The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery (PC) Playthrough
122A playthrough of Sierra On-line's 1995 graphic adventure for PC, The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery.
The Beast Within was the direct sequel to the 1993 fan-favorite graphic adventure Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers (https://youtu.be/a93l94nNuzQ), and it was the second of Sierra's high-profile FMV games from the mid-90s, having released just a few months after Phantasmagoria (https://youtu.be/yCR9IzW_07c).
After solving the voodoo murders and becoming a best-selling author, Gabriel Knight has moved to Schloß Ritter, his family's ancestral home located in Rittersburg, Germany. It has fallen to Gabriel take up the mantle of the schattenjäger, or shadow hunter, as the last survivor of the Ritter family bloodline following the death of his uncle Wolfgang.
A group of villagers gathers at the castle late one night to request his services. A young girl was savagely killed on a farm in the Munich suburbs by (what her family believes to be) a werewolf, and they want her killer brought to justice. Gabriel reluctantly agrees to help and heads to Munich to begin his investigation.
His assistant, Grace Nakimura, is worried that Gabriel might be getting in over his head and travels to Germany to help. She soon uncovers a connection between a recent string of mutilation killings and the tragic story of King Ludwig II, "the fairytale king" of Bavaria, who died under suspicious circumstances in 1886.
The Beast Within's plot spans six chapters that alternate between Gabriel and Grace's perspectives as the pair independently pursue their own leads and agendas before bringing them together for one of the most intense climaxes I've ever seen in a video game.
You might expect that the mixing of fantasy, horror, historical fiction, and modern crime drama sensibilities would result in an embarrassing and unwieldy mess of tropes and contrivances, and in most writers' hands, it probably would have.
But Jane Jensen is not a hack, and The Beast Within isn't a cynical attempt to pander to the lowest common denominator. Jensen's writing is even stronger here than it was in Sins of the Fathers. The script does an incredible job of building two parallel but distinct plot threads, both intricately detailed and meticulously researched, and stitching them together in a smart, engaging way that feels entirely natural.
And the game that was built around the narrative does an excellent job, too. Though the interface has been simplified, the puzzles are often a match for the first game's in terms of complexity and difficulty, and they rarely veer off into moon-logic territory. I say rarely and not never, because oh boy. Brace yourself if you're playing it for the first time.
Though they're often referred to as examples of bad puzzle design, I loved the zoo tape recorder and cuckoo clock puzzles. They were tough, but there were enough clues to lead you to their solutions (providing you were looking hard enough) and they were satisfying to figure out. They were nice nods to the rada drum and air conditioner puzzles in GK1.
But there are two puzzles that stick out to me as exceptionally unfair: the whole chain of events that has you catching a pigeon in order to distract a guard at Neuschwanstein, and the timed basement maze at the end. I hit both those puzzles like a brick wall the first time I played it, and after laboriously brute-forcing my way through them, I still have no idea how someone could've been expected to reasonably figure them out. There are a few clues but they require serious leaps in logic to string together, and timer-based puzzles always suck in Sierra games.
Thankfully, they're the exception and a minor blemish on what is an otherwise great adventure game. The majority of the game's puzzles are designed to play fair, and even though it's an FMV game, it's as interactive as any traditional 2D adventure.
The digitized character sprites, the FMV sequences, and the beautiful hi-res backdrops all mark a huge leap in quality over Phantasmagoria's, and the acting is good for a game of its time - it's a bit uneven (Canis... LUPIS LUPIS) and Grace is a screeching harpy, but most of the actors do a nice job of their roles, and I prefer this portrayal of Gabriel over Tim Curry's.
The writing, the settings, and the actors sell the world and the action well, but they all hit so much harder with a soundtrack of this caliber behind them. And if you remember being blown away by the Final Fantasy VI's opera scene, just wait until you get a look at 9:02:39. The entire act was written, composed, and performed specifically for this game. Robert Holmes is one helluva composer, wouldn't you say?
I'll wrap this up by saying that The Beast Within is awesome. It's the complete package of style and substance courtesy 1995, and it's one of the most memorable and absorbing point-and-click adventures I've ever played.
______\nNo cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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