Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned

Pros • Puzzles get steadily better and harder as the game goes along • The 3D interface allows the player complete control over the camera view • Jane Jensen’s attention to detail is still fantastic; not only is the European setting extremely true-to-life, but the story is a fascinating tapestry of occult themes and historical facts	Cons • The relationship between the two principles doesn’t evolve as much as players of the previous games might expect, and the level of dialog has degraded since GK 2, with a lot more sarcasm and a lot less genuine interaction • The 3D graphics cover character’s facial expressions well—but bodies are lumpy, movements aren’t terribly realistic, and lighting lacks atmosphere
Bottom Line Despite a few flaws, this is probably the best adventure game on the market today: a brilliantly plotted story with good characters, tough puzzles, and a 3D interface. Jane Jensen is still one of the best adventure game designers alive today. Although GK 3 is not as high a benchmark for the industry as the previous two games in the series were, this game is still proof that the genre shouldn’t die; no other type of game can bring us such rich narratives and complex characters. Like all Gabriel Knight games, Blood of the Sacred is like a good novel for you computer screen—the kind of story that’s hard to put down.

At last—Jane Jensen is back! And just in the nick of time, I might add—the adventure game genre was nearly dead, and there’s still probably a priest standing by to administer the patient’s last rites.

The resurgence of RPG’s and the rise of the new adventure/action hybrid games, like Half-Life and System Shock, will probably still kill adventure games in the long run, of course. But if any one series could save the whole adventure gaming genre, it would probably be Gabriel Knight—and regardless of what happens in the future, the release of Gabriel Knight 3 has at least reminded me why I used to like adventure games so much. After playing this latest installment in Gabriel’s continuing adventures, I won’t forget what I’m missing: deeply explored characters, complex story-lines, and gameplay that revolves around figuring things out, as opposed to chopping things up or shooting them in the head.

Of course, just because GK3 is the only game in town (for adventure game lovers, at least) doesn’t mean it’s perfect! There are a few flaws in any big gem, and this game has its share.

Nuts and Bolts

As usual, Jensen has presented a new installment of the Gabriel Knight series with a brand new interface and graphics engine. GK3 abandons the old full-motion video of Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within in favor of a 3D engine, which was specially scripted for this project. Unlike most other 3D games out there, however, which emphasize the realistic movement of bodies and the diffusion of light, the 3D of this game is all about facial expression—and there’s an up side and a down side to this decision.

On the one hand, it’s certainly a pleasant switch to be able to look at a 3D character’s face and have it look vaguely human. It’s a giant leap ahead of the characters we’ve seen in action games and CRPG’s lately, where the face is a flat plane with features painted on like a wooden doll. On the other hand, we’ve had to pay a heavy price for that gain in facial expression, because the model of the human body in this game is fairly crude. Nice as it is to see the half-smirk that goes with Gabriel’s characteristic wise-cracks and sarcasm, it would have been nice to have cleaner, more realistic animation of the body.

The lighting in the game is a subtler problem, and it ties in with more than just the 3D engine. GK3 is set in the French village of Rennes-le-Chateau, and an incredible amount of effort has been expended in reproducing that environment—which exists in real life—with every detail of the landscape intact. A great many of the game’s puzzles depend on a precise, retentive reproduction of the real geography of the village and its environs, and the design team was extremely painstaking in making sure every fold and ripple of the valley, as well as every building and ruin, was in its proper place. This is amazing, on the one hand—and represents a colossal amount of work—but on the other hand, so much attention has been paid to detail that it’s almost too much. At some point the team forgot that this was a horror game, with vampires in it—and while people were busy studying topographical maps and making sure every tree and bush and brick was in the right place, they forgot to give this game enough atmosphere. It just isn’t very scary.

Even the photographed backdrops of GK2 were better in this regard. Of course, the interface was horribly limiting back then, but those photographs (taken by Ms. Jensen on a long European tour) often conveyed a better sense of mood than anything in GK3. I would have been willing to give up some of the realism of this game in favor of a little more spice; horror isn’t just about reproducing the setting perfectly, it’s about seeing things through a dark and ominous lens.

Other than these two little complaints, the new 3D interface was a big improvement. It’s very nice to be able to go anywhere you want in a completely rendered 3D environment, with rich textures and nicely-rendered objects. The camera control was also especially welcome; players have a skewed 3D perspective on the action around Gabe and his friends, and you can wheel your viewpoint all around the environment with the mouse, looking at anything you want.

Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned

The plot of Gabriel Knight 3 is one of its strongest suits. As usual, Jane Jensen has done her historical homework and carefully researched her conspiracy theories; her main source material for this game was a book called Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, as well as its sequel, The Holy Place. I’m pretty sure she also consulted the Encyclopedia of Freemasonry and a couple of books on the Templars as well. It was a stroke of genius to connect vampirism with the earthly vessel that once caught the blood of Christ…but I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Trying to avoid ruining any of the plot’s twists and turns, I can still say that this story is driven by a search for treasure in a mysterious little French town. The place is called Rennes-le-Chateau, and it really is the focus of a great deal of controversy for modern-day conspiracy buffs. It’s almost universally agreed that the parish priest in that village did find something remarkable, about 100 years ago. The jury is still out on what he found, of course—but whatever it was, it made him extremely rich, and a lot of people are still looking for it to this very day.

The action of GK3 takes place over a three-day period, with each day being divided into several blocks of time. Complete the required actions for a time block, and you move on to the next one. Puzzles can be simple, like figuring out a way to steal someone’s ID, or mind-bending exercises in geometry. Fortunately, you can play Grace Nakimura when you have to do the heavy intellectual puzzles; as in previous games, Grace is the brains and Gabriel is the heart and guts of the spook-hunting operation.

Players who’ve been with Gabriel since the first game will be happy to see that Detective Mosley is back in action, although sadly his voice is no longer read by Mark Hamill. Of course, they did get Tim Curry back as Gabriel…but he just doesn’t do quite the same job he did in the old days! It may not be Curry’s fault, though; I guess I was more moved than I thought by Dean Erickson’s performance in Gabriel Knight 2, and saddened to see so much of the character development in that game thrown out the window in GK3. Gabriel and Grace do a lot of sarcastic wise-cracking these days, and the relationship between them is still adversarial rather than genuinely intimate. I was very sad to see that the bond between them wasn’t growing stronger in this game, as the ending of GK2 seemed to promise. Also, Gabriel is still basically a pig, despite all he went through in The Beast Within—apparently being a real animal for a while didn’t teach him anything.

The Final Analysis

All these little quibbles aside though, this is still a great game. It takes much longer to play than GK 2, which is a good thing; the average gamer will probably get well over 50 hours out of it, and most of that is pretty high-quality exploration and puzzle-solving stuff. Despite a couple of particularly tough brain-teasers, most of the game flows pretty naturally from one clue and conversation to the next. Overall, it’s a must-play for an adventure game fan, and most fans of the GK series will already have finished it by now! I highly recommend it; Jane Jensen is still the best there is, and she may see more awards coming her way soon.

Arinn Dembo

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