Review: Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers 20th Anniversary Edition (PC)

If there's one thing that 2014 should have taught all of us it's that you can go home. Maybe there's someone else living in the house, maybe everything feels a little smaller, and that weird couple that lived across the alley have turned their backyard into a bone yard for rusty Studebakers, but it's still home somehow. That's what it feels like with Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers 20th Anniversary Edition, where it's 1993 all over again.

As evidenced by some of the discussion amoung the Sierra On-Line faithful, there seems to be two camps when it comes to the remastered 20th Anniversary Edition of Gabriel Knight, a tale of New Orleans book store owner and writer Gabriel Knight coming to grips with his destiny, a storied family history, and voodoo. Lots of voodoo.

There's a camp that hears the voice actors and cringes. The 100% absence of Tim Curry is enough. After repeated playthroughs over the past two decades, to hear a different voice coming out Gabriel... well, it might as well be a high school drama club version of the tale.

Then the other camp that appreciates the chance to replay a game they haven't played in 20 years and the last time was the 3.5" floppy diskette, non-talky version.

I actually fall in the latter camp. I did play a little of the CD-ROM, talkie version but my first exposure was the diskette version and it's been so long since I've played it, the puzzles seem fresh even if there were a few that bubbled back into my memory for all the wrong reasons. Remember the clock in Gran's attic? Before the days of the Internet – it was the heady year of 1993, as you'll recall – unless you had a hint book to consult many of the puzzles were up to the player to figure out, sometimes with pencil and paper to map locations such as the snake mound in Africa or scribble out codes to accurately leave messages for the voodoo cartel. The clock in Gran's attic is infamous in my mind because the clues to solve the puzzle are so damn subtle that it's easy to miss the solution. I remember mapping out all possible combinations to unlock the clock... I eventually had to make a call to a friend of a friend because there was a rumour that he'd figured out the solution. The other is the leap when Gabriel disguises himself as a Catholic priest to speak to an old woman. The combination of items isn't as bad as say the cat fur moustache debacle of Gabriel Knight III but it's still a little on the frustrating side.

The 20th Anniversary Edition includes a staged (and entirely optional) hint system that was often enough to push me in the right direction without just telling me the answer. Occasionally, you can just keep clicking hints and the game will reveal the answer, but much of the time just having a list of “To do's” makes moving through the game easier. And just being able to click the talisman in the top left corner to reveal all interactive areas of the screen lightens the load in terms of figuring out what the next step is, with the exception of the very end of the game where hints are completely disabled.

What really helps fill out the experience – at least for me – is the extras; the behind the scenes stuff that showcases the difference between the original game and the 20th Anniversary Edition with storyboards, sketches, and interviews. It's almost tragic that the interviews are very difficult to listen to, which is a nice way of saying the audio is tinny, scratchy, and hard on the ears. The peak behind the curtain is still a good one, especially for those that 1) are fans of old school Sierra adventure games and 2) think that really great games can't have a female in the director's chair.

Though there's at least one entirely new puzzle and the game looks radically different (but still retains the flavour of the original), it's still the same Gabriel Knight story that I remember from 20+ years ago. That's a very good thing and anyone moderately interested in adventure games will do themselves a favour by checking it out.

- Aaron Simmer

Follow @EmpireArmchair

The Good:
- Great adult story that holds up well
- It's a great looking revision of the game
- The extras are pretty cool

The Bad:
- Some really weird bugs that don't break the game but are distracting at times (like characters talking over each other if you click through dialgoue too quickly)
- The extra audio interviews suffer from terrible audio