Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers

"Draw another picture
Of the life you could've had
Follow your instincts
And choose the other path"

 

Muse - Hoodoo

 

 

Strangeland and Lorelai having both been out long enough to receive their bugfix patches, I find myself long overdue to dive back into that genre four decades old and two decades outdated, adventure games. First though, as usual when switching tracks, I sought an older appetizer before the newer main course, some primitive simplicity that wouldn't really tax my attention much, something I could take in aesthetically while allowing familiarity to write its own intellectual assessment and fuel a short review just reading "meh" so I can move on to bigger and better things. You know, a proverbial exercise for the left hand and/or right brain.

 

Unfortunately for my already lacking brevity, I picked Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers.

Before even leaving St. George's Books for the first time, I was hit by how nostalgically different this game feels from not just more modern "action" descendants of the adventure genre, but from modern games across the proverbial board, dating as it does from a time when electronic adventuring still held the promise of a new creative medium, before being standardized and trivialized into marketability and out of cultural relevance. Mind you, I'm not gushing about its overall quality (anything from back then ranks borderline playable at best by modern standards) but because it exemplifies the better side of computer games' Betty Boop stage of creativity, managing to own its primitive nature by sheer enthusiasm and dedication to the craft.

 

 

Gameplay mechanics offer an even mix of inspiration, perennial adventure game foibles and outdated presumptions about gamer preferences. Instead of context-sensitive clicking, you get eight fixed interaction buttons, and even in real life there just aren't that many ways to use an ashtray! So you sometimes have to "walk" out of one door then immediately "open" your way past another or "read" one piece of text then "open" another and figure out whether you're supposed to grab, operate or push things like drawers and switches. And sure, sure, you can rule about half the interactions out at a glance (not going to interrogate the ashtray) but compounded by the lack of highlighting for interactable objects you're still looking at canvassing every single backdrop several times over in the hopes something will do something... and that's before we even get into dragging objects from your inventory to throw a dozen of them at every single wall and see if anything sticks.

Amazing as it may sound (even to myself looking back) this sort of tedium didn't bother us back in 1993. Computer games were still a new medium to most of us, marketed to no small extent for the thrill of partaking in this marvelous futurism, despite flimsy low-definition pay-offs, just as our grandparents sixty years earlier were more than willing to crank their gramophones or drop a nickel at the nickel-odeon to hear Caruso scratch his way through "vesti la giubba" or marvel at Betty Boop and Olive Oyl flapping their rubber arms around. Or how the younger generation doesn't mind shilling out $500 for migraine-inducing "virtual reality" headsets. Sure puts great-grandpa's copy of "Minnie the Moocher" into perspective, don't it?

Anyway, the point is we clicked for the joy of clicking back in those days, but on the other hand, designers designed their products to be a joy to click. So while Gabriel Knight's two-frame sprite animation looks rudimentary even by 1993 standards (launching the same year as the original Doom) the game might as well be subtitled "Virginia-Capers-and-Tim-Curry-snark-about-everything" for the painstaking attention to detail put into most environments. Those superfluous interaction buttons were often supplied with their own voiceovers even in the absence of an interaction, some quite humorous like "Gabriel was just thinkin' that he could really use a lake, but he doesn't want to get his pockets wet" when trying a reverse-Canute act. Not to re-reiterate my oft-reiterated disdain for computer games' nosedive in aural accompaniment over the past couple of decades, but either a good composer or some good voice actors or both can set the mood faster and probably still cheaper than any amount of pixel-shading. Though they overdid it a bit with "this is the last page of inventory" where a beep or drum-beat would've sufficed, the sheer volume of volume sounds lush by today's standards of generic tootling and stock-audio grunts. Even aside from Curry and Capers' great work, Luke Skywalker as a goofy cop, Lt. Worf as a voodoo priest, etc., make the game pleasant enough to listen to even when nothing's happening.*

But still... there's a bit too much nothing happening. Gabriel Knight is an exemplary adventure game, extending also to the genre's chief flaw of nonsensical "puzzle"-solving via brute force and non-sequiturs. To advance past several chapters you're required to stroll around the park and chat up more or less random NPCs to fulfill arbitrary, convoluted multiple steps toward what should have been an obvious simple solution, like:

*SPOILERS* \/

- a jumble of symbols needing to be re-drawn, requiring you to

    1) open your cash register for no particular reason at your shop, only to find a misplaced coupon in it

    2) observe an artist's drawing in the park get blown by the wind into a bush behind a grate

    3) trade the coupon to a hotdog vendor

    4) trade the hotdog to a little kid so he can stick his skinny little arm through the grate

    5) trade the drawing to the artist in return for re-drawing your symbols in the correct pattern

    when the only steps should've been

    1) You're in a freakin' PARK, genius! Snap a leafy twig off that very same bush and use it to grab the drawing!

    2) trade

    or better yet

    1) Grace draws!

 

- figuring out how to wash your hands at the castle. Can you ask the maid, who's just sitting there peeling potatoes, for the nearest bathroom or kitchen? No. That would make too much sense. You have to run upstairs, open a nondescript window with some fluffy stuff behind it that looks more like clouds and wash your hands in what is apparently snow.

 

- this puzzle

is utter nonsense. Not because of the code itself, which you can have translated, or identifying the person of interest which is obvious enough, or even the more shaky identification of the coded message's pattern susceptible to text adventure linguistic imprecision but especially for giving absolutely no clue as to the exactly one single item on which you're permitted to use the tracker, a device specifically designed to be affixed to anything! Like the snake's cage, an item you already knew would be included in the ceremony! Or the drums you already know they use to communicate!

 

- even the quaint "grab the lake" example from earlier is soured by the fact you really are supposed to "grab" a random patch of empty ground by the lake shore, which turns out to be clay.

 

- weirdly enough, the clock puzzle only took me a couple of tries after running across the poem, but I'll admit I "solved" it more by a vague feeling for the nouns used than by strict problem-solving

 

*END SPOILERS* ^

 

 

Even ignoring specific examples (seriously, seven-year-olds making up fairy tales cohere better than those) the sheer number of times you're expected to just run around randomly "using item on" various pieces of scenery can be infuriating. Having to comb through a random patch of terrain with your magnifying glass is just the tip of the iceberg. Certain locations offer new clues depending on your progress, but with no indication whatsoever that they've been updated, so if you're stuck revisiting each of a dozen old screens every time you get stuck or every time you acquire a new inventory item, for fear the universe has been rearranged or a new dialogue option popped up.

And yet... for all its outdated nonsense, Sins of the Fathers also shares the original Half-Life or Fallout's keen sense of monomythic escalation from the mundane to the exotic (complete with grossly foreshadowed hero's mentor sacrifice) (addendum: and hero's journey beyond the land of death) a feature even more noticeable in a linear genre like adventure games. The low-key (a.k.a. point-and-click) onscreen interactions lend themselves well to humble beginnings and mundane protagonists who grow into their heroic roles gradually, as the plot itself shifts from gradual inklings of dread to late-onset monsters. 

The overall plot itself seems trite now, its antiheroic premise catching the '90s goth craze early. Mixing Voodoo themes into other plots wasn't all that original (hell, if James Bond did it...) and combined with Gabe himself in his black trenchcoat, the slight film noir tinge can't but recall Count Zero's release seven years prior. Gabe's fundamentally no more than purest romance novel trash, a virile bad boy of good lineage just waiting to be saved from his own self-destructiveness, browbeaten and tamed by the right woman. Idiotic lines abound, like Grace's blather about "a spiritual path" or this little gem:

 

Yeah... Jane Jensen's got no compunctions against telling women they're worthless without male approval... no, wait, it's the other way around so her chauvinism mandates a standing ovation. Note that for all the talk of Gabe's sins, the worst we see him do is impersonate a charlatan, not-write-a-bestseller, steal a dead man's credit card to save a city, crack bad jokes and enjoy sex... which, again, yeah... just try reversing the polarity on that shit and see how well it flies.

In fact, it's a miracle just how well the whole game holds together given its piles of cheap gimmicks, non sequiturs and clichés, and for that alone, for the charm of being encouraged to keep clicking to hear the narrator's quips and hope the next puzzle makes more sense, I can't hate the damn thing. Sins of the Fathers is by no means the peerless classic its gushing fans hold it up to be, but definitely worth a playthrough, interesting even in its worse points for its obvious influence.

Just keep a cheat-sheet ready to save yourself a lot of wasted hours randomly trying to slap items together.

________________________________________________________

 

* And it's not like you need big names to get good voice acting. Given she had to beg for money online for her multiple sclerosis treatments, I doubt April Ryan got paid more than peanuts, or at most, cashews (only Mark Hamill gets macadamias) and gave one of the most memorable performances in any genre.