User Reviews

SPOILERS: I'm always surprised at how many people gave this game good reviews. It was awful. The script and voice acting alone ruined it. Gabriel and Grace are the most unlikeable characters in the game. You almost pray for their deaths. And worst of all, there are less vampires in this game than there were werewolves in The Beast Within.

The lack of real vampires was incredibly disappointing. If you're expecting some kind of Anne Rice style vampire story, forget it. This game's story has very little to do with vampires. You won't even see any till about the very end and even then, you won't get to fight them.

The story has radical, and pretty much blasphemous, views of Christianity. I'm amazed it got off the drawing board. I'm not even Christian and I found it offensive. Mostly, the story centers around a search for The Holy Grail and buried treasure. The kidnapping of a royal baby, which should have been the focus, really gets pushed aside. There is no sense of urgency for Gabriel to find the baby. In fact, he almost never asks anyone about the baby after the first few time blocks.

The graphics are pretty bad. The characters move about at a snail's pace even on the best of systems. They are chunky and outdated. And it's hard to go from the FMV of The Beast Within to this horrible game engine for Blood of the Sacred.

The relationship between Gabriel and Grace takes an awful turn, too. I really don't know why it was so horribly rushed, but they do sleep together. And it's not fun. Gabriel spends most of the game telling his best friend Mosely how he thinks of Grace as more of a sister and he doesn't think she's the one for him. And he seems really grossed out that they slept together. But he's so unlikeable throughout the game, that you almost don't even care at that point. His dialogue was the worst in the game. And he was constantly making stupid sexual innuendos at anything female the entire game. By the end of the game, Grace leaves him with what appears to be a Dear John letter. I guess she was as fed up with him as most of the players were.

I found the story to be annoying and boring. I was expecting to play a story of a royal baby who was kidnapped by vampires. And I was expecting to get to see and fight vampires, maybe even have Gabriel or Grace turn into one. But no. Instead, the story focused on the author's warped vision of Christianity. What a shame. Here they had the elements for a great adventure, and instead we got this.

For me, the only interesting parts of the game were actually at the very end. We do get a few action style puzzles at the end. But it wasn't worth suffering through the entire game to get to them.

I can't really recommend this game. I had gotten it back when it came out, years ago, and I hated the game engine so much that I shelved it for years. I only recently dusted it off to see what I'd been missing. And now, I'm very sorry that I did. My favorite characters were ruined. I hope there will be a fourth game just to redeem the series. And I hope they get it right next time. It would be a terrible shame to end the series with this installment.

"Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned" is the third installment of the Gabriel Knight games, a series of adventure games about the roguish writer/paranormal detective, Gabriel Knight. Gabriel and his companion, Grace, have been asked by Prince James of Albany to investigate a series of mysterious attacks by so-called "night visitors." When the son of Prince James is kidnapped, Gabriel pursues the night visitors to Rennes le Château, where he begins piecing together a mystery relating to the Holy Grail.

Despite the marketing, this game is not about vampires. Vampires have a token appearance in the game, but never command center stage, as did the voodoo hounfor in "Sins of the Fathers" or the werewolves in "The Beast Within." Gabriel and Grace make no attempt to uncover the true nature of vampires, or to research lore on vampires. Although the vampires do murder three people during the course of the game, their victims are chosen at random and have nothing to do with the main plot.

A large part of the charm of the first two Gabriel Knight installments was in the relationships which Gabriel formed with the villains. Through these relationships, the player could not help but sympathize with the villain, and thus the villain was transformed into more of a human and less of a monster. However, in "Blood of the Sacred," Gabriel's only interaction with the villain is through a single, cheesy interview, which does nothing to endear the villain to the player.

The roles that Gabriel and Grace play in this mystery are fairly futile. Gabriel spends his time snooping into the identities of members of a treasure-hunter tour group staying at his hotel, but what he uncovers amounts to nothing more than a red herring. Grace spends her time researching the mystery of Rennes le Château, but all her research is rendered superfluous by the presence of a perplexing ally who has known the answer to this mystery for centuries.

The actions of this perplexing ally and his polar opposite --- the vampire leader --- are insupportable. The ally leaves hints about the mystery of Rennes le Château in broad daylight and expects Grace (and not the other treasure hunters from the tour group) to find them. However, he could have revealed the mystery to Grace in its entirety on day 1, instead of putting the kidnapped child at risk for an additional 48 hours. And in the end, he simply tells Grace the mystery in its entirety anyway.

Meanwhile, the vampire leader fails to achieve the goals of centuries of scheming, because he chooses to refrain from action for two days after the kidnapping of the child. The only reason given for his decision to delay action is that he wants to savor his victory.

The game would have been much better had it been purely focused on the Holy Grail. The kidnapping and vampires should have been omitted, replaced with a race against the Vatican to uncover the mystery of Rennes le Château. Since Gabriel is portrayed more than once as reluctantly Catholic, this conflict would have had many opportunities for character development.

All in all, the game was a disappointing installment in the series, despite an improved interface and the return of Tim Curry as the voice of Gabriel Knight.

For Gabriel Knight 3, Jane Jensen takes essentially many of the same ideas concerning Christ that Dan Brown used in his book 'The Da Vinci Code' several years later and in my opinion she weaves a more exciting tale around the mysteries. Certainly Gabriel Knight makes for a more engaging hero than know-all Robert Langdon. Aside from the fact that they are both set in France there is not much similarity between the two except in the basic ideas that caused a stir in the 1980's. There has obviously been a good deal of research done to create the game that set Jane Jensen's work apart from the majority of adventure games.

The graphics are 3D, but are not very impressive looking back on them today. However if you are prepared to overlook that then you should find the environment more dynamic than in Gabriel's previous adventures. Many of the locations are based on real-life places in and around the village of Rennes-le-Château and it is interesting to be able to explore them as they really are.

The puzzles can be complex and tough, but they are mostly logical and don't usually involve too much frustration. Some are more interesting than others, for example the lengths Gabriel goes to in order to rent a bike is ridiculous, and the end segment is too much based on timing, which was extremely frustrating on my old, slow computer resulting in some stages taking 20+ attempts to complete (on my new computer it is much easier). It is worth mentioning that the game takes place over three days and each of those is divided into multiple time segments that require certain puzzles to be completed before moving onto the next stage. Many puzzles are optional, but gain you points so that at the end you can see whether you missed anything. This gives Gabriel Knight 3 more re-playability than it might otherwise have had.

The dialogue is witty and believable, with quality voice acting. Tim Curry is perfect for the voice of Gabriel Knight, who gets most of the best lines. Charity James is also excellent as Grace Nakimura, though it is a mystery why Grace no longer looks or sounds particularly Asian. David Thomas makes an even better Mosley than Mark Hamill in GK1. You play as both Gabriel and Grace depending on the chapter just as in GK2, again Grace gets the less exciting tasks in general.

The music is atmospheric and dynamic, composed by David Henry and Robert Holmes (the husband of Jane Jensen) though it can get a little repetitive, especially in the hotel where a good deal of the story unfolds.

Overall, I have replayed this game far more than the others in the series, partly I found the plot intrigued me more than the others and partly because I found the interface more accessible than the previous two.