Vampires. Werewolves. Sure, they're old stories, but it's hard to go wrong with Gothic. Hollywood tried to improve on that basic horror element back in the eighties with garish, gory, hack and slash, but in the end, what have they returned to? The basics: Coppolla's Dracula, Branagh's Frankenstein. Similarly, Sierra's first major foray into horror, Phantasmagoria, was an exercise in shlock. Frightened woman, creepy house, lots of blood. All the nicely rendered sets in the world couldn't have turned that into a better game. Fortunately, the Washington company has made a quick recovery with The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery. This game takes an already successful character, the New Orleans occult novelist/ shadow-hunter from Sins of the Fathers, and returns him to his Germanic roots in Bavaria, throwing in one of those all-time favorite monsters, the werewolf.
Don't expect the resonant tones of Tim Curry to supply the voice of Gabriel Knight this time around. In The Beast Within, all the characters are digitized actors, as was the case with Phantasmagoria. Knight is played by Dean Erickson, who is quite successful at bringing the strange sleuth to life. And Grace Nakimura as played by Joanne Takahashi shows a great deal more character than in her previous appearance. That doesn't mean you'll find her _likeable_, but she does make one heck of an impression!
At the beginning of The Beast Within, Gabriel has had great success with his fictionalized account of the Voodoo Murders. He's gotten enough money from the novel that he can pay off his German ancestors' debts and take possession of the family castle in what used to be Bavaria. He isn't in Schloss Ritter for very long when a group of frightened townspeople plead for his help, in his inherited role as Schattenjaeger. A little girl has been brutally murdered, and the villagers suspect a werewolf!
Gabriel begins his investigation, which leads him all around Munich, from the University to the Zoo, and eventually takes him to the door of a strange hunting club. He enlists the help of Grace, who flies from New Orleans to Schloss Ritter, and begins her _own_ research. She digs up historical information about a legendary Black Wolf, King Ludwig II, and an unperformed opera by Richard Wagner. Believe it or not, these things are very relevant to the case at hand.
The differences of style between The Beast Within and Phantasmagoria are many. The most obvious thing on first look is that instead of creating a computer-rendered environment that looks beautiful but completely unreal, the setting in The Beast Within is only slightly abstracted from photographic reality. The designers took lots of pictures in Munich and retouched the color, washing it out here, oversaturating it there, creating sort of a "vacation slide show" visual that almost certainly works better than the actual colors would.
Phantasmagoria is all played in very broad strokes. The colors are painfully bright in places, the acting is all caricature, even the camera direction is a frenzy of angle shifting. None of this is the case with The Beast Within. It has the feel of a high quality BBC production for the PBS Mystery show. Like it's predecessor, Sins of the Fathers, The Beast Within is a subtle, complicated story that takes a while to unravel. The game takes up 6 CD-ROMs, which is one less than Phantasmagoria, but it will take you four times as long to play.
Of course, this also means that this is a game for experienced players, and it's not for everyone. Some people may be taken aback at how much historical material and cultural information about Germany is included in the normal course of the game. There's a lengthy segment in a museum which includes close-ups of many of the exhibits. This is flat-out educational, and many people who buy this product because of the cool fangs on the box probably won't realize what they've gotten themselves into. I mean, how many adventure games do you know of that have the crisis action take place during an opera? The words "acquired taste" spring to mind...
But if you've played Sins of the Fathers, you probably already expect The Beast Within to be a
little... esoteric. It requires more thought than many adventure games, but also provides more payoff in terms of character, story, and even the visuals. This is, without question, one of the richest adventures I've ever played, and the people at Sierra should be encouraged so they'll do it again someday.
