Gabriel Knight 3

Gabriel Knight 3 has voice acting from Tim Curry of Rocky Horror Picture Show fame, unfortunately you aren't going to want to sing along with this adventure game. Perhaps throw toast though

The story of Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned centers around the underachieving detective Knight and his clever sidekick, Grace Nakimura, as they attempt to solve a series of mysteries in the ancient French town of Rennes-le-Chateau.

It has a decent plot sporting the requisite red herrings necessary to any good mystery and features a mix of the usual pop occult elements (vampirism, hidden treasure, the Holy Grail, the Knights Templar and child kidnappings) common to this series. The characterizations are dull-edged however, and author Jane Jensen's endless attempts at humorous writing for Knight are worse: "Looking at my passport picture it's a wonder the US ever let me go" is a fair sample of his wit. It's also fairly obvious who the culprit is at an early point in the game, removing any element of suspense.

But if the writing is frequently flat as a Florida landscape, Tim Curry's delivery goes below sealevel. He gets Knight's accent but drains the voice of all energy. Other cast members are better, but with Curry's Knight as the star, you can't get escape long from the lethargy.

GK3 is a traditional graphical adventure, meaning that it's linear and involves talking to people, and gathering and manipulating objects. (Though a series of action-oriented sequences occur towards the end of the game where the hero has to make several quick decisions, or die. Fortunately, you can resurrect him immediately for another try.) It is also relatively slow-moving compared to many other games in this genre, because so much time is spent in conversation with necessarily evasive (and all too uninteresting) suspects. The puzzles that involve information-gathering are considerably better-and quite difficult, too, though Sierra provides a hint mode.

That brings us to one of the best features in GK3: SIDNEY, Nakimura's laptop computer. It can scan and analyze items, keep suspect information you enter, do quick translations (very useful with French and Provencal documents), search and send email on the game's version of an Internet. SIDNEY isn't original-Discovery's groundbreaking 1997 release, Byzantium, used an in-game computer to assemble information, extrapolate heavily guarded or destroyed 3D architectural masterpieces and investigate their current remains-but it is both well-integrated and welcome.

My reactions to the realtime rendered graphics are mixed. In most scenes, the basic artwork, varied textures, and localized animation achieve attractive and stylish effects. (An excellently atmospheric soundtrack helps, as well.) But the high visual quality stands in sharp contrast to Gabriel Knight's own image, which looks more like a sketch than a finished human being, without shading or highlights. Additional caveats apply to the camera angles. While I enjoyed zooming my view anywhere in a given scene, the camera slowed to a crawl whenever Knight or Nakimura were in view.

If Curry's reading had been less enervated or the writing more striking, we could recommend GK3 without reservation. As it is, the game grinds slowly forward, without the sharp, intense stylization of Grim Fandango or the disguised linearity of Quest for Glory V. For Gabriel Knight fans, only.

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