The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight® Mystery

This game is probably the greatest mix of FMV and Point and Click Adventure. It's so very 90's, and I love it

Je ne m'y attendais pas mais j'ai absolument adoré le jeu. L'ayant connu à cause de sa traduction française absurde je m'attendais à rire du jeu tout le temps, mais la version originale en anglais est excellente. Les silences à la suite des dialogues sont tout de même comique. Certaines énigmes sont un peu tirées par les cheveux mais le jeu est globalement intuitif et agréable.

This is peak FMV point and click gaming.

Excelente história, envolvente, e impressionante pela época em que foi feito

Finally finished my first play through that I startted more than 30 years ago. I have a distinct memory of talking my mom into buying me this game when I was a kid and our crappy 90s PC could barely handle it and I was clearly too stupid to progress, and now here I am and i feel... well not much. GK2 is somehow one of the most impressive point and click games I've ever played while also being the most dated and frustrating. Peak era FMV games are really unique in that they briefly, in their time, felt like a generational leap into the future of gaming. yet those same games also feel so trapped in their time and aging so badly. GK2 felt so long and bloated in places. Grace's research chapters drag. One is literally just spending an hour at a museum reading exhibit cards. Travel gets repetitive af. The annoying obtuse thinking issue of just having to click everything on everything until something works is an annoyance compounded by frustrating timed game over segments in late game. The final puzzle is downright maddening. I can go on and on with reasons why you shouldn't play it, least of all it's weird disconnect from the characters, tone, and world of Sins of the Fathers. Yet I do recommend it because it is so impressive for its time. A big cool story and irl cast just getting goofy with it. So much more camp than I remember, like a low budget Twin Peaks. The big score and Gabriel Knight musical motif is so freaking good. It's just cool this game exists, warts and all. Really glad to finally add some closure to my childhood.

Its a little campy in terms of effects, but it was the 90s. I am a HUGE fan of the series though: HIGHLY RECCOMEND. PS: the first one scared the CRAP out of 12 year old me in the 90s.

Nice

i adore 90s FMV games & this one is fantastic! it's clear that so much care went into creating this game from the graphics, backgrounds, and assets to the dialogue and lore/story. i played most of the first gabriel knight game before starting this one (sins of the fathers) but i did not complete it due to some technical issues. i would generally recommend playing it first or maybe watching a playthrough because it was definitely helpful to have the background context for gabriel & grace's dynamic and some lore stuff like why gabriel ended up in germany and what it means that gabriel is a schattenjäger, as well as some fun in-jokes and references to characters/situations in the first game. but i do think the beast within would work fine if you hadn't played the previous game, and the mystery itself does not rely upon knowledge learned in the previous game. without getting into spoiler territory, the core mystery is really satisfying to unravel, the characters are well-acted and entertaining, and the split protagonist situation adds so much good flavor and drama. puzzle-wise, it can be quite challenging and mildly frustrating at times, i had to rely on an online hint guide to figure out what i was missing in several parts of the game, but that's to be expected from point & click mysteries from this era. the only part of the game where i felt actually frustrated was [spoiler] during the chapter where you are first exploring neuschwanstein as grace and have to listen to the audio tapes for every room in the castle as well as tapes describing all the artwork, because it's extremely easy to miss something and not realize it, so i got stuck for a while relistening to a lot of the same long audio files over and over again. several of the rooms also require you to click the audio tape button multiple times for additional lore, but there's no indicator for which rooms have multiple audio files. there are also some difficult-to-notice room transitions in a couple other areas during exploration with grace. thankfully her journal helped a lot with this problem as you can kind of tell when there's information missing on a specific topic when there's empty space on a page, so if you pay attention to where you got information on a topic, you can kind of retrace your steps and double check everything else in that room/area. [/spoiler] i would recommend it to anyone who enjoys games of this era and doesnt mind a little clunkiness, or to someone who's curious about FMV games, loves a good mystery, & doesn't mind potentially needing to rely on a guide or hints to get through some of the tougher sections. it takes some patience but it's very worth it!

What a wonderful game. Those FMV games from the early-mid 90s are something quite unique, but this is the best one of the all IMO - maybe together with a couple of the Tex Murphy games. Now imagine this, you are actually playing a game that utilizes old European architecture, culture and music (Wagner) as part of its story. It's such a breath of fresh air, considering how games nowadays seem to ignore the rich European cultural history, to instead focus on some generic diverse futuristic or post-apocalyptic vision. This game represents better times IMO. Next Gen graphics aren't everything... If you have a slight interest in retro games, THIS is the one to play IMO.

i love hawhaw