Most of the characters with whom you'll interact over the course of the story present the opportunity for you to analyze them upon a first meeting, and in these sequences you'll be prompted to look at several key characteristics, draw some conclusions from them and, as a result, be able to figure out what sort of person you're dealing with before you've even spoken to them in many cases. It's always made abundantly clear when you've found enough information to proceed - or not, for that matter - and, if you do find yourself getting stuck, a robust (and optional) hints system provides a nudge in the right direction without outright telling you what to do next.Īs with the adventure games of yore, though, there's plenty of optional stuff to discover, largely making use of Rector's keen perception and deductive mind. Each episode is clearly structured around one central mystery, the main objective being to uncover sufficient "data points" to analyze said mystery - be it person or artifact - and come to a conclusion. The story as a whole is a fascinating roller-coaster ride that, although being self-contained in a single game, nonetheless unfolds in an episodic manner similar to Cognition, a game Jensen worked on recently as story consultant. The relationship between Walker and Rector is pleasingly understated, leaving more than a few questions in the player's mind over the course of the adventure. From here, things inevitably get complicated with the arrival of American ex-soldier David Walker, whom Rector finds strangely familiar, and plenty of questions surrounding FITA's true motivations. Early in the game, his brilliant observational eye, deductive mind and photographic memory are recruited by the mysterious government organization FITA, and he's assigned to investigate a number of people and assess how closely the patterns of their lives recreate those of people from history. A renowned history expert and antiques assessor, Rector travels the world to assess the authenticity of seemingly priceless artifacts and determine whether or not they are what their owners or sellers say they are - a service for which he is paid so handsomely that money is, for him, no object whatsoever. Like Knight the bookseller and struggling author, Rector has a fairly mundane occupation, though unlike Knight (at least in his initial adventure) he's very successful at it. House in his depiction - a brilliant mind perpetually protected by a spiky, abrasive personality - but over time, as we, the audience, get to know him a little better, we see that there is a softer side to him, not to mention plenty of unresolved questions that Jensen has smartly left up to the player's own interpretation or open for exploration in future installments. While Knight was a womanizing, manipulative and overly curious individual who had a habit of getting himself into sticky situations - character traits that culminated in him realizing his destiny as the legendary Schattenjäger (Shadow Hunter) of the ancient German Ritter clan - Rector initially simply seems somewhat misanthropic. Sure, he's a bit of a jerk to the people around him, much as Knight was, but it's a different kind of jerkiness. Rector isn't just a clone of Knight, though. "What can you tell me about voodoo?" "Eh?" "No, never mind."
But with the launch of Moebius, he's got company: protagonist Malachi Rector is one of the most brilliantly flawed protagonists I've had the pleasure of controlling in quite some time. So beloved is Knight as a character to gamers of a certain age that Jensen is working on a beautiful-looking remake of his first adventure Sins of the Fathers to mark its 20th anniversary, in fact. Gabriel Knight is perhaps her most well-known and most enduring creation in this style. Jane Jensen's writing has many strengths, but one of the things she's best at is creating "likeable jerk" protagonists.
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