player what these are, what can result is a tedious trek through every area to search out some pretty arbitrary triggered events. For instance, I remember once having to (for no apparent reason) venture to the far right of a graveyard to catch a triggered event involving Malia, the femme fatale. I also got snagged by a few dialogue-based snafus. To win, you really need to explore every dialogue option repeatedly until you exhaust all the possibilities. Various events in the game will change the dialogue trees, so you'll need to go back and play through them all again to catch that plot-critical bit. In short, unless you enjoy tedium, keep a hintsite open. (Unfortunately, the UHS file for SotF is woefully lame, consisting mostly of spoilers rather than gentle tips.)

I might also add that the GUI is a bit irksome. It follows the basic mouse-pointer verb rotation model, and there is no support for the mouse wheel. So, you can either right-click cycle through a half-dozen or so verbs or hit the top menu to select it. This involves a bunch of extra clicking; didn't anyone learn anything from Loom? Some of the verbs are mostly redundant anyway; do we really need separate OPEN, USE, PUSH, and GO buttons? As far as I'm concerned, all of these could be subsumed under one command--likewise with the QUESTION and CONVERSE buttons.

I had a hell of a time getting this game to run under XP. I finally got it running via dosbox, though I had to run it in a small window. For some reason, the game started to stutter badly when I went to full-screen. It took me about an hour of tweaking the dosbox.conf file to get it running properly. On a positive note, the game only crashed once--apparently, other people have suffered far more frequent crashes.

All in all, though, I really enjoyed SotF and am looking forward to the other games in the series. I would particularly recommend this game to those folks who aren't impressed with the childish zaniness of most LucasArts and Sierra game and are looking for a slightly more mature game. However, though SotF has some cursing and nudity, only a religious nutjob would prevent teens from playing this creative and enjoyable title.