Featured post

Choose Your Own Adventure Retrospective: The Curse of Batterslea Hall by Richard Brightfield

By -
Image
The Curse of Batterslea Hall  was always my favourite CYOA book – it was also, for reasons I'll get into, one of the more unusual ones. It sparked my later love of adventure games and inspired some of my sketchy early attempts at creative writing (including a thinly veiled recreation on 90s 'edutainment' program Storybook Weaver ). It also deepened my devastation when I returned home one fateful school night to discover my mum had donated my extensive CYOA collection – precious gems tremblingly unearthed from the dusty Mills and Boon-straining shelves of my local Scope – back to charity. Around twenty years later, and I took the obvious next step for a mildly lockdown-crazed 90s kid squinting down the barrel of their thirties: sourced a copy inflated by just four times the original cover price through eBay. But was it worth it, and does it still hold up? Dust off your bootcut jeans and fire up your Walkman – it's adventurin' time, 90s* style... The premise Battersl...
Post a Comment

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers 20th Anniversary Edition Game Review: The Welcome Return of an Adventure Classic

By -

The most striking part of the 20th Anniversary Edition is the transformation into polished HD graphics. The moody, detailed environments – one of the game's greatest strengths – truly shine in the re-release, enabling Jane Jensen's vision of the New Orleans locales to be fully realised. Robert Holmes' remastered soundtrack is more stirring than ever. Additionally, the rerecorded voices are strong and don't jar with my recollections of the characters – a concern when I discovered the excellent original voice cast (including Tim Curry, Leah Remini and Mark Hamill) wouldn't be returning.

Otherwise, there have been slight refinements (such as a helpful new hint system) and additions (new puzzles and scenes), although nothing drastic. The game is, for the most part, faithful to the original, which can be seen as both a strength and a weakness.

Although not groundbreaking, the intriguing and well-paced storyline still holds its own (check out my review of the second game novelisation here), and the in-depth conversations that can be held with characters – even those who appear only briefly – constitute a valuable world-building feature sadly lacking in most games today.

A replay does, however, expose some of the more convoluted and unnatural puzzles (e.g. awkwardly luring a mime to a police officer to distract him while you use his radio), although this is far from unusual for the genre. Also, the fact that, while necessary (and delightfully snarky), Grace's supporting role doesn't really develop beyond this has become more disappointingly apparent to me over the years. Particularly frustratingly, I experienced a few noticeable bugs, including a quite devastating one that affected the audio, resulting in dialogue overlapping and becoming barely comprehensible if I tried to skip text once I'd finished reading it (although this may have since been addressed).

Nevertheless, the 20th Anniversary Edition is a more than welcome return to Jane Jensen's voodoo murder-mystery classic and hopefully not the last we've seen of Gabriel Knight.

Verdict: The welcome return of an adventure classic.

Score: ★★★½

If you liked this, please consider fuelling my next post by slinging a cup of coffee my way.
↓
Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Comments

Post a Comment

Did this post tickle your pickle? Let me know in the comments below.

Popular posts from this blog

Nana by Ai Yazawa Book Review: A Very Unconventional Love Story

By -
Image
⚠️  This review contains spoilers and refers to sensitive issues, including sexual assault and abuse . After 21 volumes and 80 chapters, I've finally come to the provisional* end of a manga series whose characters have taken on the familiarity of old friends. Endearing, relatable and, at times, hopelessly infuriating. Saying goodbye to them was accompanied by a quiet sense of loss I'm sure the two Nanas would implicitly understand. So what was it about Nana that made me stick with it for so long? Nana follows two young women who move to Tokyo in search of their dreams at key junctures in their lives. A frivolous airhead who attaches herself to men too readily and a fiercely independent punk rocker set on making it as a lead vocalist, on the surface, Nana K. (a.k.a. Hachi) and Nana O. share little more than a name and the same train journey. Nevertheless, they make an improbable connection.
Read more

'Your Trial Period is for Life': WhatCulture and the Culture of Artist Exploitation

By -
Image
I've just excised a venomous influence from my life. And, as a dedicated yet chronically suffering writer with "little or no money in my purse", I would like to take this opportunity to post a sobering caution to all those who live by the pen. I've been writing on topics that inspire me for a long time. I've rarely had the pleasure of being paid to do so; it's simply such a vital part of my being that it would be unthinkable not to. When it comes to writing for money, however, I've had to resign myself to the reality that my options are limited; I have successfully pursued careers in both journalism and copywriting, and have personally found both to be soul-sappingly dissatisfying. Reporting the facts and representing a client's brand left little room for my own voice and creativity. When I found an advert on TotalJobs for a fully paid content producer position for a successful entertainment website, therefore, I was intrigued. WhatCulture were...
Read more

The Joys of Josei

By -
Image
Manga and anime character tropes are a lot like gravity in that they can be said to follow a kind of unwritten law ; the silver-haired pretty-boy, the bespectacled brain, the plucky but naive hero. These archetypes stay in circulation because, for the most part, they work. But for fans drawn to the medium for its idiosyncrasy, these cookie cutter characters, though comforting, can get kinda tedious. Sadly, I know people who have given up on manga and anime altogether out of sheer exhaustion at these recurring clichés -- and Japanese anime fans are getting just as fed up as everyone else.
Read more