Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned

Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned brought the series into fully three-dimensional form and, at the same time, into the southern French village of Rennes-le-Château, a place wrapped in legends about a hidden treasure and about secrets of church history. Gabriel and Grace arrive following the kidnapping of a nobleman's child, but the case quickly grows into a search for encrypted maps, geometry hidden in the landscape, and a society that has guarded its secret for several centuries. Alongside this, the game continues the vampire thread from the previous instalment.

The gameplay is shaped by a free camera: the player controls the character in a three-dimensional environment, steers the camera himself, and looks for items by scanning the scene with the view. A substantial part of the game rests on investigation at a computer, where names, places and events are linked into a coherent picture — one of the best-executed systems of its kind in the genre. The game also contains what is probably the most-cited puzzle in adventure game history, in which the player must prepare a disguise using cat hair and adhesive tape, and which is still cited today as an example of how puzzles should not be designed. Technically it was a Windows title using 3D acceleration, whose character models already looked angular and cold compared with the live-action video of the previous instalment.

The atmosphere rests on real terrain that can be walked and measured, and on a quiet, at times almost documentary tone of storytelling. The music is sparser than in its predecessor, and the game leans more heavily on dialogue, of which there is an extraordinary amount. Reviews were mostly positive and praised the script and the tie-in with real legends, but sales fell short and the series ended for many years. Today Gabriel Knight 3 is interesting above all as an example of how adventure games sought their way into the third dimension, and as a detective story that genuinely trusts the player to work out the connections on his own.