Gabriel Knight: Sins Of The Fathers - Sierra RRP œ44.99
           (Graphic adventure for PC floppy and CD-ROM)

                      Review By Phil Darke

Gabriel Knight is an excellent game but I did have a couple of
problems with it and I feel I would be failing in my duty as a
reviewer if I did not point them out.  The first problem is really
only a minor one and Sierra's technical help line were able to
give me the answer straight away but it can be frustrating if you
don't know about it. At one of the locations in the game (Jackson
Square) I found that I could only move vertically and was unable
to move horizontally to the next screen. The reason for this was
that I had installed a different mouse driver. When I reverted to
my original driver (Microsoft Version 8.20) the problem was
solved.

The second problem is more serious and I believe Sierra are giving
misleading information. My computer is a 386DX 16 Mhz machine and
when I bought the game I read the instructions on the box and it
stated quite clearly "MINIMUM HARDWARE REQUIREMENT 386". I
installed the game on my machine and it ran albeit rather slowly.
However when I reached about two thirds of the way through the
game I came to a part of the game where Gabriel has to avoid some
guards. However because the game runs so slowly on my computer I
was unable to get past this point in the game. Fortunately a
friend who owns a 486 loaded the game on his machine and I was
easily able to get past this point and save the game on his
machine.  Later on in the game, Gabriel is required to carry out a
certain action in a limited time and the same problem arose. My
friend helped me out again.

The point of this is that if certain hardware requirements are
specified then it is surely not sufficient that the game should
run but that it is possible to carry out all actions required to
complete the game. So if like me you own an older machine then
beware.

Gabriel Knight is an adventure from Sierra and is very
atmospheric. Gabriel, the hero is an author and book shop owner in
New Orleans and is researching a book on Voodoo. His assistant
Grace helps him with research and generally looks after him.

Gabriel visits various locations in New Orleans gathering
information. He can talk to other characters or question them.
When the question icon is chosen a menu with a list of topics is
presented on the screen and when he receives an important answer a
bell sounds and another topic will be added to the menu.

Another useful feature is the tape recorder which records all
conversations so that you can review them later.

Some of the puzzles in the game are quite difficult and I thought
that several of them were not completely logical. Although I did
find that in most cases the information had been given earlier in
the game, but it wasn't always easy to sort out what was relevant
and what was just background.

The music and sound effects are very good and really do add to the
atmosphere of the game.

I played the floppy disk version of this game but there is also a
CD ROM version, which I have seen a demo of and the digitised
speech and music make the game even better.

All in all I thoroughly enjoyed playing the game and I strongly
recommend it except that I like my heroes to survive, but that's
just me.











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