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Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within

Fortunately for us, the locals know what a Schattenjager is, and when a young girl is killed by what they believe to be a werewolf they come to Gabriel for help. Having already probated the will and furnished the mansion he has no choice but to go out seeking werewolves in downtown Munich.

GK2 is done in the "Full Motion Video" (FMV) style that had a brief vogue a few years back. It looks like a movie, with live actors, some of whom can act, many of whom should keep their day jobs. FMV was expensive to produce and after a few titles it gave way to simpler technologies, (although the X-Files game tried it years after everyone else had given up on it). In some ways it's a very good way to make a game. The cut scenes are actually little movies, and have a little of that movie magic to draw you in. With crisp photographic images supplying the sets there is less danger of the pixel hunting that mars so many games, although GK2 manages to emulate the problem in a few places (proof that poor game design can overcome any format).

There are a few basic problems with GK2's use of FMV. For one thing, everything looks like what it is; a bunch of actors in front of a bluescreen superimposed over pictures of museums and rooms and forests. Even the cut scenes have this look, and manage to look less real than the scenes in Realms of the Haunting, in which the actors were superimposed over drawn sets. You keep feeling that everything ought to look nicer.

But the real problem with FMV is you are at the mercy of the sort of mediocre actors who are desperate enough to take a job in which they stand in front of a bluescreen and say things like, "I wonder if this will work" and "hey, that worked" all day long. And in GK2 you can see a wide range of mediocre acting. To make things more difficult for the actors, every time they finish a sentence they must hold their expectant expression, and unlike a film, these pauses are not cut out, so the flow of dialogue is quite choppy.

It's not all bad, really. Dean Erickson as Gabe is charmingly guileless and Peter Lucas is a rather intense Baron Von Zell. There's even one startlingly good performance by Kay Kuter as innkeeper Huber, who seems to have figured out how to give a perfectly natural performance standing in front of a bluescreen spouting snippets of dialogue.

The rest of the acting tends to vary from tolerable to lame, and the worst of it is that Joanne Takahashi, as Gabe's assistant Grace is fairly awful, giving a shrill, one note performance that mainly consists of her acting angry, startled or shocked. This is not entirely Joanne's fault -- designer Jane Jensen starts Grace off unpleasantly and it would take pretty good acting to make her seem sympathetic in the early scenes -- but it is difficult to play half the game as a character that gets on your nerves. And I won't even discuss the uneven haircut.

As in the original Gabriel Knight, there is a much higher standard for story and dialogue than in a typical adventure game. Based in part on real historical events, GK2 creates a story of an ancient king that mirrors the games events, and draws an interesting parallel between werewolfism and homosexuality. Some of the dialogue is great, such as a discussion of "the language of death," a theory that animals in the wild let predators know when they're ready to die. The story is detailed and involving.

But just as in GK1, GK2 comes up short in terms of gameplay. While not nearly as bad, there is still way to much to complain about. Often it's not clear that clicking on one part of something will give you a different result than clicking on something else, leading to one's never clicking on crucial areas. Some things are very arbitrary, such as only being able to buy one particular clock in a clock store full of them. The game takes place over six days, and you have to do all the necessary actions for each day to get to the next, and these can be very obscure: in chapter four there are no puzzles, and yet it's almost impossible to finish because you have to click on every single solitary item at every site or the game will not move forward. Why? Stupidity. Some puzzles make very little sense, and often it's not really clear what you should be trying to do or even why you should think to do it. And it seems easy to miss important information: the walkthrough I turned to would describe information I never heard and even conversations I wasn't able to participate in! Often some really minor thing holds up the entire game.

The interface is also a bit of a problem, rather awkward and poorly thought out. Once you pick up an item it can be difficult to put it down again, at least until I realized, with no help from the manual, that you could drop an item back into the inventory by right clicking the mouse. There's a way to look at an image up close, but you always have to select the item, even if it's already selected, in order to look at it. It really seems as if they didn't think things through very well.

But with liberal cheating, GK2 is still quite enjoyable. The story is involving, at times even gripping; the dialogue is intelligent; and the sense of interacting with a movie gives it an added sense of fun. The cut scenes are almost all entertaining, although I thought the opera at the end went on way too long (opera buffs may disagree). So if not a game for the ages, GK2 still makes for a good entertainment.

-- Charles Herold -2000

Glitches:Some bugs: I wish I'd thought to check the Sierra website for a game patch before I got to Chapter 4.