Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the
Sacred, Blood of the Damned
Sierra – 1999
W98
3D/Keyboard/mouse
3rd Person Adventure
Story –
Gabe and Grace receive an invitation to visit Prince James in Paris. Seems
the Stewarts have been plagued by a malady for centuries. They wake up
pale and exhausted and suffer from severe anemia – anemia induced by bite
marks on the neck. Prince James wants Gabe to protect his son Charles from
what the Stewarts call the “night visitors”. Well, they don’t do a very
good job – the first night they are there two “visitors” break into the
baby’s room and kidnap him. Gabe gives chase and winds up at a train
station where he hops the train. He is promptly knocked out and wakes up
at Rennes-Le-Chateau – and the search for the baby, vampires and buried
treasures begins
Gameplay
You use both the keyboard and mouse to move around in the game. Thank
goodness the escape key gets you where you need to be in a hurry or I’d
still be ambling around the village – boy, do those folks walk slow. There
is a map feature which is very nice – once a location appears just click
on it and Gabe or Grace motorcycle to it in a flash.
As with GK2 you play both Gabe and Grace separately. This game is broken
up into 3 days and the days broken into time frames. You cannot proceed
into the next time frame until all the necessary actions are completed.
You can however continue on without all the points – I didn’t even come
close to having all the points possible when I finished – which could be
why I was a little confused on what was going on in the story.
Puzzles
The puzzles were your basic inventory type. A couple of them were pretty
far fetched. I still wonder how Mosley (yep, good old Mose is back) is
going to leave France with his newly doctored passport. It may have fooled
the motorcycle guy but I doubt the border patrol will be so gullible. The
most annoying part of the entire game (for me anyway) was all the map
making, coordinate putting stuff on Sidney (the computer). I totally lost
the story line while fighting this part and finally resorted to a wt in
order to save my sanity. Then there was this %&*$ pendulum………and I still
wonder how Gabe and Grace fit all that stuff into those tight jeans
without once showing a bulge.
Conclusion
Overall I wound up liking the game – the story once it was finally all
fleshed out, was extremely interesting and had some surprising twists to
it – but it took way too long for me to understand what was happening and
why. That could be because I missed a bunch of stuff that filled in the
story line better. You don’t really get the entire picture of what is
happening until the second to the last time frame on the last day – up
until then, for me anyway, it was more of a “I don't have a clue why I'm
doing this, but if you say I have to then okay guys”
copyright © 2002
GameBoomers
