As someone who got into adventure gaming through the Myst series, Gabriel Knight was a wholly different and a wonderfully welcome experience. What Sins of the Fathers lacked in graphical beauty it more than made up for in immersiveness and gameplay, with an engaging plot set in a lively world that almost made me feel like I was really there in New Orleans. In hindsight of the terrible tragedy that befell that city in 2005, seeing the city through the lens of someone in 1993 leaves this game as something of a postcard from the colourful city as it was.
Puzzle solving is actually fun, and fits within the logical flow of the game and your character. Compared to my experience with Riven and the Journeyman Project games, where the puzzles (as beautiful as they were) were almost arbitrary in their solutions at times, the methodology to solving the puzzles makes a lot of sense if you put yourself more and more in the shoes of Gabriel. That takes a lot of the frustration out of this genre of gaming which has usually left me leaving many games with a bitter taste in my mouth.
I'm working my way through this game using the latest stable version of Boxer on Mac OS X (sadly, the latest 1.0 alphas choke on the video sequences, and don't mount the game's GOG disk image properly; installation was done through CrossOver Games, though the installers also work in Darwine), and I'd heartily recommend this title for any Mac user -- or any gamer for that matter -- looking for a true gem that's also a true value. For a game which delivers such a stellar experience, easily runs on older hardware on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux through DOSBox, and is only $5.99, how could you possibly lose?