Gabriel Knight II 'The Beast Within'

                 Reviewed by Julian Gregory

Those of you who read my review of the first Gabriel Knight will
know how much I enjoyed it and imagine my delight when I saw the
follow-up and what's more it was on offer at less than œ10.
Needless to say I had to have it and hoped that it would be as
good as its predecessor.

The game comes on 6 CDs, yes that's right 6. The game consists
totally of FMV, hence the large numbers of disks. This was my
first sight of such a large amount of FMV and the quality was very
good indeed. Having been used to just moving figures around the
screen this was most impressive. Because of the way the 'film' had
to be put together some of the sequences were rather stilted, but
I can forgive such small niggles.

So what of the game itself. You start off at your castle in
Germany which was featured in the first game. You are the last of
a long line of Shadows Hunters and are asked to investigate a
series of murders in and around Munich. The villagers suspect that
they are the work of werewolves.

The game is divided into 6 chapters and you cannot progress into a
later chapter until you have done all that the game requires in
the present one. Each chapter has an introductory video sequence
and also an ending one. When the chapter has been completed you
can look back at previous sequences. Most of the problems are
relatively easy, but I found usually one in each chapter which was
either difficult or obscure. It is not giving too much away to say
that to conclude one part you need throw a flower onto a lake.
With hindsight this is quite logical, but was not easy to think of
at the time, at least I didn't think of it quickly.

As in the first GK you also take over as his assistant, Grace, as
she helps Gabriel by researching his task for him.

In this version you take over one of the characters for a whole
chapter. I think that the whole game plays extremely well and does
keep up a sense of drama throughout. The interaction between
Gabriel and Grace is well written.

The game runs in DOS, Windows 3.1 or 95. The DOS version loses
some video so I would recommend that the 95 version should be used
if at all possible.

Overall rating 70% (only low because it is relatively easy)











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