Review of Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within by Lucien21

IMO FMV games of the 90’s were generally not that great. The acting was stilted and stiff because the “actors” have to return to a neutral spot between actions. It limits the actions the main characters can take to cut down on filming all the possible actions and the video was usually horrible compressed to fit on the CD’s.

Gabriel Knight 2 suffers from most of these problems. It also simplified the interface from GK1 to a single click does everything action.

It didn’t ,thankfully, affect the main reason for playing this series of games. The story and script are top drawer, the characters vivid and the history and locations compelling.

This time around Gabriel is in Germany researching his new book when he gets drawn into the mystery of Werewolves and a charismatic man called Van Glower.

In alternating chapters we control Gabriel and Grace.

Gabriel investigates a series of murders and gets closer to the members of a local hunting club run by Van Glower.

Grace researches the history of the region and Werewolves, visiting museums and castles in the region looking into the past of Ludwig II and Wagner.

Personally I found the Grace chapters to be the more interesting with the in depth history being fascinating. Unfortunately those chapters also highlighted the most frustrating problem with the game interface. To progress in any of the chapters you have to click on every possible hotspot to trigger actions in the correct order otherwise you end up wandering around not sure what you have missed. This is especially apparent in chapter 4 in which you had to click on absolutely everything in the museums and castle otherwise the chapter wont end. Some of those thing were waay too easy to miss.

I still think GK1 is a better game and Tim Curry a better Gabe than the floppy haired Erikson, but overall this is still a fantastic game and one I would play again in the future.

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Time Played: 10-20 hours