Gabriel Knight 2-8: Basement Wolves

I finished! Hooray! No speed processing issues! And plus, I got actually lucky and hit the sweet spot on only the third try!

But first, Grace has to supervise the opera.

Waiting for the VIPs

I won't give away the plot (well, not much of it) but Grace and Gabriel are going to try the scheme that Wagner and King Ludwig II cooked up--in an effort to catch the same villain. The opera will play in the same theater, but, oopsies, it was bombed in World War II and isn't exactly the same size. 

Well, I never really understood how the scheme was supposed to work anyway.

So, we go about finding items and blocking doors, and setting everything up. Then we switch to Gabriel, whom Grace has stashed in the basement. Will he stay in the room she's locked him into? Gabriel? Hah!

But the opera starts:

An Aria

Now this is something you're not going to find in any other video game. Jane Jensen and her hubby, musician Robert Holmes, have cooked up bits of an opera that actually sounds Wagnerian. Great stuff!

Of course, Gabriel will get mixed up in it.

Spiffy costume!

And that gets us to the actual endgame, in the basement of the theater, with wolves.

The basement puzzle is very good, and actually quite easily solvable if you just take the time to look at the handy chart the game gives you:  

A very handy chart indeed

The enemy werewolf is in the basement along with Gabe, who is now a werewolf:

Nice looking wolfie

The job is to first cut off the escape paths of the enemy werewolf, and then trap him in the furnace room, where we will meet Grace and Kommissar Leber. If you let the enemy wolf escape, Leber shoots Gabe. If you trap the wolf in a room with you, you also will lose. The only option is a quick move that will end the game.

That move is notoriously difficult to time, but, again, it has nothing to do with computer speed processing issues. You can do it. I got seriously lucky and hit it on my third try. (And, you can just click through the filmed scenes to speed things up when you fail.) 

And then we get a nice scene with Gabe and Grace, looking forward to . . .

Touching, but I don't think Grace is going to get what she wants

. . . GK3 of course! But I'm not going to start that one immediately. I've got some other stuff to do first. I will get to it though. I might even try to patch GK1 and see if I can get that to work.

Rumor for years has had it that Jane Jensen is working on GK4, with ghosts (we've now had voodoo, werewolves and vampires, so ghosts seems like a good next step). Who knows when that ever might happen, but if it does I rather hope they do it in full motion video again this time, because I really did enjoy that, for all it's flaws, such as delayed transitions between scenes. Let's hope!

Because although some folks (mostly folks who don't like point and click adventures) don't like this game at all, I think it's one of the best. The acting is just fine for this genre--it gets the job done nicely.

Looks like I got 666 points out of 679. Yeah. I always miss a few.

Really enjoyed playing this again, especially now that it works. Actually, it works better now than it did when I played it years ago with discs, which were constantly freezing. 

So! Enjoy!