The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery

The Good
Gabriel Knight 2 was, for a long time, a holy grail for me. It was that game I never did seem to get my hands on, but always wanted to play, since I loved the first game so much. I even played part three before I played this game. I love the first game, and I like the third, despite its flaws, but would I enjoy this, the series FMV de-tour?

First of all, there is a good story here, buried beneath layers of horrible graphics, disturbingly disgusting design and useless actors. If you're less picky about those things than I am, you might enjoy this.

The music is also pretty good, although a bit over the top at times. The special effects are, although just as bad as in Phantasmagoria, quite amusing to look at (but never ever scary).

The Bad
This really should not have been an FMV-game. The video-sequences are horrible. They might have been fun to look at at the time the game was released. At that time the so called multimedia products flooded the markets. Useless cd-roms full of pixely and crappy videos and bad 3d-graphics. This development was soon revealed to produce hollow and quite crappy products and they soon started to dissapear.

The same goes for FMV-games. They were expensive to produce, sure, but the main reason they stopped making them was that they all sucked, and the audience soon discovered that, just as soon as the initial curiosity was settled.

Gabriel Knight 2 was just produced in the worst of times, and hence, a good game was fundamentally ruined. Just one look at Gabriel Knights butt-ugly shirt and you want to vomit. When he walks around, taking his time doing the simplest thing, because everything has to trigger horrible FMV-sequences of Gabriel opening doors, turning around, walking, etc. It's unbearable.

The absolute worst part, however, is the environments. The illusion that Gabriel is walking around in an actual, living world, is painfully absent. Instead, Gabriel floats around on pixely, badly rendered backgrounds that are so ill designed it looks like some three year old's doll house gone horribly wrong.

You might think I'm superficial to concentrate so much on things like graphics and presentation. Well, my friend, sometimes, the surface contains the biggest depths. Sometimes the look of something is what tells the story, or conveys the message. It's called supersurface, and Gabriel Knight 2 lacks every bit of it. All that's left are promises of what could have been.

The Bottom Line
A great game ruined by its choice of form. FMV-games never was, and will never be, anything but garbage. It's a disgrace.

The Good
Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers was a landmark achievement even for a venerable developer like Sierra: a "serious" adventure in the vein of their own Laura Bow games, it was better scripted, better written, and thick with atmosphere.

From that point of view, The Beast Within is most certainly a worthy sequel. Like the first game, it boasts a suspenseful story, involving and credible with its meticulous attention to detail. Werewolves and obscure details about Bavarian kings hardly attracted me when I first heard about the game; I don't always enjoy Wagner's music and I certainly don't like Wagner himself. But Jane Jensen did her homework as a storyteller: she managed to present the quirky melange of low mythology and pseudo-historical material in such a way that I couldn't put the game down.

I must admit I have a weakness for the lost art of FMV with live actors in games The joy of seeing your favorite adventure game being treated like a movie was among the strongest sensations of the time. Even games with handicapped gameplay (like Phantasmagoria) could create a lasting impression because, with the right tools and talent, the resulting atmosphere could be incredibly convincing. Same happens in this game, where the very first scene envelops you in a blood-chilling, yet oddly comforting ambiance of a well-told mystery.

Much of the scenery can be interacted with. Some objects have detailed descriptions and elicit comments from our heroes. You'll gather evidence, spy on people, read old documents, interrogate suspects, and solve puzzles. There are long conversations, careful examination of clues, and original elements such as a certain change of perspective late in the game.

The Bad
It would be, however, wrong to state that the series hasn't lost anything from the transition to FMV technology. For me, the most alarming flaw was the simplification of the interface. I generally think that the "smart cursor" was one of the worst things to happen to adventure games. I understand that the traditionally verbose interface might have possibly diminished the cinematic impact of the game, but there must have been a better way to counter that than reducing all possible actions to a default, generic "interaction".

The puzzles are, for the most part, rather forgettable, and the game fails to recreate the gradual suspense-building, the coherence of the world, and the attention to detail that were so noticeable in its predecessor. At times it almost feels inappropriately cartoony and dumbed-down, lacking not only the romantic dark edge of the first game, but also many of its gameplay features.

There are a lot of video sequences, and they play even when you perform the most mundane of tasks (such as picking up an object). I must stress that, personally, I liked that feature and thought it contributed to the immersion into a movie-like experience. But the resulting slow pace is, of course, not something everyone would enjoy. Besides, I'm not sure if the game's already rich and convincing narrative needed more dramatic help from video cutscenes depicting plain, solitary actions. Also, don't expect a good movie where there is just a good game enhanced by special presentation: the direction and the acting here are completely forgettable.

The Bottom Line
The Beast Within is neither a great cinematic achievement or a particularly good adventure game. Rather, it is an interesting experiment, but one that quickly becomes outdated. For a better treatment of the same visual technique, I recommend the Tex Murphy games.

The Good
The Beast Within has tense, driven story that will captivate and draw you into the adventure. The puzzles are logically placed in the story and are believable for what a normal person would do. But again, it is the story that will keep you playing this game for days, and possibly weeks. I felt that it was a rare sequel that was better than its original.

The Bad
I do have to say that one of the puzzles requires timing, which is not my strong suit. I had to replay that part several times over. Also, this is just a personal preference, but I did not like the full motion video setup of the game, but this was the big technology at the time, and it did not hurt the actual story in any way.

The Bottom Line
A mystery/suspense adventure game that will keep you guessing until the end.