For those of you who don't know of AGD Interactive, they're definitely worth checking out. They're best known for revamping old Sierra games, updating the old "Type the command before the monster eats you" interface to "Point and click VGA glory" interface (like they used in King's Quest 5). This makes the games both new and nostalgic all at the same time. I myself have played King's Quest 1 and 2 and they're pretty fantastic. Check them out.
But we're here to talk about King's Quest 3. Now, I never played any of the original games until King's Quest 5 came along, so I really have nothing to compare it to. I've been told by many that King's Quest 3 is often considered both a favourite and the most difficult of all the games. I can at the very least agree with the second point.
King's Quest III begins with young Gwydion, a 17 year old slave forced to work under the oppressive rule of a wizard named Mannanan (oh so very hard to spell). Having worked for Mannanan all his life, Gwydion longs to escape and see the world. Then he discovers that Mannanan has some sinister plans for him, plans mostly involving death on his 18th birthday. This is just enough motivation to get Gwydion to find a way to defeat the wizard and to discover the truth of his own heritage along the way. It's a classic and simple story, and one that's fairly well told.
 |
| Feeding the chickens is better than emptying the chamber pot...seriously, you do it |
First thing's first: this is a classic Sierra game. The designer's love for the franchise is evident throughout. There are illogical and insane inventory puzzles, a tongue in cheek narrator, and about five billion ways to die. And it's great. There are also some nice inside jokes for old Sierra fans strewn throughout the game which was fun to discover.
All in all, it's a solid game. The background and enviroments are gorgeous to look at especially considering they're VGA graphics. The original music is haunting and beautiful to listen to. And while Gwydion's voice actor unfortunately sounds kind of apathetic and not exactly what you picture in the hero of a game ("Oh, Mannanan's going to kill me?...I guess that sucks), the rest of the cast do an okay job with the supporting characters.
That was quick, wasn't it? Well, there is a reason for that. This game more than anything makes me want to discuss timed puzzles. I. Hate. Timed. Puzzles. And the first HALF of this game? One big timed sequence. While the wizard is still alive and well and more than willing to turn you into dust for even just being in his study, it's pretty difficult to leave the wizard's house and wander into town to collect the various items you need to brew up spells and potions.
Then every once in a while, Mannanan will run off on a journey or take a nap and you will have fifteen minutes, PRECISELY fifteen minutes until he comes back. In that time you can run down the mountainside (hopefully without falling), and then hightail it back to the wizard's house before he returns/wakes up. If you have any items on you that he considers a threat, he will destroy you so you'll also have to hide all useful items under your bed while he's hanging around the house.
 |
| You haven't been plotting my demise while I was napping, have you? |
After every journey/nap he takes, he's hungry and demands to be fed. And there are only 3 food items in the kitchen. All told, you have between 45-60 minutes to figure out how to defeat him or else he'll get bored of you and do the lightning thing. And seeing as it's a non-linear Sierra game, it takes about 45-60 minutes sometimes just to figure out what you're doing.
To the designer's credit, the timer in the game will begin to grow green everytime the wizard takes a journey. When you have about 3 minutes left, it will go yellow, and then red with three big exclamation points to give you an indication on how much time you have. So at the very least I wasn't guessing how much time had passed. The other helpful bit of design was to have all of those useful magical items glow blue in your inventory so that you knew what to hide, which made things a lot less frustrating.
Still, that timer just kept stressing me out. I actually consulted a Let's Play to try and get a hint as to what to do next just so I could defeat the wizard as fast as possible so I didn't have to worry about the timer anymore. Sure, I developed a sort of save system so that I could cheat the timer a bit, but it speaks a lot about the game itself that I'm trying to rush through it instead of enjoying it.
I only mention this because after I finally defeated the wizard, suddenly the game was enjoyable again. Sure, I was dying left, right and centre because I mixed the wrong ingredients for a potion or I walked right into a yetti's cave (oh yeah, there's another yetti), and sometimes I would scream at the screen in Sierra frustration but there wasn't this big clock hanging overhead making me feel like my mistakes were costing me anything. All the puzzles of the game are actually pretty fun. I enjoyed figuring out how to get different ingredients and mixing the various potions together.
 |
| Dammit, where's a pie when I need one?! |
I think part of it is the fact that this is a Sierra style game. It's incredibly non-linear, and there is NEVER any certainty that what you're doing at one moment is the next quest you should be completing. There are constantly moments when you realize that the random button you saw thirty minutes before should have been picked up and you have to backtrack to get it. Add a timer to all of that and the stress increases by fifty percent. Now, I am aware that the designers are only being faithful to the original game and I guess that I can agree that at the very least the timer serves a purpose for the story, but it got pretty annoying constantly having to reload in order to play an entire sequence again to try and get it right.
I don't know what it is about me and timers, I just don't think they belong in adventure games. It seems like those elements are just thrown in there in an attempt to make things more difficult. A message for all game designers: there are ways to make things more challenging without putting a time limit on your game. Occasionally, very occasionally, there might be a timed puzzle that doesn't make me grit my teeth in frustration, but those are few and far between. There's no purpose to them, and they hinder more than they help a game.
However don't let this be an indication of the game overall. Again, these are my own personal issues with timers, and King's Quest III kind of provided the perfect excuse to rant about them. Really...if you love the old Sierra games or if you're looking for a good free downloadable game, I'd highly recommend this one as well as the two others. It'll bring back a lot of memories. A lot of pie throwing memories.
No comments:
Post a Comment