|
The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery |
|
|||
|
Studio: |
Sierra
On-Line |
|||
|
Designer(s): |
Jane
Jensen |
|||
|
Part of series: |
Gabriel
Knight |
|||
|
Release: |
December 1995 |
|||
|
Main credits: |
Producer: Sabine Duvall Artists: Darlou Gams, Layne Gifford,
John Shroades Music: Robert Holmes |
|||
|
Useful links: |
Complete
playthrough (10 parts, 626 mins.) |
|
|
|
|
What do you do when you
have just written and shipped the best adventure game of all time? If you are
Jane Jensen, you set your sights on making the second best adventure game of all time — and if you are the year
1995, you make your best to ensure that it will look and feel nothing like it
looked and felt back in the year 1993. It was a strange period, but,
fortunately for us all, things changed quickly enough for artists to be able
to offer surprising — if sometimes frustrating — new solutions before you
even had the time to wear out your trusty PC. Notably, by 1995 the gaming industry
had entered a new phase — full-motion video, or FMV for short, when digital
video and audio capacities had matured enough to allow for actual filmed
footage, with real backdrops and live actors, to be used for videogaming
purposes. For a few short years, FMV semi-successfully competed with the
other leading trend, 3D imaging, managing to hold its own largely because
early experiments with 3D looked so doggone awful. Once 3D graphics finally
began to improve, FMV lost out and died a quick death due to all the numerous
technical inconveniences accompanying filming and editing (let alone the fact
that few, if any, genuinely good actors ever let themselves be seduced into
joining that particular line of work). These days, even veteran players do
not hold that many fond memories of FMV titles from the early-to-mid-1990s
(remember Night Trap? no? good!);
but, as always, there are respectable exceptions to the rule. At the very
least, there are no theoretical
reasons for a FMV game not to be able to provide the required levels of
believability, player immersion, and entertainment; for the most part, they
failed for the same reason as so many early stages of other technological
breakthroughs, with people too overawed by the very fact of something so cool
made possible to take proper care of the handling and adaptation of said
breakthrough. Sierra’s own pioneering experience with
FMV was on Phantasmagoria, a
Roberta Williams game (of course!) which was undeniably «special» and went on
to become one of their best-selling titles, even if players today mostly
remember it for a good laugh and chuckle (somewhat unjustly, but this is no place to delve into another game’s
flaws and merits). However, Jensen’s project for a second Gabriel Knight
game, to be also done in FMV, was most certainly greenlit before, not
after Phantasmagoria hit the shelves, showing how much of a risk taker
Ken Williams was to allow two
seriously budget-draining processes run at the same time. In all honesty, I
do not know just how excited Jane was at the idea that her next game was to
be done with live actors rather than voice acting, but I guess if she weren’t
excited at all, she would be free to stick to the tried and true (like Space Quest or King’s Quest did). The «realistic» FMV setting inevitably led to
drastic changes in everything — script, dialog, puzzles, game mechanics — but
Sierra On-Line was never not about change, after all. Just as it happened with Phantasmagoria, The Beast Within bumped into numerous unpredictable issues, ran
over schedules, ran out of budget, had to be mostly filmed in California
instead of Germany, and ultimately featured far less content than Jane had
originally planned. Still, completed it was
before the end of 1995, just in time for the Christmas market, and although
it sold quite poorly compared to the heavily advertised and
«cheaper-thrilled» Phantasmagoria,
it quickly earned a far more benevolent critical reputation than Roberta
Williams’ competing brainchild. Unlike the first Gabriel Knight game, there was no specific hoopla about bringing
in a new era of interactive entertainment or anything like that — after Phantasmagoria, The Beast Within brought nothing specifically new to the table
other than the talent, enthusiasm, and hard-working attitude of its creator,
which seemingly made the title less «legendary» than Sins Of The Fathers. In some ways, however, Jensen’s sequel ended
up as an even more impactful and satisfying... if not «game», than at least
«experience» than its predecessor. At the very least, it is unquestionably
the last truly great product released by the original Sierra On-Line before
its shameful demise, and one of the
best designed and most, should I say, soulfully crafted sequels in adventure
game history, let alone the best FMV game ever created, and the one you
definitely need to take a look at before pronouncing sentence over the genre. |
||||
|
Content evaluation |
||||
|
Allow me to start out with
a bang — I do sincerely and honestly believe that The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery tells the single best
story that I have ever had the fortune of encountering in a videogame. I have
not played them all, so I am not insisting on objectivity; and I am also well
aware that, technically, Jensen’s plot is far from being consistent, has
quite a few holes (some of which, as I shall try to show below, are downright
annoying), and rests on a fair number of philosophical and artistic
clichés that would be unforgivable, were this a work of literary fiction
(which is why, by the way, I would not recommend you any of Jane’s attempts
to tell the story of Gabriel Knight in the actual form of printed novels —
yes, I did try reading both Sins Of The Fathers and The Beast Within, and the reasons why
both have been out of print for decades become quite obvious by the fifth or
sixth page or so). Absolutely none of it matters, though,
when what you are really dealing with is a computer adventure game. What
Jensen did here was take everything that made Sins Of The Fathers so good — the suspense, the mystery and
intrigue, the masterful weaving of historical fact and modern fantasy — and
made it even better by directly entangling the mystery into the life and fate
of our protagonist. Unlike so many other fantasy tales, The Beast Within is not concerned about you saving the universe
from imminent destruction; it is more concerned about saving yourself from the delicious jaws of
temptation, as well as making one formerly lost soul, with which you might
have quite a bit in common, find redemption. Avoiding black and white colors,
confusing expectations at every turn, and providing you with quite a few free
history lessons as a bonus (although you must be careful so as not to confuse
true history with make-believe), the game almost gets away with becoming a
complex morality tale at least on the level of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, even as its genre conventions
do not properly allow it to aim at anywhere higher in the canon (and, of
course, the language of Jensen’s dialogue is quite far removed from the
exquisite complexity of the Victorian Age). One can only imagine how good it
would get without the limitations of an FMV production back in its day. The story itself now takes place in
Germany rather New Orleans — incidentally, a somewhat more suitable setting
for Jensen, who actually lived in the country for a while (conversely, she’d
never been to New Orleans prior to writing Sins). Apparently, after having solved the Voodoo Murders case
and solved his financial problems by writing a bestselling novel about it,
Gabriel Knight has relocated to his ancient family nest in the small Bavarian
town of Rittersberg, where he would rather just soak up the atmosphere and
prepare for his next bout of writing than to actually step into the ancestral
shoes of the Schattenjäger,
battling supernatural evil around the globe. However, as tragedy conveniently
strikes on the outskirts of a nearby national park, Gabriel finds himself
pulled into solving yet another murder mystery — involving unnaturally large
wolves, a zoo superintendent with some weird philosophical views on life, an
exclusive hunting lodge in the City of Munich, a bunch of rich and perverted
aristocratic playboys, and, of course, Gabriel’s family history. Meanwhile, Gabriel’s trusty assistant Grace
Nakimura, sick and tired of being holed up at St. George’s Books in New
Orleans, packs up her suitcase and travels to rejoin Gabriel in Rittersberg —
only to find out that he’d just left for Munich to assist in the
investigation, and that nobody in Rittersberg is willing to tell her his
exact location, presumably out of fear that if they do find each other, it
will be hard for Jane Jensen to keep the player in control of just one
character. Yes, the game actually lets you — forces you, that is — to play as both Gabriel and Grace, shifting action between one
and the other in the form of discrete chapters, and at least as a plot
device, this is certainly an improvement on the first game, where Grace was
always in control of book research for Gabriel’s tasks, but all of that took
place firmly behind the screen. Now, for the first time ever, you actually do the book and museum research, as
Grace, while Gabe takes care of more mundane stuff. So far, so good — the regular murder
mystery with the usual suspects. Where this show really strikes gold is
closer to mid-game, when it slowly becomes clear that recent events may be
tightly linked to century-old events that involve perfectly historical
characters, namely, the Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria (1845–1886) and his good
friend, Richard Wagner. Without getting all spoilerish in this matter, let me
just reiterate that no other game I have played has ever succeeded in
building up such a masterful mystification, intertwining stone cold
historical facts with pure fantasy (and just
a little bit of cheeky tweaking, such as substituting the real paintings at
Neuschwanstein Castle with ones that are relevant to the story). Yet it is
also a mystification that somehow makes perfect sense, showing a deep
understanding of the complex personality of King Ludwig without cheapening it
through the addition of a supernatural element to his life story. By the end
of the game, you are all but ready to believe that things really happened the
way Jensen made them happen — how come they keep all this fascinating stuff
away from us in those boring history books? Considering that the plot involves at
least three distinct time layers — an 18th century werewolf incident, the
19th century Ludwig story, and the 20th century murder investigation in
Munich — and that all three lines are tied together by a complex bunch of
werewolf lore, some of it authentic and some added in by Jane for story
purposes, it is almost a wonder that it does not all fall apart at the end.
The videogame format does allow the writer to easily get away with holes and
inconsistencies: for instance, the game ultimately agrees with the lore piece
which states that an «Alpha Werewolf» can only be killed by a «Beta Werewolf»
and does exactly so at the end — yet this actually goes against the original plan which certainly did not include the
element of the Beta killing the Alpha, despite both Grace and Gabriel having
had the opportunity to read up on their werewolf lore multiple times. Or, for
that matter, the ridiculously easy-to-find locations for all the acts of the
Lost Wagner Opera (yes, that’s a big thing in this game) which, of course,
should have all been swept clean by the caretakers and repairmen at
Neuschwanstein over the past 100 years. However, I shall chalk all these and
other blunders up to the serious deficiency of resources on Jane’s part — it
is well known that a lot of content had to be cut from the final version of
the game for lack of time and money, and so let us simply pretend that in an
ideal world, where Ken Williams could get her another couple million dollars
and reschedule the release for 1996, The
Beast Within would be tighter than a submarine’s hatch. The one part of the plot that maybe does not work quite as well as
it should have is the romantic line between Grace and Gabriel. In the first
game, whatever tender feelings may have existed between the two principal
characters were buried deep behind several layers of sarcasm and
trash-talking (besides, Gabriel was too busy chasing another girl to pay much attention to his feelings for his
assistant). In The Beast Within,
due to the general plot construction, most of the trash-talking is relegated
to letters which the two star-crossed smarty-pants exchange between each
other on a regular basis (another plot blunder — apparently, mail moves at
the speed of sound in the Gabriel
Knight universe); otherwise, it is quite clear that Grace now has such
strong feelings for Gabriel that they not only make her lose her cool all the
time, but actually get her in big trouble with everybody who, according to
her, is trying to keep her away from the big lout (particularly Gerde, his
German housemaid and assistant, whom Grace suspects of unruly romance with
her employer just because, well, she is a female employed by a male). This might not be such a big problem
for those who never played the first game, but it creates the impression of a
rather huge and unwarranted personality change for those who have — and give
Grace, who is more or less supposed to represent the pinnacle of female
intelligence, an aura of extra bitchiness more befitting of some capricious
pop diva. On the other hand, this sudden streak of renegade behavior is at
least in agreement with Gabriel’s own feelings toward his partner — a mix of
suppressed admiration, deeply hidden longing, and open fear, if not terror,
at her presence. All of this could
have been handled better, particularly in the final act when the two finally
meet, albeit under rather restrictive circumstances; but Jane Jensen is just
so much better at writing detective and historical dialog than romantic one
that perhaps it is a good thing that the two quasi-lovebirds are given so
little time together. Still, I would certainly take half a
dozen romantic conversations between Grace and Gabriel over Jensen’s totally
superfluous introduction of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, a couple of «demonologists»
from «Miramak, Pennsylvania» (apparently there is no such place, but if there
were, I’m absolutely sure that it would be the best place in the world to
grow up as a demonologist). With her obligatory deck of Tarot cards, fortune-telling
clichés, and soap-opera American optimism, Mrs. Smith is barely half a
step over the ridiculously cartoonish figure of Harriet from Phantasmagoria, so much that I’ve
always suspected she was secretly written into the script by Roberta
Williams. Apparently, her main function in the story is to somehow try and
melt the ice congealed around poor Gracie’s heart, tear down her wall of
sarcasm, and make her acknowledge that the world is not always ruled by cold
logic and reasoning — which is all fine and dandy, as long as she had been
provided with dialog of at least Golden
Girls quality, rather than Santa
Barbara. So much for the bad stuff — but on the
positive side, the game script is filled with colorful characters, from
Grace’s cheerful German helpers (a music student dreaming of becoming the
next Furtwängler and a romantic historian obsessed with decoding the
enigma of King Ludwig) to Gabriel’s snobby aristocratic partners at the hunt
club, made to look as nasty and disgusting as possible, but each in his
special way. And, of course, top care is taken to make the primary
antagonist, Baron Friedrich von Glower, as thoroughly sympathetic as a
fictional villain can get. The homoerotic undertones between Gabriel and the
Baron are written out subtly, and although they are definitely present
(which, of course, led to inevitable criticism on grounds of associations
between homosexualism and evil), the game concentrates far more on issues of
loneliness and companionship than it does on carnal aspects — again, not a
particularly new topic in the post-Anne Rice era of literary fiction, but
quite a fresh one in the era of computer gaming. Jensen’s von Glower is the
single most complex (and likable) villain in video games up to 1995, and I am
actually not sure that a more
complex villain has truly appeared in the medium since then. The story offered by Jensen is
completely straightforward, without any branching paths or even minor choices
to make along the way, which is a bit of a pity — especially since at the end
of the game, Gabriel is explicitly offered an important choice, yet it is not
really ours to make, and with so much of the game luring and tempting you to
join the dark side, not being able to take that step (even if it leads you to
an officially «bad» ending) feels disappointing; that said, it would have
taken a lot of extra courage for
Jane to throw in such a path, and I hardly have the right to judge her for
railroading us into a happy ending. (Or maybe she thought that it would be
excruciatingly humiliating, after all, to have a mighty Shadow Hunter end his
career as a werewolf — and a lowly Beta
werewolf at that). For sure, a million small and not so
small things could have been done to tighten up the plot, introduce even more
depth and nuance, sharpen up the humor, deepen the dread, and make the game
even more realistic and immersive. (At the peak of my passion for the game, I
remember fighting insomnia by thinking of all the things I would have done
differently for both Sins Of The
Fathers and The Beast Within).
But even the fact that Jane Jensen was able to pull the whole thing off,
warts and all, exactly the way it is, is an astounding, groundbreaking
achievement in merging together new technologies, mass market appeal, and some good old-fashioned
scholarship and literary etiquette. |
||||
|
Perhaps the single worst
impact that FMV games had on the adventure genre was in the sphere of said
genre’s main attribute — puzzle design. In the good old days of the
point-and-click universe, you typically solved puzzles by putting things on
top of other things, er, I mean, clicking stuff on top of other stuff. Pick
up everything that is not nailed down, combine it with everything else, and
sooner or later you will get your solution — that is, after you have explored
multiple incorrect pathways. With FMV, each of these incorrect pathways would
require separate filming — it is one thing to simply program in an option in
which you are doing something wrong, but quite another to require actors
before a blue screen to act it out. (Could you imagine a filmed Day Of The Tentacle in which each of
the three leading actors would be required to sprinkle invisible ink over every other actor?) Subsequently, it is hardly
surprising that most of the FMV-style adventure games rank among the easiest
adventure games ever — The Beast Within
hardly being an exception.
Unless you are intentionally being a complete oaf, missing easily detectable
hotspots right and left and forgetting your map layout as soon as you move
from one location to another, beating the game is barely a challenge at all.
Most of the actions you have to take are fairly simple and logical, solved in
one or two steps, and clearly hinted at by the game itself. I recall only one
specific puzzle that could have anybody stumped — at one point in the game,
you have to fool a not particularly bright doorman by imitating the sound of
a door knock with the help of a concealed cuckoo clock, which really requires thinking out of the
box (more annoyingly, it requires noticing that a formerly closed clock shop
is now open without any evident difference in appearance). But at least it is
a somewhat elegant and non-trivial solution, as compared to the triviality of
most other actions. To compensate at least somewhat for
this simplicity, Jane adopted several controversial decisions. First, the
game requires you to do your research — a lot
of research, particularly when you are playing as Grace. At one point, you
have to visit two of Ludwig’s castles, Neuschwanstein and Herrenchiemsee
(«Here-at-chemistry», as Gabriel calls it), and action simply will not move
forward until you have taken a close look at just about every single exhibit — after which, as a reward, you will be
offered one more trip to the Wagner museum in Bayreuth, where, guess what?
yes, you guessed right. Actually, although I have seen many
people complain about that necessity, I have no problem with it. Jane Jensen
games always come with educational value, and if you do not want to be
educated, go play Super Mario Bros.
or whatever, you lowly pleb. The real
Grace Nakimura would certainly not have missed any of that info, so why
should you be allowed to slack off? What bothers me more is that diligent
exploration, in such situations, comes across as a substitute for actual puzzles rather than being complementary. In
the end, the most complicated intellectual tasks offered to poor Grace are to
pick a bunch of flowers to make peace with her nemesis Gerde, and to think of
a way to carry a pigeon inside Neuschwanstein (for which purpose you shall
actually need a whoppin’ two
different objects). The other decision is to include a
couple of «special» brain teasers, one of which is somewhat similar to the
Rada drum challenge in the first game — you shall have to splice different
tape recordings of the voice of the zoo’s administrator in order to compose a
message to his subordinate. This you will find either very fun or very
tedious, but at least there are some vague hints that Gabriel can give out to
help you work out the basic syntax of this message. Another unusual challenge
comes at the very end of the game, when you have to chase the bad guy into a
specific position inside the large basement of the opera theater by sniffing
him out and closing doors in specific order before you run out of time and
the bad guy escapes. Again, this is not too difficult, and will hardly
require more than 2–3 tries even from a geometrically challenged player like
myself, but the challenge is somewhat unexpected and anticlimactic, coming
right after the mind-blowing, super-tense opera scene. In a game like Broken Sword, which is all about
solving those sorts of puzzles, it would have looked natural; in a Gabriel Knight game, you will most
likely feel relief rather than proud satisfaction upon completing it. In any case, the one impression of The Beast Within you most certainly
won’t be walking away with is that of a «puzzler». Most of the actual
detective and deductive work will be done by the game for you; all you actually have to do is just bump around,
gathering evidence. From this point of view, what we have here is even far
less of an actual «game» than Sins Of
The Fathers, more like an immersive multimedia experience with occasional
chokepoints at which you are expected to commit some minimal brain work. But
that’s just the typical FMV experience for you, and who knows how it would
have turned out otherwise? Gabriel
Knight 3, for instance, has unquestionably stronger puzzles, yet that
emphasis on solving the mysteries on your own comes at the expense of a truly
great plot — apparently, there is just no way you can have that cake and eat
it too. |
||||
|
I shall try to keep this
section relatively short, because Sierra’s FMV adventure games tend to
produce most of their impact during cutscenes — the actual «movie» parts of
the game where the player’s impact is completely non-existent, and all the
thrills are to be gotten through acting and sound. In between the cutscenes,
however, you are extremely limited in your actions and even in your feelings:
this, I am afraid to say, is one bit where The Beast Within loses out to Phantasmagoria,
which, for all its flaws, at least made you feel nervous and stay on your
toes all the time while exploring the mansion. The main problem is that
the game, whenever it is actually functioning in «game mode», is extremely
static. It is impossible to freely move Gabriel or Grace around the screen;
you can only push them right or left in pre-designated directions, or induce
them to examine a hotspot. Promenading through the streets of Rittersberg, or
across the squares of Munich, or over the dense forests of Bavaria, is a bit
like marching in circles inside a prison courtyard. You do get a tiny bit of
entertainment every once in a while — some animated figures near Munich’s
Town Hall sit around a fountain playing "When The Saints Go Marching
In" (an ironic nod from Sins Of
The Fathers), and the guards at Neuschwanstein keep changing positions at
regular intervals, but on the whole, the action going on around you is
minimal. (One can only guess just how populated the game might have been,
were it released in the age of The
Witcher 3!). Still, the atmosphere does
change, and change it does, when shit hits the fan properly and the game
moves into the danger zone. As in the first installment, Jane takes her sweet
time to build up the sense of danger — throughout the first four chapters of
the game, Gabriel and Grace both experience uncomfortable premonitions, but ultimately
manage to stay in the safe zone. However, by the end of the fifth chapter the
beautiful and peaceful forest in which our hero is merely supposed to do a
bit of hunting becomes a death trap at night — and it is at this moment that
the game completely shifts its tone, as the mystery-solving quest becomes a
quest for your own survival and sanity. All I can say is that this is a much harsher atmospheric twist than
the one in Sins Of The Fathers,
where the tone of the game also changed at about the same point, but the
feeling of danger was never as sharply pronounced. After all, in Sins Of The Fathers the worst that
could happen to our protagonist was mere death; in The Beast Within, death is less scary than damnation, and it is
difficult for even the most jaded and least impressionable person in the
world to not feel anything about poor Gabriel’s fate. On the other hand, humor is
not such a well integrated feature here as it was in Sins — which is partly due to the lack of Tim Curry (who would
probably have a thing or two to improve about the script), and partly to the
fact that Jane clearly wanted to come up with something deeper and darker
than she did first time around. Sins
were populated from top to bottom with characters acting as comic relief, from
Officer Frick to colorful patrons of the Napoleon House to good old Detective
Mosely himself; Beast has no comic
characters at all (unless you count the Smiths, which you shouldn’t), and
even if Gabriel has not completely
lost his sense of humor, he is no longer operating on the top tier level of
the sarcastic son-of-a-bitch he was in Sins
(it would be up to Tim Curry to restore him back to that position in the
third game in the series). Some might find this a good thing, others might be
disappointed; I know I was one of the others when I first played the game,
missing the light touch of Sins and
all the personality changes in both Grace and Gabriel — eventually, though, I
got used to that, and even justified it by the obvious trauma that the
characters went through at the end of Sins
(I mean, Gabriel did lose the love
of his life at the end of it; even the most sarcastic son of a bitch could
want to cut down a bit on the puns and innuendos after that). |
||||
|
Technical features |
||||
|
It is tricky to discuss the
technical aspects of FMV games separately from each other — considering, for
instance, that they are built upon actual acting by real people, which means
that visuals and sound are integrated far more tightly than usually.
Consequently, here and elsewhere in reviews of Sierra’s FMV titles I am going
to expand the traditional «Graphics» section to cover acting in general,
while the «Sound» section will be reserved exclusively for the musical
soundtrack (which, in the case of The
Beast Within, most certainly deserves its own section). All of the action in The Beast Within takes place in two
modes: (a) cutscenes, in which actors are filmed properly, either talking to
each other or carrying out various actions, against actual backdrops or, far
more commonly, against green screen backgrounds later substituted by still
backdrops; (b) interactive scenes, in which you can direct your character
across the screen, usually against a still photo as a backdrop. Since all the
video files for the game had to be gruesomely compressed in order to fit into
one package (it still took about 6 CDs to get it together), quality of images
in cutscenes is predictably much lower than in interactive scenes — admiring
the beauty of the game is really only possible with still images, not moving
pictures. The still images are beautiful, though, especially
considering that this time around, the game crew actually took a trip to
Germany in order to film the necessary locations — such as the Marienplatz in
Munich, or the Neuschwanstein Castle of King Ludwig. It goes without saying
that if you are unable to be there in person, you are much better off with
high resolution images than stock footage from a 25-year old videogame, but
that, of course, is not the point, not even any more so than the alleged
«cheesiness» of Neuschwanstein (Ludwig’s «fairy tale» castle, so sweet and
rococo-ish that even Disney appropriated it for Sleeping Beauty). The point
is that the locations do add a
serious touch of authenticity to the experience — so serious, in fact, that The Beast Within ends up being one of
the very, very few FMV games that really makes you lament the quick,
decisive, and irreversible demise of the genre. It is also impressive just
how well the fictional elements are integrated into the real images,
reflecting the same delicate interweaving of reality and imagination in
Jensen’s writing. I have already mentioned the fictional «wolf panels» at
Neuschwanstein, replacing the original paintings, but it is also fun how the
fictional locations in Munich — the office of Gabriel’s lawyer and the hunt
club, in particular — are smoothly inserted to the left and to the right of
the Town Hall building (so smoothly, in fact, that when I actually visited
Munich, I half-expected to see the hunt club after turning the corner). And
something tells me that not a few fans of the game who visited Neuschwanstein
afterwards probably spent a bit of time poking around pre-designated corners,
trying to find out whether those secret caches for the three acts of the lost
Wagner opera really existed... Still, unless you are a
super-serious sucker for German historicism of the late 19th century, you
shall probably spend more of your time on the various cutscenes than on
admiring the still scenery. Thus, it is time to talk about the cast — for
which, unfortunately, it was impossible to assemble such a strong list of
B-tier players as it was for Sins Of
The Fathers, either due to limited budget or because good actors tended
to be very wary about lending not only their voices, but also their
appearances to this strange new format. Apparently, there was some talk about Tim Curry possibly
reprising his role, but Jensen vetoed this herself, claiming that Tim’s looks
are not quite what she had in mind for Gabriel Knight. (On which I
respectfully disagree, because, after all, the voice is hardly just randomly
tied to the face, but whatever). In the place of Tim Curry
comes Dean Erickson, a bit player in various TV shows who actually hoped that
his starring role as Gabriel could be his big break, but eventually went on
to found an investment advisory firm (in more recent photos, he looks more
like Gabriel’s lawyer in Munich than Gabriel himself). Either all by himself
or as directed by director Will Binder, he introduces a huge personality
shift to Gabriel — this character is clearly less cocky, less blatantly
self-confident, is no total stranger to shyness and humility, and generally
reserves his sarcasm for snobs and assholes who really deserve it rather than
spewing it around 24/7 with no signs of discrimination. His badboyishness is
now more like a nostalgic badge which he can still proudly wave around if
required ("do you like women, Herr Knight?", he is asked at one
point in the game by a particularly sleazy member of the club, to which he
half-cockily, half-embarrassedly replies, "I’ve been known to..."),
but overall, it’s as if the events of the first game really knocked him down
a peg or two. This means that you will
most probably either hate Erickson’s performance next to Curry’s, or love it
— it would be difficult to experience comparatively strong emotions for both,
and it would be impossible not to be affected by their differences.
Personally, I remember a sharp original pang of disappointment, not because I
disliked Erickson’s Knight per se, but more because this was one of those
Sean-Connery-to-Roger-Moore types of transitions where you find it hard to
accept that the same fictional character has just received a personality
reboot for no apparent reason. Over time, though, I learned to appreciate the
rather fine nuances of Erickson’s acting: the mimics, the gestures, the
well-placed theatrical pauses, that thin aura of negligence and sloppiness
combined with streetwise intelligence, even the major tantrum which he throws
at Grace as the curse begins to affect him — all of that is pretty well done,
want it or not. If he’d only spent less time twitching his lips or running
his hands through his hair in the cutscenes... but I guess that is more the
fault of the director and the FMV format than anything else. Joanne Takahashi, as Grace,
usually gets more flack for her acting, but honestly, I don’t think she does
a bad job, either. In the first game, Leah Remini’s Grace was a mostly quiet,
reserved, sarcastic fountain of wisdom, which she preferred to dispense from
behind her desk rather than hopping from place to place or getting herself
involved in much of anything. In The
Beast Within, her role is more active, as we have to deal with her not
only in the capacity of researcher and investigator, but also in that of a
jealous lover (at the beginning) and a brave and caring rescuer (at the end).
If there is a single flaw in her performance, it is probably that she takes
the role too seriously, and tends
to overact every time the script requires a strong emotion — her hysterical
reaction to Gerde in Chapter 2, for instance, would only look convincing if
there were a long and transparent story of deep emotional traumas leading up
to it (it is a bit hard to believe that Gabriel’s leaving New Orleans for
Rittersberg was really the only thing to cause our lady to jump off her
rocker). But other than that she’s as fine as can be — she is
Japanese-American, she is intelligent, she is beautiful, she is well-spoken
and sharp-mouthed, and she is adorably clumsy in every single bit of romantic
scenery (some might think of this as a negative, but I suppose that a
character like Grace Nakimura would
be quite clumsy and uncomfortable about romance in real life anyway). That said, I think everybody
and their grandma would agree that the single best bit of acting in the game
is delivered by the Polish actor Peter Lucas as Baron Friedrich von Glower.
Why that guy never made it big time (I think his biggest break would later be
a supporting role in David Lynch’s Inland
Empire, a movie that nobody remembers any longer anyway) is a total
mystery to me — chalk it up to the mysterious lottery of fortune, ever once
in a while liable to supporting mediocrities like George Clooney or Jon Hamm
(sorry, guys) over actual talent. Lucas’ von Glower is, simply put, the single greatest villain in video
game history, at least in terms of how elegant, intelligent, multi-sided,
caring, and overall sympathetic you can make a guy who has also made it his
life’s purpose to destroy the lives of people he actually cares about. He
steals every single scene in which he is present — fortunately, there are
quite a few of them — and there is something hypnotic about his voice even in
a lengthy sequence where you just read a letter explaining his plans and
motives. If only he were given higher quality dialog — if only the lead
writer for the project had been, say, Herman Hesse instead of Jane Jensen —
the scenes in von Glower’s residence, where he explains his «philosophy» to
Gabriel, would have been totally iconic... though I guess that they are still iconic in some ways, at least as
far as FMV gamemaking is concerned. In addition to this (insufficient, but
still respectable) layer of intellectual depth, he is also able to portray
some good old-fashioned homoerotic attraction that comes across as elegant
and courteous rather than sleazy, cheesy, or riddled with over-the-top
clichés of writers and actors who try a bit too hard — an advantage of
the game for which Jensen and Lucas have to share the honors. On the whole, I am
surprised to say that conspiculously and unquestionably proverbial «bad
acting» is all but lacking in the game. Even the horrendous Mrs. Smith,
played by veteran TV actor Judith Drake, is acted out quite credibly — she is
just an utterly annoying character, written in by Jensen because she probably
wanted to show all the mysterious ways in which God sends us help from above
(sometimes it even comes in the shape of an annoyingly super-sweet provincial
lady who can’t keep her mouth shut for a second), and she plays the part
precisely like an annoying character should. Nicholas Worth is an imposing
and hilarious Kommissar Leber (the obligatory big dumb detective who
alternately helps and hinders the protagonist); Richard Raynesford does a
convincingly all-out nasty Baron Von Zell; and charming old gentleman Kay
Kuter (whom players will probably more commonly recognize as the voice of
Griswold Goodsoup from Curse Of Monkey
Island) plays a wonderful Werner Huber, the owner of the Rittersberg inn
and the Herald of Doom for both Gabriel and Grace (you haven’t lived, really,
until you saw and heard him make that grimace and intone
"WE-E-E-E-REWOLF!" in a voice seemingly carved from the Rock of
Ages). In short, if you do want
Proverbial Bad Acting, go play Phantasmagoria
— next to that one, all these guys deserve their Oscars. In terms of actual
cinematography, the capacity of the game is understandably limited — there is
not that much you can actually do against a green screen — but it is
impossible not to mention the climactic opera scene at the end, for which
Sierra really went all-out, hiring
real opera singers and putting on quite a grand theatrical show, with
excellent editing work and tension build-up quite worthy of a Hitchcock production
(or at least a Francis Ford Coppola, though I think Hitchcock is clearly a
bigger inspiration for Jensen). It is the single most outstanding moment in
all of Sierra On-Line’s cinematography — and, probably, the highest point of the entire FMV era as well, the likes of
which we have not seen ever since and most likely never will again, which is
a pity (grand cinematographic spectacle in 3D animation is quite common these
days, but still, it can never truly replace the same spectacle put up by real
people of flesh and blood). One can only speculate how
much better it would all have turned out if the game had been produced at
least 5–6 years later than it was. The resolution of the videos is
horrendously low, necessitating total compression and interlacing (at least
there now exists a patch that helps you de-interlace the videos, making them
a bit more watchable on modern screens); the green screen impediment means
that the characters’ contours are crudely and unnaturally sticking out
against the backdrops, reducing immersion; and the few elements of CGI
integrated with real video capture — such as the werewolves in the last
chapters — look much too cartoonish and clumsy when contrasted with actors,
which really takes away from the intended feel of horror (especially today,
of course, but even in 1995 the difference in quality was clearly visible).
Not everybody was willing to look past these technical deficiencies back in
1995, and, clearly, very few people will be willing to do that 25 years
later. But just as we now marvel at, for instance, the skills of the artists
who could at one time record the entirety of Sgt. Pepper on 4-track tape machines, so might we actually feel
inspired by the work of the people who could make a generally believable
experience of hunting werewolves in the cities and forests of Bavaria by
putting a bunch of unknown actors in front of a blank screen. |
||||
|
By 1995, Robert Holmes, who had
composed the original soundtrack to Sins Of The Fathers as well as acted
as the game’s producer, was not just a composer, but also Jane Jensen’s
husband, and so there was clearly no way that he would not be responsible for
the score to the second game as well — and thank God for that. If the game was going to feel less than
a traditional game and more like an interactive movie, with big fat emphasis
on the movie part, that also meant
that its soundtrack would have to feel more like an actual movie soundtrack —
with strong, memorable themes going beyond mere background accompaniment.
After all, when we’re dealing with an actual adventure game, you usually do
not want the music to be overbearing and overwhelming, because sooner or
later you are going to get stuck in some specific environment, and wrecking
your brain over puzzle solutions with loud, expressive, dynamic music
intruding inside your busy space will eventually become torture and probably
lead you to turning the sound off altogether. But if at least half of your
gaming time is going to be filled up with watching cutscenes, that is a whole different thing
altogether: it means that making music into an integral part of that
experience is an obligation, and that music better be worth it. Whether Holmes would be able to pull it
off was not evident from the beginning, precisely because the scale
difference between the soundtracks to Sins
and Beast was like the difference
between, let’s say, an album of surf-rock instrumentals and an Andrew Lloyd
Webber-type rock opera. However, right from the opening themes of the
Prologue and the opening chapter we may be reassured that the man is fully up
to the task. Despite all of the music being MIDI-synthesized (real
orchestration surely would have been nice, but BUDGET BUDGET BUDGET), Holmes
succeeds in getting the required epic effect over and over again, largely
taking his cues from the symphonic rock of the 1970s, I’d say — I can
definitely hear echoes of Pete Townshend’s keyboard work on Quadrophenia in some of the tracks,
among other, sometimes less flattering, things (such as American arena-rock à la Journey). To prop up the continuity effect,
Holmes borrows and reworks quite a few of the older themes from Sins, such as the main Gabriel Knight
theme, or the Police Station theme (which, appropriately, is now playing at
specific intervals inside the German
police station, with an appropriately more brutal percussion sound). However,
all of them are intensified, and Holmes’ trademark piano riffs are bashed out
with all the force he can give them. The piano, in general, is the most
important instrument here, intermittently churning out epic, depressing, or
romantic moods depending on the situation; one exception is a frantic «Danger
Theme», which typically bursts out of nowhere to scare the shit out of you
whenever it is necessary — for instance, during Grace’s nightmare sequence,
or during a pivotal moment when Gabriel stumbles upon the gruesome evidence
inside the werewolf lair. The sequencing arrangements are also interesting —
thus, while the music within cutscenes is always rigidly scripted, outside of
them the themes for specific locations do not loop around continuously, but
rather crop up, play out, and fade away with intervals of silence between
them, presumably to prevent you from getting irritated by constant sonic
accompaniment if, for some reason, you tarry too long in one place (which is
never really the right thing to do). Holmes’ biggest challenge for the game,
of course, was to come up with at least a brief snippet of the Lost Wagner
Opera — the key element binding the 19th century segment of the story to the
present time. Any lesser mortal would have cowered at the challenge, but a
big strong woman like Jane Jensen certainly would not have married a
spineless wimp unable to beat Herr Richard at his own game, and so Robert
actually sat down and composed a 10-minute piece (with Jane providing the
libretto), performed in full during the climactic Transformation scene in the
last act. Of course, it does not really sound much like Wagner (not least
because Wagner himself had relatively little experience working with a MIDI
interface), but there is something Wagnerian
about it all the same — like the impressive whirlpool of strings during the
ominous Minstrel Dance, somewhat reminiscent of Wagner’s proto-minimalist
moments (such as the Rheingold overture);
most importantly, it gets the job done, slowly and masterfully deepening the
colors until the explosive revelation. (As a sidenote, I would like to remark
that the whole story of The Beast
Within and specifically the dark supernatural tones of it, crossed with
the idea of damnation and salvation, is actually much closer in spirit to von
Weber’s Der Freischütz, whose
romanticism was a direct predecessor to Wagner — unfortunately, «a lost Weber
opera» would neither have fitted in with the Ludwig/Wagner narrative nor
sounded as impressively for the average player. I would not be surprised to
learn that Holmes was more influenced by Weber than Wagner, though). Regardless of these details, it is
clear that the soundtrack to The Beast
Within was one of the most ambitious sonic undertakings in at least
Western videogame history up to that point — and even if you lack the ability
or desire to test it out within the game itself, I still recommend
experiencing at least two
or three themes in order to grasp the overall seriousness of the entire
project. It is actually quite befuddling to me that, despite showing such
major progress here, Holmes was not picked up by any major movie or videogame
studios ever since — then again, it is also perfectly possible that he is
just a simple, modest, unambitious, stay-at-home soul, perfectly content to
restrict himself to writing soundtracks for his spouse’s games for ever and
ever since, God bless the both of them. |
||||
|
And this is where we come
to the last and, conversely, least impressive part of the game — the
interaction part. As long as you watch
the game, it is relentlessly great, but, as we have already seen in the Puzzles section, as soon as it comes to
actually proving your own worth, it
begins to disappoint. The interface of the game generally follows the new
pattern introduced with King’s Quest
VII: still images and video cutscenes occupy about 2/3rds of the screen,
the rest of it being given over to the menu bar which is... surprisingly
empty (apparently, the middle chunk was supposed to be given over to
subtitles, but ultimately the game shipped without them — there is a fan-made
patch that actually adds English subtitles, though). You really only have a
small inventory window out there, as well as your trusty tape recorder which
allows you to relisten to important conversations (a feature carried over
from Sins Of The Fathers) and a
video replay option which allows you to rewatch some important scenes (not
all, though). At least you can freely save and restore your games at and from
every location — thankfully, Jane dispensed with the utterly stupid «bookmark
progress» alternative of King’s Quest
VII and Phantasmagoria. On the
other hand, the division of the game into several chapters introduced in the
same games works very well for The
Beast Within, both agreeing with the same division (into «days») of Sins Of The Fathers and allowing us to
alternate between Gabriel and Grace on a chapter-by-chapter level. Unfortunately, one thing
Jane could not dispense with is the utterly minimalistic point-and-click
interface, which forces you to helplessly wave your dick, uh, I mean, cursor
around the screen until it reaches an otherwise unidentified hotspot and changes
into a dagger, at which point you click on it to either get a verbal
description or interact with it. The lack of different options means, for
instance, that sometimes in order to achieve progress, you have to first click on an object to get its verbal
description, and then click on it again
to interact with it and actually get somewhere. This is annoying and stupid,
and I am pretty sure Jane (with her very nice set of alternate cursors in the
first game) must have hated it, but such were Sierra’s laws of the time —
what has been predetermined by the next generation of Roberta Williams games,
goes for everybody else’s games as well. Still, the game quickly
lulls you into being totally assured that as long as you stick out your
tongue, roll your eyes, and click your cursor / dagger all over the screen,
the game will just keep on rolling — all you gotta do is reach out for those
sweet little hotspots. This is why the very last puzzle in the game, when you
actually have to get just a wee bit trickier with your dagger in order to
solve the issue of the Beast once and for all, turns out to be so frustrating
for a lot of players (I actually surveyed several «blind playthroughs» on
YouTube to make sure of that) — because it requires of you to take a type of
action that was never required or even hinted at in the game before. (Bad
game design! Bad game design!) Other than that, the
interface is user-friendly: you can easily skip any cutscene you wish by
simply clicking the mouse (comes in handy if you’re a speedrunner, I guess),
you can watch your progress in points at the top of the screen, and oh, I
almost forgot to mention that Grace actually keeps a journal in the same spot
where Gabriel has his tape recorder — in which she regularly takes notes,
ordered by subject and chronology, and
can actually read them aloud to you (along with plenty of sarcastic comments
on Gabriel and just about all of her new acquaintances). The journal part is
nice to have, though not essential (well, perhaps
essential for those with short memory spans — there is, after all, quite an
overload of information to be had from completing Grace’s parts of the story),
and I think that it is pretty much the only innovative aspect of the entire
interface. Keeping journals (though not always voiced ones) would later
become a fairly regular feature in adventure games (e.g. The Longest Journey or Syberia),
but I am not sure just how widespread the practice was by 1995. (Certainly
some of Sierra’s mystery games, such as the Laura Bow series, could have benefited from it early on, but
Roberta was apparently fine with a «dummy» journal for her heroine). Finally, just like in the
first game, you won’t be able to die at all in the first four chapters (and
you can’t die as Grace at all), but
eventually there comes a time when you may
die, and later still, a time when you will
die with 99.99% certainty, many times over before you figure out what to do.
For such cases, there will be a «Try Again» option, so there is no need to
continually save and restore (you might want to do just that while running
around the basement in wolf form, though, to save you lots of ennui). |
||||
|
Like the first Gabriel Knight game, the
second one also sets the bar way higher than it could ever hope to reach. It
is not truly a game as such; it is riddled with technical deficiencies which
are hard to overlook or forgive; its plot is full of holes; even the best of
its characters often speak in clichés and truisms; it may easily be
deemed as too insulting for the intelligence of people who read books, yet
too confusing and boring for those who do not. In a certain way, its fate is
oddly similar to the fictional fate of its most interesting character — no,
not Gabriel Knight, of course, but rather King Ludwig II of Bavaria, whose
human flaws were many and whose artistic tastes were debatable, but who has
managed to remain a fascinating figure all the same. Of course, big and sprawling ambitions are
not always welcome — they have resulted in way too many embarrassing
JRPGs over the past half century, and in the world of videogames, where flash
is so commonly prioritized over substance, they can easily do more harm than
good in any setting. But in Jane Jensen’s case, what really helped was
focusing the story on personal levels, making it more of an exploration of
the conflicting inner selves of 20th century Gabriel and his 19th century
mirror Ludwig — an exploration which can admittedly get soapy at times, but
hits you pretty hard in the feels at others (can I admit that I actually
teared up at the final scene of Gabriel and Grace on the bridge? no? too
late). Then, even when you stop and think and begin to be tempted to laugh at
your emotional reflexes, even from a cold intellectual point of view you
cannot deny that the integration of the werewolf story with the historical
narrative of Ludwig and Wagner is one of the most brilliant ideas in the
history of mixing together fact and fiction. So it was realized less
efficiently than it could have been... but who can tell, really? It’s not as
if there were precedents for this in gaming history, right? I do believe that if you have at least
certain faint feelings for (a) adventure gaming, (b) European history, and
(c) folklore-based fantasy — all three of these, that is — your life will be
somewhat incomplete until you have played this game. If you are totally
indifferent toward at least one of these points, that statement should
be retracted (thus, pure history buffs will most likely scoff at the werewolf
angle, and pure fantasy fans will probably fall asleep during Grace’s
never-ending tour of Bavarian museums). But if you are lucky enough to be
interested in all three, The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery
will most assuredly work its magic even today. Hopefully, some day a grateful
bunch of fans will use the necessary AI to bring the video files up to modern
standards; until then, we’ll just have to curb our expectations for the
reward of a unique experience which, in some ways, has never been bettered —
even if the arrival of modern standards has seemingly set up all the
necessary conditions for making it artistically obsolete. Which, as of 2020,
it most certainly is not. |
||||
