Remakes of beloved games generally prompt kudos, and few games are more beloved than Jane Jensen’s Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, a brooding 1993 PC mystery that moved the ball way down the maturity field, story-wise.
The game was classic point-and-click adventuring — nothing new mechanically speaking, but actors like Tim Curry and Mark Hamill did superb, memorable voice work (in my memory, anyway). And with Jane Jensen’s able, steady hand on the narrative rudder, it was one of those games that elicited lots of “I had no idea games could be this” while crossing demographic lines: the girl I was dating at the time — up to that point not a gamer — wound up playing and finishing Sins of the Fathers before I did.
Jane Jensen just confirmed the happy news on Twitter: a fresh-minted version of Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers is in the offing for Windows, OS X, iOS and Android, and it’ll be here sometime next year.
Jensen let Spike TV’s Geoff Keighley post the first image of Gabe’s lovely New Orleans-based bookstore. It looks mighty fine contrasted with this old DOS screen of the same location.
In an interview at Game Trailers, Jensen reveals the game has been officially licensed from Activision (it’s not crowd-funded, in other words). It’ll essentially be the same game we played decades ago (“We are adding in a few new things here and there, but I wanted the original to be fully represented,” says Jensen) and — brace for the one potential downer — all the voice work had to be re-recorded, and thus the voice actors recast.
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