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Studio: |
Sierra
On-Line |
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Designer(s): |
Roberta
Williams |
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Part of series: |
Kingʼs
Quest |
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Release: |
November 9, 1990 |
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Main credits: |
Lead Programmer: Chris Iden |
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Useful links: |
Playthrough: Part 1 (62 mins.) |
Part 2 (65 mins.) |
Part 3 (68 mins.) |
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Few games were more
revolutionary in the history of Sierra On-Line than King’s Quest V — perhaps King’s
Quest I... maybe King’s Quest IV...
could be King’s Quest III... well,
you get the drift: whatever huge changes the world at large commandeered from
Sierra, in those years you could always count on Roberta Williams to step
forward as their flagwoman. (Well, then again, she was the boss’ wife, after all.) That said, «revolutionary» does
not necessarily mean «best», be it politics, music, or video games, and there
is hardly a better example of «revolutionary done wrong» than this game,
which has always elicited very mixed reactions from me. As the Nineties brought
along further advances in processing power, graphic resolutions, and digital
sound technologies, Sierra did its best to adapt: with increasing competition
from younger, bolder players on the scene (LucasArts, in particular, had
firmly established itself as a strong force to be reckoned with), Ken
Williams was clearly determined to remain on the cutting edge. King’s Quest V was the first in what
could be called the «third generation» of Sierra games, clearly distinguished
from the previous one by three important changes: (a) new and improved VGA
graphics, with background images now typically painted and scanned in; (b)
new and improved sound technologies, finally allowing for full-on voice
acting to replace (or complement) text boxes; and, most importantly, (c)
complete removal of the text parser in favor of a new point-and-click
interface. The latter decision was clearly influenced by the competition
(e.g. such LucasArts games as Loom,
which had completely dropped the verbal aspects of earlier games like Maniac Mansion and introduced the
quintessential point-and-click experience) — and, in my humble opinion, was
the single most devastating choice in the history of plot-based video games,
but more on that below. Along with all these massive changes
came a good story — King Graham was brought back from the near-dead for such
a monumental occasion, and sent in pursuit of the evil wizard Mordack who had
just kidnapped his entire family and
his castle, for no apparent reason. The narrative and dialog, still mainly
controlled by Roberta Williams, were rather old-fashioned for 1990, but
tolerable. The changes to the graphic system and the interface, fresh and
dazzling, were also received warmly — but when two years later, in 1992, the
floppy disc edition was followed by the fully voiced CD-ROM version, critical
reaction was a bit more reserved, largely due to the lack of professional
actors involved (all the voicing was done by Sierra staff). As time went by
and what was once novel became the norm, the attitude towards King’s Quest V cooled down significantly,
to the extent that today it is generally remembered as one of the weakest
games in the series, or, at the very least, a serious misstep caught in
between two masterpieces (IV and VI). How much of that negativity
reflects historical justice, and how much constitutes revisionist injustice?
Read on to find out. |
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Content evaluation |
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King’s Quest V was the last game in the series for which Roberta Williams was
credited as sole designer — meaning that she actually wrote all the plot and
dialog, unlike later games, where she acted more like a mentor while the
actual job was done by other writers (Jane Jensen, Lorelei Shannon). This
signifies another old-fashioned, traditionally-stylized experience, a story
of noble rescue and a plotline peppered with randomly written characters from
all over the world of European folklore... and, in theory at least, there is
nothing wrong with that. One significant feature of
the game’s plot is that it is very
tightly tied to the previous games — King’s
Quest IV may have set the ball rolling with its plot directly continuing
from the mild cliffhanger at the end of III,
but other than a few moments in the intro, the game still functioned
perfectly well as a stand-alone title. King’s
Quest V, marking the triumphant return of King Graham as the active
protagonist, seems seriously preoccupied with its own mythology, and could
not be easily recommended to players who had not already subscribed to the
Roberta Williams fanclub years ago. At the very beginning of the game, we see
a mysterious figure appearing out of thin air and apparently «pocketing»
Graham’s castle along with everyone who lives in it (the everyone in
question, surprisingly, only including Graham’s wife, son, and daughter — the
servants must have all gotten bonus tickets to Disneyland). Eventually, with
the aid of his friends, King Graham is able to get to the bottom of this and
crack the identity of the cloaked kidnapper, but that identity will still be
a bit of a puzzle to anyone who had not played King’s Quest III, and the effect will not be quite the same. The initial setting is, in fact, very
similar to that of King’s Quest IV.
Tragedy strikes (Graham suffers a heart attack — Graham’s family is
kidnapped), an unexpected magical assistant materializes out of nowhere
(Fairy Genesta — Cedric the Owl) and lures the protagonist out to a distant
land (Tamir — Serenia) by some or other means of insta-travel (teleportation
— magic dust). What expects you next is a lot of wandering through the brave
new world, sorting out various people’s problems and getting important gifts,
until you finally encounter the archvillain (Lolotte — Mordack) and use their
own strengths against them (no spoilers, sorry!). In other words, Roberta did
not exactly jump sky high to bring us a fresh new plot — but she did come up
with a few fresh twists on old storylines, which is more than enough for a King’s Quest game. Or maybe not quite enough, particularly for old fans of the series: too many
elements seem rather lazily rehashed from past games — evil snake blocking
your path from King’s Quest II,
endless deadly desert from King’s Quest
III, abominable snowman from King’s
Quest III again, and many other encounters which just substitute old
characters with new while leaving the old tropes intact. If ever, for some
reason, you decide to binge your way through all the series, multiple waves
of déjà vu are practically guaranteed. The only principal
difference is the introduction of a sidekick — Cedric the Owl, who
accompanies you throughout the game for absolutely no reason other than whine
and annoy you to no end (and it gets even worse if you play the voiced
version, see below for more on that). Some of Roberta’s synthetic elements
feel rather poorly integrated into the atmosphere of the game — namely, the
desert sequence which, for some reason, features elements from Arabian Nights; this is at least
something new, but seeing the oh-so-British King Graham suddenly transform
into Aladdin for a few moments is, to put it mildly, rather inconsistent with
the overall tone of King’s Quest,
though probably not catastrophic. On the positive side, the game’s
conclusion, with an epic magic battle of wits between the hero and the
villain, adds tension and drama — for the first time in the series, the final
challenge is not a single action which you can leisurely type in on your
keyboard, but an actual multi-move timed test of intelligence which actually feels like a challenge. Later King’s Quest games would try to follow
the same tension-building climactic rush in their finale, but this is one
aspect on which King’s Quest V has
them all beat. Unfortunately, just one. |
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As Sierra’s first proper
point-and-click game, King’s Quest V
is not terribly imaginative. You can Look at stuff, Use / Take stuff, and
Talk to people — which essentially means that most solutions to most puzzles
involve taking detachable object X and using it on undetachable object /
person Y, as they would in fact do in most point-and-click games from then
on. The actual actions needing to be performed are fairly simple and logical;
the main difficulty lies in scoping out the rather vast (for 1990) land of
Serenia, since you typically need to go to one end of the world in order to
pick up an object there that you need to exchange for another object in the
opposite end of the world, only to return with it to the former end of the
world etc. etc. — prepare yourself for quite a bit of backtracking, and never
forget to save. In fact, never forget to
save in multiple slots, because King’s Quest V suffers from a
particularly bad case of dead-end-itis. Leave Serenia for your journey across
the mountains without even a single necessary object, and you’re a goner.
Accidentally waste a necessary object, and you’ll never see paradise. And, in
perhaps the game’s most maligned episode, blink once to miss a crucial event
(just a cat chasing a mouse), and half an hour later you are dead without
even properly understanding what it is you did wrong in the first place.
Today, gamers will mercilessly label this as piss-poor game design; back in
1990, they would be more likely to just accept these things as tough
challenges and keep a stiff upper lip. Who cares if there is no way to know
that you absolutely need that
custard pie for your mountain crossing? The important thing is that you can get that custard pie before you
cross that mountain, and whatever you can
get, you should get. Such is the
logic of classic adventure games — and what exactly makes it less logical
than any absurd actions you must take in your favorite arcade games, or the
endlessly unrealistic deeds you do in your RPGs? Anyway, while a small
handful of puzzles here does border on the utterly absurd (particularly the
one that involves getting rid of the yeti), the majority are straightforward,
and your biggest difficulties will be getting stuck in unwinnable situations
because you tried to complete the challenges in the wrong order. (Hint: do
the desert challenge before trying to
whoop the evil forest witch’s ass, or frustration will follow you to the end
of your days). My biggest
difficulties, the way I remember them, were getting through all the darn
mazes — first, trying to figure out all the right beelines between water
sources in the desert, and second, trying to find my way in the geometrically
confusing dungeons underneath Mordack’s castle, which almost look like an
early predecessor to the disorienting jumbles of corridors in early Elder Scrolls games (not exactly Daggerfall level of confusion, but as
close as you could expect of an adventure game from 1990). Still, while much of the
retro criticism of the game prefers to focus on bad memories of the yeti
puzzle or of Graham dying in prison because he failed to befriend his
potential savior, I prefer to fondly remember the end of the game and that
climactic battle of wits with Mordack — that
was a fun and innovative bit of design, and it yielded a very satisfactory
ending to the game. |
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For some reason, Serenia,
the place where you are likely to spend about 2/3 of your playing time, fails
to fully recapture the charm and horror of King’s Quest IV’s Tamir — even despite the obvious technical
superiority of the graphics. Perhaps it is due to the land actually being
quite small: one screen for an
entire town, about 10 more for all the adjoining outskirts and forests, and a
huge, endless, largely procedurally generated desert which literally dwarfs
the country. Like Tamir and everything else, Serenia is also divided into
relatively «safe» and «dangerous» zones (this time, with a literal warning
sign that marks the danger zone), but the lack of transitional areas is
rather befuddling — the layout of Tamir was more convincing, with the land
gradually getting darker and darker from west to east. Here, it’s more like,
Grandpa Dwarf takes three steps out of his cuddly home and runs into danger
of being froggified by the evil witch. All in all, the game seems
to have been designed rather pragmatically: it is much easier to get lost in
Mordack’s boring dungeon maze than in the land of Serenia, where each screen
is tightly and functionally loaded (and the game itself, by the way, is
fairly short — a complete playthrough runs for about 3 hours), so there is
fairly little joy in wandering around it from end to end. The diversity in
atmosphere between the safe and danger zones is nice, and the danger zone
itself (the evil forest) is beautifully designed, with horrific-looking
plants and red eyes blinking at you from random spots on the screen, but
everything is just too small to leave a lasting impression... and that
includes the mountain crossing and
Queen Icebella’s palace and the
little beach spot and the island
with the harpies, anyway, you get the drift. Arguably the single most
atmospheric space in the game is Mordack’s castle — the beautifully eerie
Gothic designs, the gloomy ambient music, and the constant feeling of danger
just behind your back combine to make that last part of the game into one of
the scariest segments in any King’s
Quest game, period: earlier games lacked the graphical and sonic assets
to achieve that effect, and later games, even such a masterpiece as King’s Quest VI, would feel more
cuddly and family-friendly even in their darkest moments. Taken together with
the already mentioned epic battle at the end, this turns the last half-hour
of the game into an experience that can unsettle and impress the player even
today. Too bad you have to slog through everything else in order to get
around to it — but for those with patience, it’s well worth it. |
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Technical features |
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King’s Quest V marked the arrival of a new graphic era for Sierra: with
256-color VGA, and the ability to actually paint the backdrops by hand and
then scan them in digitally, the game differed from its predecessors like
night and day. To celebrate these technical achievements, Sierra hired an
actual graphic artist and illustrator with previous experience in TV
animation, Andy Hoyos, and he made sure that the backdrops and cut scenes,
for the first time ever, began to look like actual pictures rather than pixel-based
digital art. Naturally, the resolutions (320x200 native) were still way below
anything properly acceptable for a well-detailed picture, but if you do not
concentrate on making out facial features of the characters and instead
concentrate on the broad brush strokes, there is plenty to like, and some of
the backdrops are even impressively impressionistic. There are occasional
touches of vivid imagination in the artwork — for instance, in the shapes of
wild plants in the evil forest, sometimes looking like giant mutated
agglomerations of bear traps; in the mish-mashed quasi-abstract bunches of
crystals within the Crystal Cave; certainly in the designs of Mordack’s
castle interiors, where traditional Gothic shapes mingle with an odd
fascination for claw, tooth, and bone (the entire game, I might add, feels
rather «toothy» and «bony»). That said, an artist’s wild idiosyncratic
rampage King’s Quest V is not: this is still the domain of
Roberta Williams, and Roberta Williams is fairly conservative when it comes
to such established genres as fairy tales, fantasy, or horror. So do not
expect anything particularly out of the ordinary — Loom or Grim Fandango
this is not. In terms of sprites and
animations, the game apparently introduced special techniques based on
rotoscoping live actors, borrowing the mechanics from Disney — though it
probably takes a very trained eye
in the modern world to detect that, given the crippling limitations of
then-current graphic resolution. Still, there is no denying that all character
sprites are now both much more detailed and
feature a much larger and a much smoother set of motion poses, looking less
and less like matchboxes on legs and more and more like figures of real
people when seen through the eyes of somebody with real low visual acuity. A
nice touch is that, while talking, most of the characters receive special
enhanced close-ups, with well-animated facial movements; these were further
enhanced in the «talkie» version of the game and smoothly synchronized with
the audio (again, a truly big achievement for the early 1990s). The only
regrettable thing is that there should have been many more cut-scene
presentations — the most realistic and pretty shots of the game are the ones
where the camera zooms in on the characters, which, unfortunately, happens
only several times during the play. |
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The original version of the
game came on floppy discs and predictably contained no talking — only a
musical soundtrack and some SFX effects. The soundtrack, credited to Sierra’s
veteran Mark Seibert and newcomer Ken Allen, is decent, but nothing
particularly special, a clear step down from the complexity and energy levels
of King’s Quest IV: much of it is
just built on fairly generic functional motives (generic gypsy music for the
gypsy scene, generic Eastern dance music for the Eastern scenes, generic
gloom-and-doom soundscape for the Mordack Castle scenes, etc.). The sound
effect work, however, is quite commendable: for most of the game, you are
accompanied with lively noises (chirping birds in pretty forests, scary birds
in evil forests, people hustling and bustling in busy towns, cold winds
blowing in the mountains, waves crashing on the seashore, wicked brews
bubbling in Mordack’s laboratory, etc.): such a dazzling variety was never to
be found in even the most show-off-ey of Sierra’s second-generation games. Yet most importantly, of
course, in 1992 King’s Quest V came
out on CD-ROM and became Sierra’s first fully voiced title — though this is
precisely where the idea of «revolutionary does not always equal good» comes
out in full. With voice acting in video games still being a very fresh thing,
Sierra’s management was either unable or not willing to call for professional
voice actors, meaning that all the voicing had to be done by the staff
members themselves: thus, artist Andy Hoyos tries his best to voice the evil
wizard Mordack, composer Mark Seibert voices the briefly appearing Genie, and
Roberta Williams herself voices... the pip-squeaky Rat. New addition Josh
Mandel, who would soon be playing a significant role in Sierra’s design and
writing history, does a decent enough job with King Graham (rather wooden,
but then Graham himself has always been a fairly wooden character). However, the biggest
slip-up was committed with the character of Cedric the Owl, voiced by
programmer Richard Aronson — for some reason, everybody thought it was a good
idea to make him deliver all the lines in a shrill «hooting» falsetto, and
this, coupled with Cedric’s annoying and totally unnecessary presence in the
first place, quickly turned poor Cedric into arguably the single most hated
Sierra character of all time; if you are a veteran, too, you most certainly
remember the immortal line "Graham, watch
out! A POISONOUS snake!" like it were only yesterday. Then
again, sometimes gruesomely inept easily translates into hilariously
unforgettable, and at least Sierra’s masterminds were sufficiently aware of
this to allow poor Cedric to be properly grilled and lambasted, as an inside
joke, in multiple future games (from Al Lowe’s Freddy Pharkas, where you can find the poor guy being picked
apart by vultures, to Space Quest IV,
where you can shoot him down as a bonus prize in the Astro Chicken arcade). Ironically, my own biggest
personal gripe with the soundtrack is that, this being Sierra’s first voiced
title and all, there is still no way to get the voice acting and the text boxes to appear at the
same time — which may be annoying even for native English speakers, since the
sound quality of the acting is relatively lo-fi, noisy, and hard to
understand whenever somebody sets a natural filter on their voice, be it
Roberta’s pip-squeak or Aronson’s helium falsetto. Later games would correct
that mistake and always let you listen and read at the same time (apart from
the FMV titles in the catalog), but here it’s either pick the floppy disc
version with the text, or the CD version with speech (which are also slightly
different in terms of available lines of dialogs and descriptions, though not
by much), and, apparently, the fan community was not able or not willing to
try and splice both with some fan-made patch (not that I blame them —
submitting yourself to hours upon hours of testing the compatibility limits
of Cedric’s dialog is quite an exotic torture). Still, an achievement is an
achievement, and it does not always have to be carried out in perfect style.
For a little cherry on top, King’s
Quest V even features the first ever fully instrumentated and voiced bit
of singing, in the form of a little
melancholy folk ballad performed by the Weeping Willow (played by Debbie
Seibert, surprisingly a much better singer than her husband Mark is an actor
— then again, if I am not mistaken, she does have a BA in vocal performance).
It is short and nothing special either melodically or lyrically, but at least
I would definitely take it over Sierra’s later attempts at power balladry
such as ‘Girl In The Tower’. |
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Interface And here we are — Sierra’s
most drastic change ever, a death sentence for the text parser and transition
to the point-and-click interface: as I have always insisted and will continue
to insist until my dying day, the single worst decision in adventure game
history, and worthy at least of the Top 5 worst decisions in gaming history,
period. An opinion with which few gamers will agree — in 1990, the change was
welcomed by fans and critics alike, and endless retro reviews of the games
always keep pointing out how wonderful it was for the simple and economic
point-and-click interface to replace the clumsy and nearly always broken text
parser which had caused so much frustration. Yet instead of going the
difficult, but promising and intriguing route — fixing the parser, so that, in time, it would become more and
more intelligent and give the player more and more creative freedom over
one’s choices — Sierra went the easy way and eliminated those choices
altogether, limiting the player to the oh-so-wonderful option of searching
out hotspots on the screen and poking them with the mouse cursor, which went
in a whoppin’ FOUR different shapes: Walk, Look, Take/Use, and Talk. Amazing! I distinctly remember those
days of the first point-and-click Sierra games, and certainly remember how
disgusted I was and how this pretty much turned me off from adventure gaming
for quite a long time — the only things that saved the experience for me were
the continued and ever-improving degrees of storytelling and atmospheric
immersion. It does not help, either, that King
Quest V’s interface is so defiantly simplistic: at least some of the
better future titles from Sierra tried to introduce slightly more variety in
the amount of performable actions (like the «smell» and «taste» icons of Space Quest IV, or the tasteless, but
strangely comforting «zipper» icon in Larry
games, or a full set of physical actions in thee first Gabriel Knight), but here all you can do is helplessly grab at
things, and so many things aren’t even grabbable! Not to mention the lack of
true hotspots — miss an important object by a millimeter and you will get the
impression that it might not be important at all, when in fact it is. Apparently, re-orienting
the SCI engine towards a point-and-click interface first time around was such
a demanding affair that the result is extremely sparse — absolutely nothing
other than the above-mentioned icons in the menu, plus the usual
save-restore-restart-quit options. The only addition to the gameplay is the
laconic «combat system» at the end, where you get a menu box and may select a
particular shape to which you want to shift: it’s fun, but hardly worth
remembering as an outstanding feature. All in all, it has always been, and
continues to remain for me, as prime evidence for the inferiority of the
point-and-click system to a well-trained parser: I always have more fun
replaying King’s Quest IV than this
game precisely for that reason. |
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It might be an exaggeration to state that
the slow and shameful death of Sierra On-Line began with King’s Quest V
— particularly given the abundance of stellar titles that the studio released
in the 1990s — but in retrospect, the game does feel like an inauspicious
first sign of the company’s imminent demise. Up until that game, pretty much
all of Sierra’s truly innovative titles (and most of those were King’s
Quest games, too!) innovated for a good reason, and those innovations
were usually a joy to behold and experience. The innovations of King’s
Quest V, however, mostly ranged from dubious and controversial to
embarrassing and poorly implemented. The revised graphics were technically
stunning, but did not look nearly enough as a true labor of love like those
in King’s Quest IV. The addition of speech was a fine achievement, but
the voicing itself left a hell of a lot to be desired. And the removal of the
text parser in favor of a point-and-click interface was, at best, a deeply
divisive move — a perfect favor for the fans, in the eyes of some, and a
suck-it-up move towards the dumbification of the adventure game experience,
in the eyes of others (myself included). In short, it was all a massive
revision of objectively or seemingly outdated standards that was done with
nowhere near the same brilliance and efficiency as it was in the past — and
it was at least partially due to Sierra beginning to function more and more
like a business organization and less and less as a company of idealistic
nerds who were more out there for fun and excitement than to make money, even
if they still made money a-plenty. Just the first small signs, mind you,
nothing much to worry about — Sierra would still go on to have at least half
a decade worth of artistic success — but if you ever wanted to write a Rise
And Fall Of The Sierra Empire, you’d probably have to use 1990 as the
entry point for the Fall chapters. In the meantime, want it or not, you still have
to play King’s Quest V if you do not want to be left without the important
missing link between IV and VI. You might want to select the
old floppy disc version, though — that way, you won’t have to put up with
Cedric the Owl too much (though you will have to put up with the extra
hassle of Sierra’s annoying copy protection), and you are certainly not
missing anything if you do not get acquainted with the lovely tones of other
Sierra employees, either. |
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