Gabriel Knight | |
---|---|
Genres | Point-and-click adventure |
Developers |
Sierra On-Line Pinkerton Road Studio |
Publishers | Sierra On-Line Phoenix Online Studios |
Creators | Jane Jensen |
Composers | Robert Holmes |
Platforms | MS-DOS, Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, Android, iOS |
First release |
Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers December 17, 1993 |
Latest release |
Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers 20th Anniversary Edition October 15, 2014 |
Gabriel Knight is a series of point-and-click adventure games developed and released by Sierra On-Line in the 1990s. Activision currently holds the rights to Gabriel Knight. Series creator Jane Jensen hopes that the launch of her new studio, Pinkerton Road Studio will lead to a fourth Gabriel Knight game in the future.
The Gabriel Knight characters and games were created by writer Jane Jensen, who also worked on King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow with veteran game designer Roberta Williams. The music in the series was composed by Robert Holmes, Jensen's husband.
All three games in the series focus on the adventures of Gabriel Knight, a New Orleans author and bookstore owner who finds that his destiny is to become a Schattenjäger, or "Shadow Hunter". Gabriel's assistant, sidekick, and sometime romantic interest Grace Nakimura is a major supporting character in Sins of the Fathers. In The Beast Within and Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, she shares the role of protagonist with Gabriel. The player alternates between Gabriel and Grace for different portions of the latter two games.
The first episode of the series was released in 1993. Its story unfolds over a sequence of "days", each of which has a required set of actions to be performed before proceeding to the next. In this way, the game proceeds mostly linearly, since the puzzles on a given "day" must be completed in order to reach the next day. However, within each day play may be nonlinear. A similar format was used throughout the series, with "days" replaced by "chapters" and "time blocks" in the later games. Each game also awards a number of "points" both for completing game required actions and for completing various optional puzzles along the way.
Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers and Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned both included, along with the game media and documentation, graphic novels that contained back-story to the starting points in either game, much in the tradition of Infocom's "feelies". The Sins of the Fathers graphic novel follows the story of Günter Ritter, an ancestor of Gabriel Knight, who has left his ancestral home for the American continent in the 17th century. The Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned graphic novel details the events immediately preceding the player's starting point in the game.