This is the third and final game in the Gabriel Knight trilogy, and as is the case with so many third instalments, it pales in comparison to its predecessors. The ambition is certainly there, with a sprawling story, talented vocal cast, and what was (for its time) impressive graphics, but it’s also overly complicated, difficult to navigate, and somewhat anti-climactic. And those graphics? Have dated horribly. Just horribly.
The pixel art of the first game and even the full-motion videos of the second are still watchable, even beautiful, but this – from the balloon-like limbs of the characters to the garish textures of rock and grass…there’s no beating around the bush, it’s hideous.
Perhaps the toll it took on designer/creator Jane Jensen is clear in the lack of supplementary material she would have otherwise prepared for the game’s release. Sins of the Fathers has a 2014 remake, a comic book introduction, and a novelization. The Beast Within has a novelization. Blood of the Sacred has only a slim comic to give players a grasp of the story, and the fact Jensen never got around to putting this story on the printed page (which would have done wonders for clarifying some of the plot’s murkier developments) suggests she never had the time or inclination to do so.
The game was released in full 3D, but by all accounts the development team had little experience with the format, leading to a number of bugs and omissions that put a huge strain on the schedule and release date. As a result, its greatest claim to fame is sadly one of the most infamous Moon Logic Puzzles of all time, though it should be renowned for the audacity of its storyline, which delves into the patrilineal line of Jesus Christ and the possibility he fathered a child, a full six years before The Da Vinci Code had tourists swarming historical sites and ticking off the Catholic Church in search of evidence for its similar hypothesis.
But you can bet the promotional material made the most of the fact it was released in 1999, with a poster that's possibly one of the greatest and most evocative images ever used for a computer game:
I mean, wow. That's ingenious. And check out the trailer:
You can see how badly the graphics have dated, but the music, the editing, the sequencing – they’re still fantastic, and at its best the game captures that thrill of an ancient treasure hunt beset with supernatural dangers and grand conspiracies...
The opening prologue to the adventure is found in a short comic illustrated by Ron Spears, which you can read here. Gabriel and Grace are summoned to the estate of Prince James, Stewart of Albany, who is in need of the Schattenjäger's help.
After a boring weekend of high society living, Prince James finally gets to the point of their visit: the Stewarts are descended from the Stuart dynasty, and have been plagued for centuries by a strange malady that is best described as a form of anemia. But there’s clearly something more sinister at work, as revealed by a photograph of his newborn son, who has tiny bitemarks on his neck.
Prince James now wants Gabriel’s help in protecting his son Charles from what the family call “the Night Visitors”. Locked doors and guard dogs are no hindrance to them – so perhaps the Schattenjäger can help where more mundane means could not.
Yet that same night, a shrouded figure steals through the window and kidnaps the baby. Gabriel leaps after it, chasing a black sedan on his motorbike through Paris to a train station. He manages to leap on board the train as it leaves, but during the search of its carriages, an assailant knocks him over the head. And so the game begins...
The introductory animation in the game itself has Gabriel waking up, his head splitting after a strange dream involving a baby, blood, vines, a courtyard and (strangest of all) a unicorn. He staggers out onto the platform and is informed by an attendant that he’s in Rennes-le-Château. Yeah, THAT Rennes-le-Château. The only clues he’s got is that two men with a trunk were seen departing the train, and the words “san greal”, which he heard just before passing out.
It’s a compelling beginning, but even with the comic book to help you out, it’s a little bewildering to understand what’s expected of you in the gameplay that follows. This would not necessarily be a bad thing – after all Sins of the Father gave the player nothing to go on but the fact Gabriel was researching local murders for his new book – but here it’s more of a challenge to grasp what one should actually do, especially since the baby’s disappearance is treated with an astonishing lack of urgency.
You’re given control when Gabriel wakes up in a hotel room, having recovered from his head injury and ready to start the investigation. As he quickly discovers, the place is filled with members of a treasure-hunting tour group led by French beauty Madeleine Buthane. According to her: "I guide my clients through the facts of the mystery and show them the important locations. From there they can draw their own conclusions."
The mystery being the famous legend of a buried treasure in Rennes-le-Château, not to mention all manner of secrets involving the Knights Templar, 19th century village curate Bérenger Saunière, the Priory of Sion, the architecture of the Church of Saint Mary Magdalene, the Merovingian dynasty, the Freemasons, and more conspiracy theories than you can shake a stick at.
Although exposition is given, the game does require a certain familiarity with all this stuff – not just a basic understanding of the Holy Grail and its significance, but also the previous games and Gabriel’s calling as a Schattenjäger. If you sat a newcomer down with this game, they’d find it utterly incomprehensible.
***
As with The Beast Within, gameplay shifts between Gabriel and Grace, with the former investigating their fellow guests at the hotel, and the latter tackling the historical mystery. Unlike the previous game there is more overlap between their two stories, and more often than not they’re relegated alternating hours in the day (in which they regularly interact) rather than a full twelve hours each.
Jensen certainly makes the most of the old “group of eccentric individuals in a confined location” trope, with the tour group containing personalities such as chauvinist Australian John Wilkes, stuffy British aristocrat Lady Howard, enigmatic Middle-Easterner Emilio Baza, and shifty Italian Vittorio Buchelli.
She even finds a way of bringing back Gabriel’s old pal Mosely, not seen since the first game and apparently on vacation in the south of France (not that Gabriel believes this for a moment).
While Gabriel tries to figure out what brought them all to the village and whether they know anything about the kidnapped baby, Grace delves into the centuries-old mystery of Rennes la Chateau, which involves deciphering clues left in the local church’s architecture, the geography of the French countryside, and the cryptic notes that appear everywhere, presumably left for her by some mysterious guide.
One note in particular is incredibly long, and it wasn’t until I started writing this review that I discovered it’s actually based on a real manuscript. Le Serpente Rouge becomes a turning-point in Grace’s treasure hunt, and Jensen deserves kudos for figuring out a viable “answer” to the twelve-stanza poem, one that involves meridian lines, Egyptian mythology, mathematics, the paintings of Nicolas Poussin, Christian Gnosticism, the zodiac, French history and astronomy.
Obvious care has gone into researching the game’s subject matter, though an unavoidable bit of gameplay involves downloading all of Grace’s accumulated information onto her portable computer and translating into onto a map of the area in order to find various key locations where more clues might be located. It’s unforgivably difficult, time-consuming, frustrating, and most importantly – NOT FUN.
The computer itself is called SIDNEY and is described as a database of information on cases and facts pertinent to a Schattenjäger’s work (though oddly enough, typing in words or names relevant to Gabriel’s last two cases brings up absolutely nothing). I watched a lot of this game via a Let’s Play video on YouTube, and had to agree when one of the saved games was titled “Sidney is the true vampire.”
***
Foremost among the voice cast is Tim Curry who returns as Gabriel, though Gabriel himself ends up regressing from where he was at the end of the second game. Maybe I’m misremembering, but he comes across as even more lewd and sexist than he was in Sins of the Fathers. Not helping is that Grace is constantly insisting he’s changed (he hasn’t) while Mosley does the courtship dance of the passive-aggressive Nice Guy around her.
It’s pretty awful actually, and it’s a shame the Gabriel/Grace dynamic (not to mention poor Mosely) had to be reduced to this. In the past they all had a mutual banter that was laced with funny barbs and mutual concern; here they’re just annoyed and frustrated with each other. Which is weird, because Gabriel and Grace actually sleep together in this one, which just goes to show that a flirty partnership is always more to watch fun than an uncommunicative relationship.
It trips up in another area as well, and that’s the lead villain. I’ve always appreciated the old school approach Jensen has with her assorted bad guys, for in Gabriel Knight’s world werewolves and vampires and voodoo cults are pure evil; none of this Sympathy for the Devil nonsense that’s so prevalent these days. (Okay, maybe there’s a little, but not so much that it warps the ethical boundaries of the story).
But past games had Malia Gedde and Friedrich von Glower as antagonists, each compelling characters in their own right, who formed complex and fascinating relationships with Gabriel. Blood of the Sacred has… Excelsior Montreaux. I had to look up the name because I honestly couldn’t remember it, and I’m not even entirely sure what he does in this story. Until the climactic finish he mainly just hangs out in his vineyard estate.
Both Malia and Friedrich taught Gabriel something crucial about himself. But Montreaux? He and Gabriel interact only three times over the course of the gameplay, and he’s just not interesting.
In broader terms, the exposition isn’t particularly elegant, as most of the important stuff isn’t relayed through ancient tomes or interviews with colourful characters, but by browsing through the dreaded SIDNEY. Yes, you have to utilize a computer within a computer in order to get the information you need. Despite being surrounded by the French countryside, a lot of time is spent prying around the hotel, and the conclusion is pretty anti-climactic, with Grace stuck at one end of a radio while Gabriel moves through increasingly-deadly puzzles, only for her to pull the plug on their relationship and leave before he returns.
The game (and seven years worth of adventures together) ends with the screwed up goodbye note that she’s written him, a break-up that remains unresolved to this day. To say it’s unsatisfying is an understatement.
***
But so I can end on a positive note, I have to point out that some sequences are unquestionably very good. At one stage Gabriel has a dream of vampires levitating into his hotel room through the open window in order to attack Grace, and the following day John Wilkes is reported missing. Gabriel enters his room and sees that the hotel window is wide open – just like the one in his dream. There’s no musical cue, no shocked reaction, just the open window, and it’s terrifying.
At another point, Grace is exploring a seemingly-empty chateau after hearing a baby’s cry, one which sporadically persists as she breaks into the house and begins to explore the rooms. Again, it’s spine-chillingly effective. There’s also a repeated motif of the unicorn, which represents (or so I’m assuming) the purity and holiness of Christ’s bloodline: appearing first in the opening sequence, in which it’s frightened by lightning, then at the halfway point when its blood is drunk by the vampires, and finally at the end of the credits, where it leaps over the courtyard wall to freedom. Jane Jenson keeps its meaning enigmatic, but it’s an evocative image.
That’s the other thing Jensen is good at: knowing when to spell things out and when to keep things ambiguous, as when Gabriel interviews Montreaux, who makes brief mention of his wife. Later, when Grace breaks into the winery she happens across a half-crazed old woman ranting about bloodlines. Are the unseen wife and the old women one and the same? We never find out, and the unanswered question still haunts me.
Miscellaneous Observations:
The accuracy in rendering Rennes-le-Château is fairly impressive, as one can discover if they visit Google Earth. Places like the Tour Magdala and the Church of Saint Mary Magdalene are fairly true to life, especially when they become important to the gameplay.
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| The Church of Saint Mary Magdalene in the game |
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| The Church of Saint Mary Magdalene in reality |
We finally learn Mosely’s Christian name, and it’s Franklin. Even more humorously, there’s a cameo appearance from his gold blazer (worn throughout Sins of the Fathers) that appears in his hotel room.
The continuity of the series is strong, with mentions of Grandma Knight, Gerde, Professor Barclay, and another rendition of The Saints Go Marching In at a local pub.
Lest you were in doubt that this game took place in the nineties, there’s a dial-up noise every time Grace logs onto SIDNEY.
One nice touch is that when Gabriel and Grace need to dig for clues, a short sequence depicts them going back to their vehicle in order to fetch a shovel, rather than the two of them just pulling a life-sized shovel out of their pockets.
This attention to detail is also apparent when you notice Grace changes her clothes from day-to-day – you know, like an actual woman would.
That Moon Logic Puzzle I mentioned earlier? It involves Gabriel setting a trap for a stray cat in order to acquire hair so he can create a fake moustache that’s held on with maple syrup so he can impersonate Mosely and rent a moped under his name. The icing on top is that Mosely doesn’t even have a moustache!
And on a final note, the Schattenjägers’s origins, briefly hinted at by Uncle Wolfgang all the way back in Sins of the Fathers, are finally revealed. It’s got absolutely nothing to do with gameplay, and it’s the same backstory that was afforded to Longinus in that old nineties show Roar starring Heath Ledger, but hey – at least now we know. One of Gabriel’s ancestors was the centurion guard that pierced the body of Christ with his spear, and so became the first “Shadow Hunter” after begging forgiveness for his crime. And now you know!
***
Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned doesn’t get talked about as much as its predecessors, and clearly didn’t make as much of an impact on the fanbase. It was also the final game I completed before my interest in gaming came to an end. I grew up with pixelated artwork, and never really warmed to the more advanced graphics that came with the end of the nineties. There was never another Gabriel Knight game, it was the very last adventure game that Sierra produced, and the company was disestablished only five years later.
So this game stands as the end of an era: for me, for Gabriel Knight, and for Sierra itself.
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