Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers is an adventure game that proved the genre could be serious and dark too. Gabriel Knight, a bookstore owner in New Orleans and a writer with a creative block, begins investigating a series of ritual murders attributed to a voodoo cult and gradually discovers that the whole affair touches his own family's past. The script was written by Jane Jensen, and it shows that the game was built as a full-fledged story, not just a framework for puzzles.

The game is split into ten days, each with its own goals; the player moves around a map of New Orleans, interrogates characters, and assembles their own file of notes. The dialogue is long and carries most of the storytelling, the puzzles are mostly logical and grow out of investigative work — tailing a suspect, deciphering symbols, and working with material on voodoo that the game presents with surprising knowledge. The controls are icon-based, the pacing is slower and much more detective-driven than in its comedic contemporaries.

Visually it's 256 colors and hand-painted backgrounds that turn New Orleans into a sultry, damp, dangerous place; the score, with its jazz and percussion motifs, ranks among the best music Sierra ever put in a game. The CD version added full voice acting with well-known actors and considerably strengthened the cinematic feel. At the time the game was praised for its mature theme and its storytelling, even though its darkness wasn't for everyone. Today Gabriel Knight reads as an important milestone: it showed that adventure games could handle horror, moral ambiguity, and a real character who changes over the course of the story. The game keeps a slow but never dull pace, and the individual days function like chapters of a series, each ending with a revelation that pushes the whole thing forward. Some puzzles are seen today as clunky, and without notes the player can easily get lost in them, but that doesn't spoil the overall impression. For genre fans, Sins of the Fathers is required playing — and also the best reason not to look at Sierra as merely the maker of fairy-tale adventures.