Gabriel Knight III (Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned)

As usual, I don't cover too much about the game's plot and characters,
since there are lots of extant reviews where you can get that sort of
information.

I haven't played the previous two games in this series, so I can't
provide a comparison, but I believe that a game should stand on its
own merits anyway.

Gabriel Knight falls into what I call the "mystery adventure" genre,
which means you spend almost all your time talking to people, and a lot
less time collecting inventory and/or solving mechanical puzzles.  In
this game, the mystery is based on a real-life one based in the French
town of Rennes-le-Chateau.

Side note:
I did a certain amount of research on the Rennes-le-Chateau mystery
after I finished the game.  My basic conclusion is that conspiracy
theorists abound in this world, and that they all have to be a few
bricks short of a load.  I'll post my reasons in another thread if
anyone cares enough to ask me...


Graphics:
	With a few provisos, I actually enjoyed the graphics engine
	in this game.  It looks like someone took the engine from
	Quake and used it for driving an adventure game.  The ability
	to go where you want, especially with the roving camera, was
	unique and rather fun.  Waiting for the engine to load the
	polygons of a given area could be tedious when in a hurry,
	but it wasn't any worse than many other games I have played.
	However, the lack of ray-traced graphics creates a game world
	with no shadows, and a very flat feel to it which no amount
	of texture mapping can make up for it.  The lack of depth
	ended up being a bit disconcerting by the time the game was
	over.

Controls:
	Mouse plus keyboard, easy to use.  You could actually just
	the mouse, and I was impressed at how easy it was to do
	some fairly sophisticated camera motion control after a
	short time.

Music:
	It's been a while since I played the game, and I don't
	remember anything about the music.  This means there wasn't
	any, or that I found it totally forgettable.  Whichever...

Character animation:
	Mixed at best.  Some of the characters looked like they
	were suffering from some sort of seizures at times, and
	other times the movements were amazingly good.  One strange
	effect was due to the fact that some characters were
	designed as "abdominal breathers", and others as "chest
	breathers".  From the correct viewpoint, this caused effects
	which were hard to ignore.  For example, Grace's breasts
	moved up and down seemingly independent of the rest of her
	chest, making it really hard to stop laughing when you see
	it for the first time.

Plot:
	As I said, it's based on a real-life mystery, the game basically
	uses that as a starting point.  After that, things get really
	far-fetched, which is somewhat of a shock to the system.
	The plot starts out rather gripping, but I found that the
	speed of gameply was slow enough to make the plot seem sluggish
	by the time you get to the middle of the game.  Maybe I should
	restate things and say that the plot was fine, but the game
	play ruined it in one way or another.


	I would like to know where you can buy laptops like Sydney.


Voices:
	OK for the most part, but Tim Curry's voice acting for
	Gabriel Knight was execrable.  He succeeded in creating
	a thoroughly unlikable character.  I must also comment
	that his southern U.S. accent sounded amazingly fake.

Characters:
	I'd rather meet Leisure Suit Larry than any of this bunch;
	at least he smiles.  Sour, sarcastic, miserable bunch of people,
	with Gabriel Knight being the worst of the lot.
	Did I mention that I didn't like them?

Puzzles:
	Most of the game is finding the people you need to talk to,
	and then talking to them.  Then you go around and talk to
	everybody once more (after you search for them).  This whole
	sequence became very tedious after the first few times.
	The other puzzles in the game seemed contrived and/or silly.

Ugly puzzles:
	An entire sequence of action-oriented puzzles, complete
	with an amazing amount of blood and gore.  If you are
	in any way squeamish, don't start this game.  If you hate
	action puzzles, don't start this game.

Puzzle difficulty:
	Very easy to very hard.  Some of the harder ones involved
	actions which were out of character, which made them hard
	for me to see.  Other puzzles were so ludicrous that I couldn't
	believe that the game designers would make me do things like
	that.
       
Bugs:
	None that I encountered.  Apparently other people had performance
	problems when viewing the courtyard fountain, but my machine
	didn't slow down there at all.  Mybe my graphics card was
	optimized for that sort of display?

Pros:
	An interesting "eye of God" camera.
	Use of Quake-like game engine may reduce the costs of game
	production, so I will mark it as a plus.
	Plot based on an interesting real-life mystery.

Cons:
	Flat lighting, no shadows.
	Action sequences.
	Extremely bloody, gory sequences.
	Unlikable characters, bad voice acting.
	
Conclusion:
	I got more enjoyment from researching Rennes-le-Chateau on
	the web than I got from this game.  I won't call it an
	outright stinker, but it sure didn't provide much game
	playing enjoyment for me at all.

Spoiler space:


I found the ending to be amazingly bad.  It turned a potentially good
story about a real-life mystery into a fantasy tale of the supernatural.
I found it completely silly and rather hard for me to swallow.  The
violence at the end was also appalling; my wife quit playing with me
until I got past that set of sequences, and I had to grit my teeth
and turn off the sound for most of them.