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Adventure games have been very dead as of late, mainly due to the fact that most gamers nowadays seem to prefer action games to anything else. Even many RPGs are adding action-oriented features to try to attract more gamers. Adventure games usually require the gamer to think hard and piece together clues, gathered from many different areas of the game world, to solve the puzzle and progress the story. A good adventure game is like reading a good novel; it is extremely gratifying to see the end of a well-constructed story.

Storytelling is what adventure games are about, and Gabriel Knight 3 has one of the best stories that I have ever had the pleasure to experience. One word of warning; if you are of the religious type (Christianity, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam), this game might offend you with its story or at least the implications of its story.

Gabriel Knight is basically a hunter of the supernatural, or in the game series’ term, a Shattenjaeger. For those with a taste for the occult, all three Gabriel Knight games have very interesting themes on different areas of the occult. The story of Gabriel Knight 3 begins when you receive an invitation to Prince James of Albany's residence for a party. The thought is that they were invited because Gabriel has taken up the mantle of the Ritter estate (Gabriel's ancestors were named Ritters), and thus have become sort of a royalty in European society. However things are not always as it seems and when Gabriel arrives, he and his partner Grace Nakimura are told an intriguing story about Prince James's family and are requested to help protect Prince James's baby son from the "Night Visitors." The "Night Visitors" are vampirish like characters that have plagued Prince James's family for generations. Gabriel and Grace stand guard over the baby when 2 men break into the residence and take the baby. Gabriel gives chase while Grace is seemingly under a sleeping spell of sorts cast by the intruders. Gabriel, having his Shattenjaeger artifacts on him, was protected from the spell. The chase takes him on a train where the 2 men knock him unconscious. When he awakens, he's at the train station near the village of Rennes le Chateau.

The game starts with Gabriel in the hotel at Rennes le Chateau the next morning. This is the beginning of a game which will weave itself into your consciousness for many hours to come. I have to say that as the story evolves, it gets more and more interesting as Jane Jensen has succeeded at making you guess about the motivation of every character that you meet in the game. This is by far THE most intriguing tale that I have encountered ever in an adventure game (note my warning about the story at the beginning before you proceed with the purchase of the game). Gameplay:

The only reason why Gabriel Knight 3 didn't get a full score here is due to game engine and interface quirks that I did not particularly like. However the story is what makes an adventure game, and in that department I have only praise for the game. You not only get to interact with very interesting characters, but have to really give your mind a workout to solve some of the game's more difficult puzzles. The mother of all puzzles in the game is the map puzzle, in which you will need to decipher a poem, Le Serpent Rouge, to plot points and figure out the map. The difficulty of this puzzle is so high that a hint icon just for that puzzle was built into the interface. There are certain parts that were really extremely difficult, but when you actually solve the game without the help of the hint system, the feeling of gratification is beyond words.

Like all adventure games, Gabriel Knight 3 is a linear game, no matter what the game companies like to say. However, in order to get out of this stereotype, there are many scenes in the game where you have to be there at the right time in order to encounter them. These scenes do not really progress the storyline but help to flesh out the characters and the story. It is not necessary to find out where all these scenes occur to finish the game, but it is strongly recommended...after all, the richness of the story is what we are after in this game.

The game is divided into time slots spread over a period of 3 days. When you complete the puzzles or triggers in a particular slot, the game advances you to the next time slot. You will rotate between Gabriel and Grace to solve the game, each with a particular style of their own. Gabriel is portrayed as the brawn and Grace the brains. Thus, as Gabriel, you will deal more with running around and finding things, while as Grace, you deal with the research and puzzles that require your brain to work harder. There are so many dynamics between our two heroes that to discuss them here would give away the story. For veterans of the series, I found that Gabriel is somewhat a little different in character than from the previous games. Tim Curry made him sound like the stereotypical uncultured American which annoyed me to no end. I didn’t think Tim Curry managed to capture Gabriel’s character well. Although overall the voice acting is top-notched, and I think they managed to do the European accents really well. The other annoying thing about this game is that the world is divided into small areas and every area takes quite a long time to load up, so there is quite a substantial amount of time spent waiting for the game to load areas up.

The Achilles heel of adventure games is that you probably won’t play it more than once. Maybe sometimes you might dig out an old adventure game to play it again, just like you would sometimes re-read a novel after a period of time has passed. However to reiterate, the story of this game alone is worth the time, money and effort. It took me about 25 hours to complete the game and I didn’t find everything there is to find in the game. Of course if I counted the number of times that I took a break from the game because I was stuck, wandering about the house trying to think of other possible solutions to the game, I think we are talking about an extra 5 hours of time spent with my mind thinking about the game.

The controls are quite quirky. You would’ve thought that clicking on the screen would move your character around but it doesn’t. The game uses the camera to let you explore the areas and if you move the camera to a spot in any area, and find something you can interact with, when you click on it, it’ll magically summon the character to that spot. I quite like this arrangement but only due to the fact that in this way I don’t have to wait for the character to walk from one spot to another as the speed of walking is agonizingly slow. Since the camera is very sluggish especially when you turn it, and you aren’t given much configuration options in terms of control, you are basically stuck with what you are given.

One of the big selling points of the game is the accurate rendition of Rennes le Chateau. The design team actually went to France to do the research to craft the buildings and artwork for the game. However, despite the accuracy, which I cannot prove or disprove, the sluggishness of the game engine takes away much of the experience to appreciate the game world. I cannot understand why the engine is so sluggish as the textures and polygons are neither extremely detailed nor are the objects created with a high polygon count. Before you get into the "It’s not a shooter, we aren’t looking at a shooter so we don’t need a shooter’s framerates" argument, think about this. The 3D world for this game doesn’t even look like it uses half the polygons and high quality textures that a normal level of Quake 3 Arena uses and very little else is happening on the screen in the game. Why should it run slower than a game that has tons of objects moving around? As I mentioned before, the game is divided into small areas so it doesn’t take too long before you need to load up another new area. For example, when Gabriel walks from his room to the corridor, you load up a new area, then when he walks past one door and go down the stairs to the lobby, the game loads up another area. This excessive loading, the small size of each area, and the sluggishness of the game engine when you try to move the camera around really makes me wonder just what the programmer was thinking. The small areas were probably meant to allow even the oldest 3D cards the ability to run this game, but if so, why is the camera so sluggish on the latest generation of 3D cards on a machine with a ton of RAM and a full Ultra2 wide SCSI subsystem, and why does it take so long to load even in a very fast system? If the engine was faster, it would have made the experience of the game much better. The only consolation in the whole thing is that although the game is sluggish, the story makes it worth the while to suffer through it.

I have already mentioned that I found the voice acting to be great, and the other sound effects are quite well done as well. In fact there was a part of the game where the sound effect was the clue to the situation, I don’t think I can think of many games in recent years that actually used the sound effects as part of a puzzle. The background music is great as well. The music in this game will probably be one of the most overlooked features in the game. If you like classical music a lot, you’ll thoroughly enjoy the music of this game.

The process is pretty straight forward, with the typical options. However I would suggest doing a hacked install after you are done with the normal installation procedure. I found that by actually copying all the area files onto the harddrive, I could speed up the loading of the areas significantly. Sierra should have included the option of copying everything onto the harddrive. This will take up over 1 gig of space but, hey, drive space is so cheap nowadays, and most people have enough drive space to do this anyway. In order to do this, all you really need to do is to copy every file in the /data folder on CD 2 and CD 3 onto the /data folder in the Gabriel Knight 3 folder on your harddrive.

Ok, I may be biased here since I absolutely loved the first 2 games, and the story of this one just totally blew me away. I think Sierra made a mistake of releasing the game at this time, as it is the wrong holiday for a game with this sort of a story. However if you aren’t the zealously religious type, and love a good occult tale, this one will make you very happy. I have to congratulate and thank Jane Jensen and her team for crafting one of the most interesting games that I have played this year. With this game, I think Sierra has actually proven that it can create adventure games that live up to the reputation of the company, and for the first time in many years, Sierra finally has taken the throne back from LucasArts in this arena of gaming.