text by Brandon Parker

★★★☆

“THE BEST MOVIE I EVER PLAYED.”

Once, in a junior high science class, the teacher asked the class what the scientific name for a wolf was. A girl next to me raised her hand. “Cannabis?” she asked. No, that wasn’t quite it. It was canis lupis of course. I knew because I played The Beast Within. You can learn things playing these games.



With each of the Gabriel Knight games you get practically a whole god damned tour and history lesson. The first game took place in New Orleans and involved voodoo. The third one is in a small French village and is about Da Vinci Code type stuff. The Beast Within is the second game in the series, it takes place in Germany. The first time I played it, I remember I didn’t care too much for the Bavarian history lesson on Mad King Ludwig II; I wanted to get back to hunting werewolves. Now, as a more mature and less bloodthirsty individual, I’ve come to appreciate it more. I even bought a biography on Ludwig so I could separate fact from the game’s fiction and educate myself further on the matter. Sure enough, I didn’t see anything in there that said he wasn’t a werewolf.

The Beast Within was the part of the series that was unable to get out in time before the big Full-Motion-Video Plague of the mid-nineties hit. I’m sure you remember it. That was where they filmed real people dressed up for the game, the idea being that it would be like controlling a movie. Of course, like anything in life, they always took the cheapest, most uncreative and stufftiest route available. The Best Within is the sole survivor of this pandemic that swept the nineties. To this day it still sits upon its lonely throne, formed from the bones of Sewer Shark, Night Trap and many other Sega-CD titles. Shining like a beacon of hope in the darkness, Gabriel Knight 2 is a symbol to inspire others to put the effort and thought towards a quality experience, rather than the dark and lazy path of cheapness and poor production values.

I still prefer the pixelated painting look of the older Sierra games though. In this one you’re walking around on top of postcards. It’s still better than those generic and lifeless pre-rendered and 3d backgrounds in modern adventure games. And since it’s an FMV game, with real people, I think it’s better at pulling off the horror atmosphere of the series than the cartoons in the other games. It’s never really scary, but I don’t find hardly any horror movies scary or very interesting though so what do I know. This one is interesting though, and while not scary it can be somewhat nerve-wracking at a few points. The story is more the focus here anyway.

Gabriel wanders around Munich looking for a lead in the mutilation killings, while his research assistant Grace reads books on Ludwig in libraries and goes to museums. Good idea, leaving the street work to the men. Though by the end, all the Ludwig and Richard Wagner stuff ends up tying into the modern day case. Jane Jensen, the writer of the Gabriel Knight games, also worked on King’s Quest 6 which happened to have the best writing out of all of them. So it seems she’s a good writer. She’s like Grace, researching the important stuff, trying to educate us, while we’re wandering around like a jackass looking for some hotspot to click on.



Let me tell you my favorite part of the game, since you aren’t going to play it anyway. Gabriel infiltrates a hunting club that he’s pretty sure has the murderer among its members. You go off with the club on a hunting trip at one of their lodges out in the middle of some Bavarian forest. So you’re isolated out there with a bunch of suspects. It’s then that you finally realize, “Oh stuff. One of these guys is a child eating wolf, better do something about that.” Because you’re pretty sure at that point the suspect knows you’re on to him and is going to use this opportunity to probably kill you, or something. I mean who knows what happens; you’ll have to play the game to see.

There’s also a part where you have to pray to a spirit for help to advance in the game so if you like Earthbound you might want to check this one out.

The acting in this game is pretty good. The only real bad acting is at the beginning when the villagers come to talk you into taking the case. I can’t tell if the guy who lost his daughter is so broken up he’s turned into some sort of vegetable man, like that guy in A Better Tomorrow 2, of if he’s just a terrible hecking actor, like that guy in A Better Tomorrow 2.

Dean Erickson, who plays Gabriel Knight here, is good, a real classy bastard. Especially since his only previous acting job was in a couple episodes of Frasier as a waiter. So it’s sort of depressing to find out he hasn’t acted since The Beast Within and went back to his original career as a real estate agent. Jane Jensen once said she’d want him back for Gabriel if it were a game that used “real people” again. Well now that we’re in some fancy HD-ADD era with photo-realistic textures and advanced motion capturing and whatnot I think it’s time to bring Dean back. If you’re ever given the chance to do another Gabriel Knight game, do this one thing for me Jane. I’m sure he’d be up for it.

Tim Curry is the guy who voices Gabriel in the other games, I’m not sure why but he’s usually the fan favorite. To me he just sounds less like a southern jackass struggling to adapt to his new role of modern day inquisitor, and more like convicted sex offender recently paroled and on the hunt for fresh victims. The two roles may sound similar Tim, but they aren’t, there’s subtle differences that I don’t think you have the range for. We need Dean for the job.

Dean Erickson for GK4.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2022/11/06/the-beast-within-a-gabriel-knight-mystery-gabriel-knight-2-the-beast-within-1995-pc-review/

While the first Gabriel Knight wasn’t a massive success for Sierra, it did receive a lot of critical praise from both critics and adventure game fans alike, so a sequel was greenlit and put into development almost immediately, and a year and a half after the release of the first game, The Beast Within was released.

When the original Gabriel Knight was released, video games were making the transition from the 3 and a 1/2 inch floppy discs that were limited to 1.44 megabytes per disc to CDs which had up to 700 megabytes per disc, and while the original Gabriel Knight did take advantage of the new format by adding voice acting and having cutscenes with more animation, it was still clearly made for floppy discs in mind.

Released in the same year as the first Gabriel Knight, Myst and The 7th Guest were released to both critical and financial success, with Myst becoming the highest selling game at the time and became the reason to own a CD drive, along with several other games around the same time also receiving moderate success, and it really showed off the advantages that the extra space that CDs allowed by adding high quality music and sounds along with videos, and the team behind The Beast Within took notice and decided to use Full Motion Video for the game. Jane Jensen returns to pen the story for it’s sequel, which helps it be consistent in tone with the previous game.

The result of this choice lead to the game using a whopping 6 CDs, which was massive at the time. I know that doesn’t sound as impressive more than 25 years after it’s release considering that file sizes have ballooned so much that the average indie game made up by a small team could easily match it or even surpass it in file size, sometimes by accident even, but it was expensive at the time to print a game on that many discs, and a company wouldn’t normally do that unless the studio knew it was going to be a big hit, or was at least hoping that it was a big hit, or the studio making the game was being incredibly ambitious, requiring all of that extra space.

Considering that The Beast Within was being developed along with and eventually released the same year as other titles developed with a serious tone in mind such as ‘Shivers’, ‘Roberta William’s Phantasmagoria’, and the spin-off of ‘Police Quest’ titled ‘Police Quest: S.W.A.T.’, Sierra was clearly banking on their games being higher quality and more ambitious than a lot of the other games at the time to get their games flying off of shelves, with all of these tiles requiring at least two CDs to store all of their content.

Set one year after the events of the first game, Gabriel Knight has written a best-selling book loosely based on the events in the first game, titled “Voodoo Murders”. Since then, Gabriel has since moved into his late uncle’s castle, Schloss Ritter, located in Rittersberg, Germany, and has taken on the title of Schattenjager, or Shadow Hunter in English, passed down to him from his uncle. Since the events of the first game, Gabriel has been struggling to recreate the success of his previous book, with very little in the way of progress.

One night, during one of his many unsuccessful writing sessions, a group of people from the nearby town arrives at Schloss Ritter in the middle of the night, looking for the Schattenjager with a story that the daughter of one of the townsfolk being attacked and murdered by what they claim is a werewolf. After a moment of reluctance, Gabriel agrees to find the alleged werewolf for them and prevent the killing of more people.

His investigations soon lead him to a shadowy hunting club and infiltrate their ranks by leaving an impression on the person in charge of the club, Baron Von Glower, and while the other members are suspicious of them, Glower vouches for Gabriel, and both of them soon find a connection between them.

In the year that Gabriel has been living in Schloss Ritter, Grace Nakimura, Gabriel’s assistant, has been taking care of his rare book store back in New Orleans. Grace finds this frustrating, since the only communication that she has been getting from Gabriel is through letters in the mail saying that he’s making great progress with his new book and she shouldn’t worry about him and should just focus on taking care of the book store, leaving Grace frustrated that instead of being able to use her abilities as a researcher like she did in the first game by helping Gabriel investigate the Voodoo Murders, which inevitably got him success with his first book, she is relegated to taking care of a dusty old book shop that has been getting an increase in visitors in the form of new fans from Gabriel’s recently successful book.

After an encounter with a particularly annoying fan, Grace decides to temporarily close the book store to visit Gabriel and see if Gabriel is actually making as much progress as his letters say he does and goes to meet up with Gabriel in his recently inherited castle, soon finding that Gabriel had already started his investigation elsewhere, leaving Grace with the Gerde Hull, carer of the Castle that Gabriel inherited from his uncle, which Gerde had previously assisted with and potential love interest, which thankfully goes nowhere. Soon Grace is helping Gabriel with his investigation by researching werewolves as Gabriel is investigating the hunting club, with both of them communicating via mail throughout most of the game.

And just like the first game, ‘The Beast Within’ uses real world locations, history, and people for it’s story. And just like last time, this review/retrospective is going a little too long for me to talk about it, so I’ll have to make another post about it if there’s enough interest for it.

Much like the first game, this got a novelization by Jane Jenson, released in the box with the game, and expands on a lot of the details of the story. It’s hard to get a physical copy of it these days, and if you know where to look by sailing the high seas, you could probably easily track down a copy of it yourself and read it if the game’s plot has peaked your interest.

This time around instead of just playing as Gabriel like in the first game, Grace is now a fully playable character alongside Gabriel, with whole chapters dedicated to just playing as just her. While Gabriel is getting his hands dirty by getting involved with all the major characters involved with the events in the surrounding story and getting close to them, going to any location that seems linked to said characters and events, and generally getting his hands dirty, Grace is at the opposite end of the scale, with her investigating the history of werewolves and the real world history tied to what Gabriel is getting involved with.

And despite being separated for most of the game, Gabriel and Grace still keep in contact by sending each other letters to keep up with each other and to inform the other person of their own investigations. Remember when you actually had to send someone a physical letter via snail mail? Actually, a lot of people reading this would be young enough that they might think snail mail is referring to sending e-mail over a 56k modem, which is also now archaic. Oh no, my back hurts.

For most of the The Beast Within, it’s your typical point-and-click adventure game. You click something and the character moves across the screen to interact with the something that you clicked. It even comes with some helpful ways to guide you through the game if you’re having problems, such as a feature on the map screen that highlights locations that still have things to do at them. But the game is not without some problems.

Because the game is now using real world images instead of pixel art, some stuff naturally blends together where the pixel art might have been used to properly highlight something, through making something distinct or the focus of the room, where as staring at an image of a real world location might not trigger the same response since it might come cross as white noise, even if it isn’t intended. It’s never terrible since everything pretty much makes logical sense, but it can still happen to some degree.

There are also times when the game shows a short video clip to help make transitioning from one location to another smoother, but there have been a few times where I clicked to skip what I thought was a video that I had seen a thousand times before only to find out later through items either appearing, disappearing, or being combined in my inventory, or when something suddenly becomes interactive when it wasn’t before that I realized that I had clicked through an entirely new clip simply because the first moments of it were exactly the same as the other clip. It would have been helpful if the video transition was from a different angrily or at least zoomed in or out so that it would have been easier to notice that the game was signalling that I had trigger something new in the game.

In one of the sections of the game focused on Grace when she is going on a tour of multiple locations, the Neuschwanstein Castle, the Herrenchiemsee Museum, and the Wagner Museum in Chapter 4, you have to go through every single room, look at every single painting, listen to every single tour tape, and read every single plaque under every single painting, costume, and letter sent to make any progress.

As much as I loved this virtual tour of real world events and getting to see real world locations that I’m probably never going to see myself, it can become quite tedious, especially if you’ve missed something and you have absolutely no idea what it was, causing you to have to go back and go through everything again to make sure that you didn’t miss something from earlier. Thank god there was the hint button on the map screen highlighting places with stuff that you still had to do at that specific location, otherwise I would have pulled my hair out wondering exactly what I had to do.

There are also a few minor problems throughout the game, such as the audio quality seeming to change from scene to scene. Sometimes it will sound more compressed and there were a few clipping issues. There will be a few people out there who are into audio who would probably notice, but most people would probably be fine with it.

Like I mentioned in the introduction, the developers of ‘The Beast Within’ decided to jump on the Full Motion Video trend that had become big in the 90s instead of keeping the pixel art of the first game. But unlike most of the other FMV games that were coming out in the mid-90s that were using the lice action videos as a gimmick to try and get their games to fly off shelves through trend chasing, Sierra was actually trying to take advantage of FMV as a new medium to it’s fullest potential, and the effort really shone through, placing ‘The Beast Within’ above it’s competition.

Like most of the ambitious Full Motion Video games of the time, ‘The Beast Within’ uses blue screen to place their actors digitally onto sets that didn’t exist, but unlike other FMV games, a lot of the locations in this game actually existed, it’s just that actually filming in a lot of these locations or building sets would have been prohibitively expensive, and ‘The Beast Within’ was already becoming one of the more expensive video games of it’s time period.

But the one thing that they did do was sent out a few of the developers to the real world locations that were used in this game and took hundreds of images and carefully stitched them together in such a way to make the face feel like it actually took place in the real world locations seen in the game. And credit to the developers, the actually did a pretty solid job of representing the real world locations with their limited budget and time schedule.

The game features real world castles such as “Neuschwanstein Castle”, Burg Rabenstein”, and “Starnberger See”, along with several other real world locations such as the “Hellabrunn Zoo”, the “Richard Wagner Foundation” in Bayreuth, and the “Rathaus-Glockenspiel” and “Marienplat 21” in Marienplatz.

Although the games writer Jane Jensen admits that it was pretty limiting on what the characters could do, since it no longer could get away with the more heightened reality of the first game that allowed the creation of new locations where none existed.

After seeing some of the locations in YouTube videos, in images on Google, or through street view in Google Earth, all of the locations look very close to the real world counterparts, but some smudging of reality to make it work in a video game of course. If you’re a fan of the game and want a vacation, maybe you can take the “Gabriel Knight Tour” if you have the time.

This time around the cast is completely different from the first game, with none of the high-profile actors returning at all, probably due to the previously mentioned increased cost of moving from voice acting to actually filming the equivalent of several hours of live action video. That’s not to say that the actors in this game were bad by any means, but it was clear that actually hiring someone like Tim Curry would have blown the budget of the game several times over, so the developers chose authenticity over star power.

Instead of Tim as the titular Gabriel Knight, Gabriel is now played by Dean Erickson, whose biggest acting credit is this game unfortunately enough. The only other notable role that he ever got is a re-occurring bit part as a waiter for a few seasons on the TV show Fraiser. The difference between Dean and Tim is pretty obvious, as Dean doesn’t even try to mimic Tim’s performance from the original game, instead of going with a smarmy New Orleans accent Dean instead going with his native Californian accent.

Dean did state in an interview with “Adventure Classic Gaming”‘ that he didn’t even try to mimic Tim in any way since, in his own words, there was no way that he could even come close to doing an impression of Tim, so he played the character down to Earth. ‘The Beast Within’ was Dean’s last acting gig and while he did want to pursue acting at the time, he has since move onto other things and seems to have no resentment with the fact that his acting career fell through.

Although I do think that Dean did the best job that he could with this game, the fact that Gabriel now sounds like a confused surfer dude who just found out that werewolves existed throughout the whole game is amusing to me, and watching him try to pronounce German words in his natural accent just adds some unintentional comedy to some of the scenes. Also, “Surfer Dudes Vs German Werewolves” is my idea, do not steal.

This time around Grace is now appropriately played by an Asian Actress, Joanne Takahasi. Unlike Dean, I couldn’t find much about Joanne other than her appearing in a few minor roles, such as a doctor in episode 22 of season 4 of ‘Babylon 5’, which is her biggest role outside of this game. Looking her up on IMDB, the rest of her filmography seems to be dubious in quality from the looks it. Unfortunately Joanne doesn’t seem to act alongside a lot of other characters, although that’s most because of the way the story is told, but I still find it a tad disappointing. Her performance as Grace is solid and she does a pretty good job of helping the character make the transition from the art of the first game to the live action of the second game.

She hasn’t done any interviews about this game and has disappeared from the public eye, which is likely what she is probably enjoying the quiet life.

The other character who is important to the games story is Baron Friedrich Von Glower, played by Peter J. Lucas, and watching him and Dean play off each other as Glower and Gabriel as the character’s relationship developers is the highlight of the game’s story.

Peter’s biggest role outside of this game is Piotrek Kroll, from the David Lynch film ‘Inland Empire’. He also played a Russian reporter from ‘Independence Day’ and a Russian buyer from “Cradle 2 The Grave”, so he seems to have been pigeonholed as that guy you hire if you need someone to play a Russian basically. He’s mostly had bit parts throughout his career, but he still seems to be acting on and off as of writing this. He also had done some musical training along with acting and has appeared on a reality show about dancing, so he’s clearly had a well rounded career on stage and on screen

I know that the acting and special effects can be seen as pretty cheesy these days, especially since the overall quality of games has gone up in the 25 years since this game has come out and the budgets of the big budget studio games has skyrocketed, but the cutscenes in this game still hold up fairly well, clearly showing off the ambition that the developers have, regardless of the videos being small, interlaced, and having a low framerate.

‘The Beast Within’ doesn’t have the agonizing nails on a chalkboard first-year level hammed up acting or amateurish screenwriting like 95% of the games coming out at the same time. that would have been laughed out a 10-year olds school play.

I know that comes across as pretty backhanded, and I admit that it kind of is, but “The Beast Within” stands out from the rest of the FMV games of the time and is actually enjoyable the entire way through.

The few FMV games that still come out have been relegated to the indie scene and are a rarity in the modern era. Despite having internet speeds that now allow games like ‘The Beast Within’ to be downloaded or Blu-Ray discs to contain all of that footage, it’s still much easier to make assets instead of video due to the ease it can be reused throughout a game.

And while the technology to actually film them and show them in a game has significantly improved, none of them have had the budget to replicate something like ‘The Beast Within’, leaving it as something that probably won’t even be replicated ever again, leaving it feeling quite unique unless some rich millionaire somewhere has a specific interest in niche FMV games and money to burn.

While ‘The Beast Within’ doesn’t really retain much from the first game besides the characters, like the general look, the actors, and even tone in a lot of areas, going in a different direction with the FMV, it’s still a fantastic follow up to ‘Sins of the Fathers’. I’m pretty sure in the 25+ years since it’s first release, fans have found much to appreciate about it, and since it’s initial release it has become a beloved cult classic and I would wholly recommend it to any adventure game fans.