Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within

Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within is the second entry in the series and the best-known example of the fact that games built on live-action video didn't have to be a cheap gimmick. Writer and hereditary hunter of the supernatural Gabriel Knight has settled into an inherited castle in Bavaria, where the locals ask him to help investigate attacks in which a child died and the tracks point to a wolf. Alongside him, his assistant Grace Nakimura investigates, unravelling in Munich's archives a second thread that leads to the history of King Ludwig II and to an unfinished opera.

The game is controlled through a simple cursor-and-inventory interface, but progress rests largely on combining information: the player reads documents, compares names, shows photographs to witnesses and, above all, asks questions. Chapters alternate between the two characters, so the player runs two investigations at once, and only their connection reveals the whole picture. The puzzles are mostly embedded in the investigation and only rarely slide into absurdity, which was no given in the productions of the time. Technically it was a title built on live-action footage shot at real locations, released across several discs for DOS and Windows, and it ran surprisingly smoothly on a Pentium with a quad-speed drive.

The acting was among the better of what appeared in games of the time, and the scene direction managed to avoid the amateurishness that otherwise accompanied the wave of FMV titles. Bavarian castles, rain and forests give the game a gothic tone, and the operatic music in the second half builds to one of the most memorable scenes in the genre. Critics praised the game above all for its script and atmosphere, and often name it the best entry in the series as well as the peak of the entire brief era of live-action video games. Today the image looks softer and the video's low resolution shows, but the storytelling and the construction of the investigation hold together better than in most of today's games with live actors.