A true mystery horror adventure classic (although of varying quality)
First off, this wasn't a charming comical adventure about pirates, or time traveling, like family friendly Lucas Arts' or Sierra's adventure games. This was a fully developed movie-like mystery thriller with horror elements that had a feel of a late 80-ies, early 90-ies movie.
The creator of this soon-to-be hit & miss franchise is one of the most passionate adventure game authors, Jane Jensen, a veteran of many Sierra's Quest adventure series. This game was her baptism of fire, because for the first time she had to create an original game with it's own world instead of a sequel.
So what are the hits, and what are the misses?
Let's start with the story. Where would be a good place to start an interesting mystery? New Orleans off course (later, you get a glimpse of German village and African wilderness). This being a horror adventure and having this intriguing city as a background, voodoo is bound to come up...
Gabriel Knight (talking about "a name with a hint") is just a regular citizen of this coastal melting pot, who owns and runs a bookstore, has a young smart female employee Grace Nakimura (she takes care of most of the business) and pays his taxes. If only he didn't have recurring nightmares lately everything would be just dandy. When a string of voodoo serial killings start in the city, Gabe gets interested in the occult aspect of it. His friend is an officer on the case so snooping can start. The story soon gets more complex and we get to see some old and new cults, hidden family histories and myths that might be real. Storytelling is a definite hit. Sure ... it has a few plot holes here and there, and not all actions or answers make sense, and you can occasionally see a twist from a mile away, but overall it's pretty good stuff...
As for the gameplay...
Instead of clicking on the commands, here you click on the icons when you want to interact with objects. Snooping still boils down to going places, talking to everyone you see and clicking on everything you see (or you don't see). Hit and miss, depending on your view of this "thoroughness" as a chore or a fun.
Design is excellent and you are drawn into the locations right away. They breathe with atmosphere. Colors are warm and screens are quite detailed. It resembles a lot to Broken Mirror game in this respect.
Characters are the usual bunch, but the voice work is quite good, except Gabe's. They got Tim Carry (who had played a bunch of cult movie roles) to do Gabe and it went... not terribly well. While Tim does give our hero a real life feel, his accent is unlikable. Tim being British went for that slow southern movie voice and it's not easy on the ears...
The rest of them (like Mark "Skywalker" Hamil) do a descent job.
Puzzles (and that's what makes an adventure game, right?) are sometimes obvious (go to a crime scene), tedious (pixel-hunting, get object A to get object B to get ... to get object H), sometimes ludicrous (returning multiple times to a location for something to happen, talking to a character who needs to do something ridiculous for you to progress) or movie-like (what would a hero do if this was a movie?) and sometimes very interesting (decipher a voodoo-coded message) but mostly forgettable. Style and story are simply more interesting here.
There are some 300 points to collect for obsessive collectors and two endings depending on a fairly obvious choice near the end...
All in all it's a classic but with flaws, some missed opportunities and good characters with some unfortunate voice work.
For old-school gamers, new gamers that are willing to try to relieve an interesting part of the adventure-gaming history or people who liked the second (FMV) game in the series and want to see how it all began...
Jane hit the mark with the sequel, but it all went backwards again with the last part of Gabriel Knight trilogy...
Maybe we'll get to see more sequels or remakes of Gabe's adventures, but let the truth be known: This is the origin story of Gabriel Knight and his trustee smart sidekick Grace Nakimura.