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20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Classic Third Person Adventure, March 28, 2002
What can I say? The Gabriel Knight series is to traditional 3rd person adventure what the MYST series is to atmospheric 1st person adventure: the best of its kind. Briefly put, they follow the adventures and experiences of author and bookstore owner, Gabriel Knight, as he unravels various occult mysteries and at the same time explores his odd heritage.The stories are incredibly engaging and well developed; the author, Jane Jensen, put a remarkable amount of research into the subject matter. The characters are likable and believable, and the voice acting -- and in GK2, the acting -- is some of the best. Everything about these games is excellently done. For the collector, the GK series is a little history of the adventure genre. GK1 is made with the 2D animation typical of the early 90s, while GK2 explores the FMV trend popular in the middle of the decade. In both the main action consists of finding and applying inventory items and gathering information by talking to a wide range of characters, with a spattering of arcade type puzzles and brain teasers to keep things interesting. One feature that I liked was that you are awarded points for completing puzzles, but you don't have to complete every puzzle to complete the game. This makes the games highly replayable as you can play through once for the bones of the story and then play again to go back and pick up what you might have missed the first time. There are also a lot of fun easter eggs that you can stumble on by chance. Though the subject matter is sometimes grim, dealing with murders, conspiracies, and such occult subjects as voodoo and werewolves, there is a levening of humour in the character interactions that keeps the darkness at bay. I found these games totally absorbing; it was not unusual to play for 7 - 10 hours at a stretch without even realising it. They are also very long -- a plus as far as I'm concerned -- taking a week to ten days to complete. You can be killed, but it happens rarely and when it does you are given the option to try again from a point right before you made your fatal mistake, so if you haven't saved recently it isn't such a big deal. Die Hard fans of first person, MYST-like adventures may have a hard time relating to the Gabriel Knight series because it's so different, and players of shooters or pure action games will probably not like GK at all. If you like games like _The Longest Journey_, however, you will like these. The collectors edition pack contains a lot of extras -- books, soundtracks, and the like. That's a plus and well worth having, because I was so sorry when the games were over that I wanted to keep reliving the experience again and again. I'd pay twice the price just to have one of these games. They truly are the best.
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