Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned was the last instalment in the series in 1999. This time creator Jane Jensen takes us on a trip to France involving the Crucifixion, the Templars, the Cathars and the Freemasons – throw vampires into the mix and you’ve got yourself one hell of a party.
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By the time work began on Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, it was already clear that it would be the final Gabriel Knight game. Regardless, Sierra On-Line felt that the series should move to 3D graphics to keep up with the times but the development team had had little experience with or understanding of the format. When programmer Scott Bilas was brought on board mid-production, he was told that the game was nearly finished but found out that a number of features needed to make the title playable had been left out.
I’ve been working my way through the Gabriel Knight series alongside the lovely Kevin from The Mental Attic, and he recently sent me a post-mortem article from Gamasutra written by Bilas. After reading about all of the development issues faced and the struggle that the programmer went through, it’s a wonder that the game even made it onto the shelves! It didn’t have a great start in life and unfortunately didn’t have a good time after release either: launched shortly after the ‘crash’ of the genre, it couldn’t match the critical and financial success of its two predecessors and was the adventure title published by Sierra.
After playing through second instalment – The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery – with its FMV gameplay and portrayal of the lead character by Dean Erickson, I was looking forward to returning to blocky pixels and the fabulous Tim Curry – who depicted the drawling ladies’ man in the original Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. But as soon as I started playing Gabriel Knight 3 I immediately had to send Kevin a message: “What the hell have they done to Gabriel?!” The title does have several positive points but unfortunately there are a number of negatives that prevent it from reaching its full potential.
The game begins with our hero coming round after being knocked out by two ominous strangers while following them on a train, and finding that he’s now close to the French village of Rennes-le-Chateau. Grace eventually arrives on the scene and while Gabriel searches for a kidnapped child, she slowly begins to uncover a mystery that has been hidden through the times of the Crucifixion, the Templars, the Cathars and the Freemasons right up until the modern day. As they both continue to dig (both literally and figuratively) they soon realise that everyone – even the man who originally hired them – has a secret agenda.
Grace always seems to be the brains of the team.
Notice that in the paragraph above I just threw in the ‘kidnapped child’ phrase without explaining anything? Well, that’s what Gabriel Knight 3 does to the player. You’re thrown into the middle of Rennes-le-Chateau with very little information about why you’re there and soon Gabriel starts saying to himself that he’ll keep an ear out for the baby (cue another message sent to Kevin: “Who said anything about a baby?!”). I’ve since found out that when the game was originally released it came with a comic book that covered the backstory, something that’s missing from the GOG version, and this in itself causes a lot of issues with gameplay.
After getting over any initial misunderstandings or plot holes caused by the absence of the comic, players will find themselves in a tale involving the kidnapping of an infant from a family of Scottish nobles and concentrating on vampires, the legend of the Holy Grail, the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, the Priory of Sion and – to top it all off – Jesus. If you struggled to take in all of that last sentence just imagine what it’s like playing the title. While the plot’s complexity is good in that it’ll give even seasoned adventure gamers a proper mystery to sink their teeth into, it quickly becomes difficult to keep up with what exactly is going on.
Despite the murders, there’s never any real sense of urgency.
Add to this the fact that much of the backstory involving the history of Rennes-le-Chateau and the related conspiracy is handled via conversations between Gabriel and Grace rather than actual investigative gameplay, and you’ve got a narrative mess on your hands. It perhaps would have been better if there was some kind of urgency but the storyline seems to progress at a leisurely pace; even though a Scottish heir has been kidnapped, a few murders have occurred and vampires are in town, the events never seem particularly dangerous.
Gabriel Knight 3 is a point-and-click adventure and the interface is pretty much what you’d expect from a game in the genre so I won’t spend too much time covering the basics. But something worth writing about here is the player camera: you have complete control of the view and can move about independently of Gabriel and Grace (except during conversations and cutscenes). There are a couple of positives to this. You can go virtually anywhere in the current location you’d like without having to wait for the character to tag along; and if you move too far ahead of them, they ‘teleport’ to a spot behind the camera to save time when you need them to appear.
However, I found that this mechanic didn’t work for me – technically it was fine and I didn’t experience any issues but it wasn’t ideal in terms of gameplay. The reason I like playing adventures is because I want to be immersed in the character and their story: why are they here, what are their motivations, how are they feeling? But being able to move independently to the characters made me feel somewhat distanced from them. I guess the camera mechanic could mean that some players will find the title less ‘restrictive’ than others in the genre but personally, it made me feel more like a spectator and less like a part of Gabriel and Grace’s world.
As with the previous instalments in the series, Gabriel Knight 3 takes place over a number of days, each broken up into ‘time blocks’ which span periods of between two and four hours. They’ll only end when certain conditions are reached and there are also optional events which you’ll miss if you’re not in the right place at the right time. Sometimes the actions required to complete a block are unclear and, since most of the locations contain several sub-locations, it can be tough to figure out exactly where to go next. It can mean that you’ll end up blindly revisiting everywhere and, while not necessary to complete the game, missing out on sub-plots that are important to your understanding of the storyline.
A puzzle involving SIDNEY is probably the one of the best I’ve come across.
Aside from the plot, the most important aspect of an adventure is the puzzles; and unfortunately the quality of those included in this title varies wildly. On the positive side it does contain what’s probably the best puzzle I’ve come across so far and one that’s sure to kick any player’s butt regardless of their adventuring experience. During day two Grace learns of ‘Le Serpent Rouge’, a pamphlet connected to the Rennes-le-Chateau mystery, and much of the gameplay in the second part of the game is devoted to solving a series of riddles embedded in its text. She uses SIDNEY (the Schattenjäger Informational Database) to analyse diagrams and maps, translate passages from other languages, and perform cryptographic and anagrammatic functions, helping her solve the overarching enigma.
A number of other challenges are in direct contrast however. An infamous puzzle on day one that sees Gabriel trying to figure out how to access a motorcycle is ridiculous – why he didn’t just accept the bike he was offered (seeing as there was one right there), ask the hotel about car hire (seeing as a receptionist seems so keen to help him) or take a taxi (seeing as that’s how he arrived at the village from the train station in the first place) is beyond me. Even Bilas thought it was bad, according to an interview with Game Informer: “It was terrible! There was something that Jane [Jensen] wanted to do that was just too hard, too expensive, too complicated to make it happen. I think our producer came up with the cat puzzle [as a replacement]. I’m pretty sure Jane didn’t like it. None of the developers liked it, but we were really late and needed to get something in there.”
Guess what the moustache is made out of?
Each instalment of the Gabriel Knight series features a significant change in graphic design, with the first featuring 16-bit VGA visuals and the second being entirely in FMV. Gabriel Knight 3 was the first to be in full 3D but I can’t say that this has done it any favours. While environments are accurately modelled and based on real locations, the horrible texture mapping make the title feel more like a simulated architectural walk-through than an adventure game. The characters models are clunky (Detective Mosely has a particularly ‘square’ butt) and cause some issues with gameplay; in a puzzle where players must watch a complex handshake and then repeat it later, the sequence is made much more complicated than necessary.
Sound is better – at least in terms of musical score, anyway – and players familiar with the series will remember several themes (yes, When the Saints Go Marching in is in there somewhere!). There’s a particularly good moment during Grace’s explorations of the sinister Chateau de Seres on day two, where a single theme is used but becomes more intricate and menacing the deeper her investigations take her into the mansion. It really adds to the sense of atmosphere.
Mosely is certainly carrying junk in that square-shaped trunk.
Unfortunately though, the voice-acting is pretty bad. Tim Curry received mixed reviews for his portrayal of Gabriel in the original Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers but I thought he was great, making our hero come across as a loveable rogue who was definitely the love-‘em-and-leave-‘em type. But even I have to agree he did quite a poor job in Gabriel Knight 3. The character is almost unlikeable with a fake accent and overly-dramatic delivery; for a particularly intolerable example, have Gabriel look at the notebook in his inventory and tell you what he sees.
It’s not entirely Curry’s fault though as he wasn’t exactly given a great script to work with. Sexual innuendos are a staple of the series (and in fact for a lot of other Sierra titles also) but here they’re probably the worst they’ve ever been. One character tells Grace: “I’ve never had me an Asian girl before” and another says to Gabriel: “A wife need not be a burden, if she knows her place.” And if that wasn’t bad enough, our hero’s lines are even worse. Instead of establishing him as a ladies’ man with a keen sense of wit, he comes across as an immature college jock and you start to feel embarrassed for him (particularly when he starts comparing Grace to a chair).
Eyes upwards, Gabriel.
By the time I finished the game, I can’t say that I was eager to start it all over again; but in actual fact Gabriel Knight 3 does have quite a lot of replay value. The points system featured in the previous instalments is back and it’ll probably take you several attempts to get a perfect score. Many scenes and items are entirely optional, and events play out in several different ways depending on what you’ve already witnessed or collected. But just because a title has replay value doesn’t mean that you’ll actually want to revisit it.
I should point out here that I experienced a number of issues with the title after installing, and looking at the GOG forum it seems like many other players came across them also. It took me several days to get the title to work and I count myself lucky that I work in IT (if I can’t figure something out, I’ve always got someone to ask); I believe Kevin didn’t have as much trouble as I did but he still experienced a graphics issue. They’re all things that can be resolved, but it’s something to bear in mind if you’re thinking of purchasing the game.
Oh baby… Gabriel Knight 3 just doesn’t live up to its predecessors.
Kevin told me that he wasn’t going to be reviewing the game because he wouldn’t be able to find anything positive to say about it! And, while I can’t say that I disliked it as much as he did, I’m afraid I can’t be entirely positive myself about Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. Jensen’s attempt to cover over two-thousand years of history and legend in one game is commendable but it’s both its glory and its failing; there’s so much here to keep you interested but it’s too easy to lose track of what’s going on.
I can’t help feeling that there’s a real classic with an amazing story in there, if only it was handled in a slightly different way and did more to guide the player through its twists and turns. But sadly it just doesn’t live up to its predecessors and I can imagine many new Gabriel Knight fans coming away disappointed. An adventure game where its necessary to reveal its final revelations through a narrative cutscene rather than gameplay – that’s something I just can’t forgive.
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