The Beast Within

A modern-day gothic mystery, the six-disc set The Beast Within is the follow-up to 1994's Gabriel Knight CD-ROM opus, Sins of the Fathers. The Beast Within charts the adventures of novelist and werewolf killer Knight and his sidekick Grace Nakimura as they track a lupine murderer from rural Germany to Munich. Combining actors with digitized photographs and backdrops, Beast lets you interrogate the locals, picking your way through hundreds of scenes and taking an extended side trip into the life of mad king Ludwig II of Bavaria. Like a well-researched American Werewolf in Germany with passable acting and no major plot snafus, this interactive movie easily surpasses most of the click-and-watch live-action CD-ROMs out there. If you don't have the patience to search through all these clues, though, you won't have the stamina to find The Beast Within. A-