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Studio: |
Sierra
On-Line |
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Designer(s): |
Roberta
Williams / Jane Jensen |
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Part of series: |
Kingʼs
Quest |
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Release: |
October 13, 1992 |
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Main credits: |
Lead Programmer: Robert W. Lindsley |
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Useful links: |
Complete
playthrough (7 parts, 430 mins.) |
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By the beginning of the
1990s, Roberta Williams’ King’s Quest,
the series that once upon a time singlehandedly turned Sierra On-Line into
the reigning king of adventure games, was clearly in a state of crisis. While
each of the first four games in the series represented some sort of
substantial and/or technical breakthrough, King’s Quest V was the first title to clearly show that Roberta
was falling behind the times — if not in purely technical terms (after all,
the game did introduce Sierra’s new point-and-click system, new graphics
engine, and voice acting), then definitely so in terms of user-friendly game
design and, perhaps even more importantly, in terms of deeper and more
meaningful storytelling. Like everything else in the digital age, plot-based
computer games were growing up; their characters and plot devices were
becoming more sophisticated and less conforming to pre-existing literary
stereotypes. Or, at least, they were expected
to become all that. With Roberta in charge, for some reason... they really
weren’t. So how exactly did King’s Quest VI, a game which only the
most adoring fans could have really been looknig forward to with trepidation,
break that predictable streak? — and not just the King’s Quest streak, but, actually, the entire streak of fairly
mediocre Sierra games that had marked the studio’s transition into the new
decade? King’s Quest V, Space Quest IV, Police Quest III, Leisure
Suit Larry V (ugh) — all of those titles from 1990-91 were extremely
subpar when it came to good storylines and intelligent design (for lack of a
better term), sort of like the earliest sound movies, still transitional
between the old and new aesthetics and technology and extremely clumsy as a
result. To reverse those ill fortunes, it was evident that new blood was
required — people who could introduce subtler, more fine-grained lines of
thinking and action into the older, stale formulae, and do it on several
stylistically different fronts if possible. One such jack-of-all-new-trades
happened to be Josh Mandel, the mastermind writer behind some of Al Lowe’s,
Marc Crowe’s, and other peoples’ projects. The other was Jane Jensen —
another recent acquisition for Sierra who had already cut her adventure game
teeth on several earlier projects (including Gano Haine’s Eco Quest) and now would go on to
prove that she could be a better Roberta Williams than Roberta Williams when
it came to writing about kings, queens, and digital damsels in designer
distress. I do not know — and
probably nobody knows or will ever know — precisely how much of the game’s
vision ultimately belongs to Jane and how much of it still stays with
Roberta, but from what I have read it seems that by that time, Roberta was
fairly happy with the role of «creative consultant», ensuring that everything
stay true to the established style and lore of the series, whereas most of
the actual work, including dialog writing and puzzle design, was done by
Jane. However it was, the result was smashing: for the first time ever, a King’s Quest game managed to achieve a
level of depth and complexity that put it at least on the Princess Bride level of entertainment.
The game did precisely what was necessary at the moment — signaled to the
world that Sierra On-Line had finally gotten its shit back together, and that
it was prepared to move forward not only as far as technical specs were
concerned, but, more importantly, with a certain degree of intellectual
growth. Admittedly, King’s Quest VI has never suffered
from being underrated. Upon release, especially after the arrival of the
fully voiced CD-ROM version, most of the reviews were glowing, and even today
quite a few gruff game historians who would normally want to forget that
Sierra On-Line ever existed still have no choice but to place this particular
title on their best-ever lists. In my own book, it still battles with King’s Quest IV for the title of best
game in the series — if only because few things can beat that subtle feel of
heavenly exuberance which permeates The
Perils Of Rosella — but it goes without saying that it is hard to compare
an adventure game from 1988 with one from 1992 when it comes to length,
detail, technical parameters, and voice acting. It is probably safe to say
that without King’s Quest VI, there
would be no Gabriel Knight — it was
only due to this game’s major success that Jane Jensen, a relative newcomer
to the Sierra planet, was given the green light to pursue her own creative
vision to the fullest. But this consideration should not be downgrading the
game itself, which remains as eminently playable today as it was thirty years
ago: showing its age, of course, but still remarkably well crafted to allow
for total immersion. |
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Content evaluation |
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Condensed to its basics,
the story of King’s Quest VI does
not stray too far from conventional fairy tale clichés — which makes
it safe to assume that the basic draft still came from the time-honored,
narratively conservative imagination of Roberta Williams. Stepping once more
into the shoes of Prince Alexander, who makes an assured comeback from the
faraway days of King’s Quest III,
we are tasked with rescuing a beautiful damsel in distress (Princess Cassima,
a recent acquaintance from King’s Quest
V) who is kept locked in a tower in the Land of the Green Isles by the
evil Vizier Alhazred, regent of the kingdom after a tragic «accident» has
taken away the lives of both of Cassima’s parents. The Vizier, not so much in
love with Cassima as with wealth and power, is planning to use her as a pawn
in his own evil game — and it is up to Alexander, washed up on the shores of
the island after a shipwreck, to unravel the Vizier’s plot, save the lady,
and restore justice. So far, nothing too special. But in
terms of plotline, the most interesting thing about all King’s Quest games had always been the colorful, unpredictable,
and sometimes downright absurdist mish-mash of its various influences, and
one of the chief goals of this game is to literally pull all the stops in
this particular respect. The gameplay for King’s
Quest VI is significantly longer than for any previous game in the
series, and this allows to include a larger and more diverse number of
locations. While at first stranded on the Isle of the Crown, Alexander soon
gains possession of a magic map (hello King’s
Quest III once again!) which allows him to travel between it and three
other destinations — each of which has a distinctly individual character. If
the Isle of the Crown itself has more of a general 1001 Nights flavor to it, then the Isle of the Sacred Mountain,
with its winged Guardians and Minotaurs, is decidedly steeped in Greek
mythology; the Isle of the Beast, as you can probably tell, is all about
recreating a version of Beauty And The
Beast; and the most original location in the game is the Isle of Wonder, most
of which is clearly inspired by the works of Lewis Carroll — given that this
is decidedly the first time that references to Alice crop up in a King’s Quest game (unlike Greek or Mid-Eastern
motives), I would definitely chalk this one up to Jane Jensen’s fantasy. A somewhat less welcome feature of
older King’s Quest games was that,
whenever they borrowed a classic motif, they would usually exploit it in its
most predictable form rather than invert it in any way — thus, if you met
Medusa, you most surely had to turn it into stone; if you met the Ogre, you
had to steal his golden egg-laying hen; if you met Count Dracula, you had to
carry a mallet and a stake around with you, etc. In King’s Quest VI, some of this predictability still remains in
place — for instance, the story of Beauty and the Beast is reproduced quite
faithfully, albeit in an abridged version. But some of the plotlines are
instead resolved in more original ways: for instance, in order to find your
way around the Labyrinth and defeat the Minotaur it is no longer sufficient
to simply have read the story of Theseus and Ariadne — at the very least, you
have to combine that with certain stereotypical knowledge about bullfighting. Arguably the finest bit of storytelling
in this game, and, one might argue, in the entire King’s Quest series in general, is to be found when Alexander travels
to a particularly challenging destination, the Land of the Dead, to try and
bring back Cassima’s parents. Obviously inspired by yet another piece of
Greek mythology (the tale of Orpheus), this sequence nevertheless has a
denouement all its own, which, incidentally, happens to be the single most
emotionally heavy moment in King’s
Quest history — perhaps the only time in its history when the game taking
itself seriously managed to have me impressed rather than amused. Of course,
Prince Alexander’s encounter with Death is still no Ingmar Bergman, but by
the standards of video games in 1992, this is pretty heavy stuff, and even
today I am pleased to occasionally see comments of genuinely stunned
YouTubers accidentally stumbling upon this piece of ancient history. Ironically, if your playing style
happens to be a bit careless, you might even whip through the game without
witnessing that particular climactic moment — because, unlike any other King’s Quest game, this one allows for
several distinctly different pathways, essentially a shorter, «lazier» one,
and a longer, more difficult and more rewarding scenario. Both are worth
trying out: the shorter route, which does not require a journey to the Land
of the Dead, has its own set of puzzles and challenges — but, of course, it
still functions more like a teaser, or, rather, a «taunter» for the
inexperienced player not smart enough to have suspected that a much more
satisfying solution to all of the Land of the Green Isles’ problems was very
much in reach all along. If my memory serves me well, this seriously
bifurcating plot was the first, and last, time that Sierra implemented this
technique — multiple solutions to puzzles are one thing, but different
endings provided by seriously divergent paths (rather than simply making one
or two different choices at the very end of the game) were not their cup of
tea at all, not even in the RPG-influenced Quest For Glory series. With this colorful mix of influences
and characters, heavily improved dialog writing, emotional impact, and
different paths to take, King’s Quest
VI clearly breathed new, exuberant life into the Roberta Williams formula
which some people, after the disappointment of the previous game, probably
were already taking for dead. But the awesomeness of King’s Quest VI certainly does not end with the intricacies of
its storyline — video games tend to be fairly consistent on all fronts in
regard to their greatness or suckiness, and a strong plot was just one of the
strong points that Jane Jensen and the other team players brought to the
experience. |
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First, the classic
disclaimer: when all is said and admired, King’s
Quest VI is still a Sierra game, and yes, this means that you are going
to die more than once — sometimes due to your own stupidity, sometimes due to
circumstances beyond control of your intelligence — and that, one way or
another, you are going to run into dead ends due to deficiencies in your
inventory. So, as usual, save-early-save-often, and for God’s sake make a full and thorough sweep of all the islands before daring to enter the
Minotaur’s Labyrinth. (To be fair, the game actually warns you about this,
but impatient gamers will not take the warning seriously). It is not as bad
as it used to be in the early days, but the game still wouldn’t get the Ron
Gilbert seal of approval. Other than that, however,
Jane and Roberta really worked their asses off to make the game’s puzzles
look like a solid balance between the challenging and the user-friendly. The
first act of the game, in which you have to find a way of transportation
between the different islands, is fairly simple (other than a bit of
pixel-hunting on the beach, perhaps), but once Prince Alexander acquires the
basic means of teleportation, his challenges quickly begin to multiply — amusingly,
in more or less the same way as in LucasArts’ Monkey Island 2, which also came out the same year: both
Alexander and Guybrush have to solve puzzles on Island X by making use of an
object picked up on Island Y, which then gives them access to yet another
object that they have to use on island Z, and so on. This means a lot of
backtracking, but, fortunately, all of it is done even quicker than in Monkey Island: the fast-travel
open-world mechanic is implemented very smoothly. An excellent example of
this approach is the Five Senses puzzle, where Alexander encounters a group
of five gnomes guarding the entrance to the Isle of Wonder — each of the
gnomes being challenged by way of four out of five senses, but heavily overcompensated
by way of the fifth; you have to find just the right way to block out that
single sense (vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch) in order for the
guardians to leave you alone. This is a brilliant sequence in all possible
ways — starting from how it plays on certain traditional folk motives while
at the same time being completely original (I know of no fairy tale that
would play it out exactly the same way), and ending with fairly logical
solutions to each of the five challenges, for which, however, you must first
scour the neighboring islands. In addition, there is no unnecessary risk of
dying (you can always flee if you miss one of the ingredients), and having
each gnome talk in verse, even when Alexander is captured, denounced, and
executed, is hilarious. A somewhat less ideal, but
still interesting piece of design is the Labyrinth — a location which I am
obligated to hate due to my inborn aversion toward mazes, but still find
myself somewhat fascinated by, probably because of the atmosphere (see
below). On one hand, it is really the mother of all dead ends in the game:
without at least two special objects in your possession, you have no hope of
getting out of there alive, and nothing in your previous experience informs
you that they will be in some way relevant for that location. On the other
hand, their usage in both of the relevant situations is super-logical — in
fact, the climactic scene of the Minotaur battle adds an excellent (somewhat
anachronistic, but fully justified) touch to the Minotaur trope, and is far
more enjoyable than if you just had to battle the beast the traditional way,
like Theseus is supposed to have done. (The entire game implies anyway that
Prince Alexander isn’t much of a sword fighter: like most of his computer nerd
fans, he always prefers brain over brawn). Finally, the two-path
strategy for winning the game is also implemented fairly well. At one point,
the game gives you a seemingly straight hint about how you might be able to
sneak inside the impenetrable castle of Vizier Alhazred; later on, upon resolving
one of the islands’ quests, you seemingly get the means to effectuate that
penetration. But all the while that you are there inside the castle, you will
be tormented with the suspicion that you just might have done something wrong — especially if you still find
yourself in possession of certain unused items, or unprepared spells from
your magic book, by the time the game is over. And then, when you do it more
carefully in order to reach the «perfect» ending, you see how you could
actually use the same object in two different ways. Okay, so this is really
not much of anything in the modern days of choice-based games, but for Sierra
On-Line in 1992 it actually counted as a breakthrough (Gold Rush! did something similar several years earlier, but there
the different pathways were laid out for you explicitly, just as they were,
of course, in the character-dependent Quest
For Glory adventure/RPG mixes). King’s Quest VI is also an ideal standard for an adventure game in that it
features absolutely no arcade sequences whatsoever (other than a few
situations where you must quickly time your reaction to something), and, in
what must have been a first for the series, no frickin’ ladders or ledges to
fall from because of your keyboard or mouse malfunction. It is less than
ideal in terms of copy protection, though: arguably the single least pleasing
thing about it are the Cliffs of Logic, in order to scale which you have to
rely on your wits about half of the time, and on carefully reading the
Guidebook the other half. They even retained that bit for the CD-ROM version
of the game, which is absurd, since CDs in the early 1990s were largely
uncopyable (for instance, the Gabriel
Knight games never had any copy protection). But oh well, every rose has
its thorn. |
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Oh, this is going to be a
little weird. While I do believe that King’s
Quest VI has one of the most well thought out plots in King’s Quest (and maybe even overall
Sierra) history, and that it features one of the strongest and best balanced
sets of puzzles in Sierra history, I would not say that the game is nearly as
«atmospheric» as the ones before it. For some reason, the Land of the Green
Isles just never struck me as much as, say, the land of Tamir or even the
land of Llewdor when it came to making the player feel the «amazing joyous
wonder» of the game’s surroundings. I am still not quite sure why that is. Perhaps it has to do with a
somewhat pragmatic orientation of the game: Prince Alexander is definitely
not there on the Islands to admire the scenery — he is on an urgent mission,
and pretty much everything and everyone around him happen to be only as
important as the part they have to play in that mission. All the locations in
the game are beautifully portrayed, for sure, but they are all relatively
sparse: each island is small, cannot really be explored in depth, and is
strangely depopulated. Despite the fact that the game space is formally
larger than Rosella’s Tamir, there is no large open space here — and now you actually realise that all those
«useless» additional screens that you simply had to walk through on the way
somewhere else were there for a purpose, helping you identify with your
character in her time and space. In King’s
Quest VI, there are no purposeless screens: everything is crammed with
important objects and clues, and although a few of the text / voice
descriptions of some components of the local scenery are quite colorful, most
seem to be of the «Alexander could use this» / «Alexander has no use for it»
variety. Cold! There are two important
exceptions. First, the Isle of Wonder — once you have made it past the Sense
Gnomes, its space opens up to you like a sprawling, barely cohesive tribute
to the imagination of Lewis Carroll, with bookworms looking for Dangling
Participles, sibling rivalries between stick-in-the-muds and bump-on-a-logs,
trash-talking rotten tomatoes, cowardly holes-in-a-wall, and an entire
Chessland with Chess Queens arguing over spoiled eggs and charcoal hunks.
This is the most colorfully absurdist that King’s Quest ever got, and I presume that we have to thank Jane
Jensen for that, so thank you, Jane. Too bad that there are only four screens
on it, and you cannot really tarry in Chessland, so only three to roam at
will. The second exception is the
Land of the Dead. This is the first time King’s
Quest has dared to visit the afterlife, and no expense was spared to make
it look like a really fun place to spend your vacations. Ghosts, ghouls,
dancing skeletons, monster-shaped gates, Charon in his boat, and, finally,
the Lord of the Dead himself are all there for entertainment, during which
you can actually die at any moment (actually, you can enter the Land of the
Dead many times over the course of the game — upon dying, that is). As I
already said, the culmination of your visit to that place is one of the emotionally
strongest moments in Sierra history, and the whole thing is just so damn well
scripted that it is hard to believe some players may have originally missed
it entirely (the ones who were naïve enough to follow the «easy» path). The ending, on the other
hand, is a little anticlimactic: the palace of Alhazred is formally
beautiful, but cold, lonely, and somewhat boring when it comes to navigate
its seemingly endless (though, in reality, quite short) corridors and
stairways. And even if, objectively, there is tension here because you could
get caught and thrown in jail very easily, it still loses in that department
to the creepy suspense at the end of King’s
Quest V, in Mordack’s castle, where it looked like the walls themselves
were ready to pounce on you and bite your head off at any given moment. This might also reflect a certain
difference in style between Roberta and Jane: the former seemed to love the
universe she was creating much more than the story she gave you to play out,
whereas for Jane — here, at least — it is mostly all about the story, while
the universe takes second place. (You can see traces of the same problem in
the Gabriel Knight games, though by
the time she was allowed to make her own games, she got a little better at
solving that dilemma). |
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Technical features |
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I would not call the visual
art of King’s Quest VI particularly
exceptional: rough comparison with King’s
Quest V shows comparable levels of skill and detail when it comes to
painted backgrounds (credited here to John Shroades), and while both games
look very pretty, most of the drawings are more or less what you would expect
for a fairy tale book. Again, this relates to what I wrote above about the
atmosphere: the game seems to place its largest investments in the storyline
and the puzzles, far more complex than ever before but forcing all the other
aspects of the game to adapt to those needs — and, frankly, there is nothing
wrong with that: not every game in the world needs «scenery porn» to fully
involve the player. Which is not to say that the scenery looks bad or
anything — the graphics are lush, realistic, and look quite decent even on
modern day computer screens. The animations have been improved as well: for
instance, when you are standing on the shore, you not only see ripples on the
water, but plant leaves rustling in the air, and (occasionally) birds and
rabbits scurrying around, a pretty solid achievement for 1992 (and a solid
tax on system resources back then — I do not remember about myself, but I am
pretty sure that many players had to move that «Details» slider down and cut
out the animations to get the game to run without stuttering). Compared to King’s Quest IV and V, there is also a significant
increase in the number of close-up images: they only appear during cutscenes,
but they do a good job in letting you have a good look at the principal
characters (Cassima in the tower; the Vizier and his Genie in Alhazred’s
chambers; the Lord of the Dead on his throne; the winged Lord and Lady of the
Isle of the Sacred Mountain, etc.) otherwise represented by subpar sprites
during the actual game. A particularly favorite animated closeup of mine is
the horseback trip to the Land of the Dead, with the sun gradually setting or
rising depending on the direction of the trip — it is minimalistic, but very
efficient in preparing you for the dread of the Dead, or relieving you from
it on your way back. It is not the overall quality of the graphics, but
exquisitely thought out little touches such as this one which still make the
game worth revisiting. Sierra did pull all the
stops when it came to the game’s introduction — a nearly 5-minute animated
pseudo-3D mini-movie, with sliding and panning cameras, fully (or partially)
animated characters, and arguably the most realistic digital representation
of a sea storm up to date; the whole thing was commissionned from Kronos
Digital Entertainment, a freshly formed digital animation company which later
went on to design games like Dark Rift
and Fear Effect. Today, it is
strictly a museum piece: the pixellation looks more awful than anything in
the actual game, and it is really only watchable in its native resolution,
which means that, in order to look good, the mini-movie has to be settled in
a tiny corner of your display. But back in 1992, the effect must have been
amazing — for everybody, that is, who was able to get the animations to run
properly. Special mention must be
made of the 1993 CD-ROM version of the game for Windows, which included
enhanced, high-resolution graphic segments — though only for the small
cut-out animated pictures of the characters appearing onscreen during dialog.
They create a bit of incongruity, given the contrast between their sharp and
clear level of detail and the relative blurriness of everything else (as well
as the fact that the faces in these cut-outs do not always match the sprites
or the big closeup images), but they are still beautifully painted and
realistically animated; it’s a shame they lacked the resources to upscale at
least the cutscenes in the same way (let alone the walking sprites, all of
which suffer from the same ugly blockiness which haunted all of Sierra’s
VGA-era products). |
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The musical soundtrack to King’s Quest VI, mostly designed by
Sierra’s then-resident composer Chris Braymen, stands out a little from
previous games by being nowhere near as dependent on British folk motives and
thus, in a subtle way, also moving the game away from the classic Roberta
Williams model. Instead, background themes range from the more
Mid-Eastern-influenced ones on the Isle of the Crown (in keeping with its 1001 Nights setting) to more whimsical
music hall-influenced ones on the Isle of Wonder (in keeping with its Alice In Wonderland setting) to
baroque harpsichord themes on the Isle of the Beast (because 18th century
origins and all). Since I only ever played the talkie version of the game, I
never paid as much attention to the music as I did to the voice acting, but I
could never complain about any of the themes not being in proper emotional
sync with whatever was going on in the game (particularly in the Land of the
Dead, where the dark, slowly-paced keyboard notes mesh particularly
hauntingly with the overdubbed sound effects of constantly howling spirits). Of course, the one thing King’s Quest VI is most often
remembered for in the musical department is not Chris Braymen’s subtle
soundtrack, but the horrendous power ballad ‘Girl In The Tower’, composed by
Mark Seibert and performed by his wife Debbie and some other dreadful male
singer. Fortunately, it is only performed at the very end of the game over
the final credits, so you are not forced to hear a single note of it these
days — unlike back in 1992, when,
in a much-maligned crass commercial move, Ken Williams included in the game
package a call for all players to flood radio stations with requests to play
this tripe. (The fact that stations actually threatened to sue Sierra for
this does, however, indicate the amount of serious influence that the company
had over millions of computer users those days). I can only assume from this
that Ken Williams has likely been tonedeaf from birth, because by 1992 this
style of power balladeering was already going out of fashion, and even if it
weren’t, ‘Girl In The Tower’ is such an inane collection of musical and
lyrical clichés, it makes any given Aerosmith power ballad sound like
‘Hey Jude’ in comparison. (At least Sierra managed to somehow redeem itself
for this travesty by including several ‘Girl In The Tower’-related gags and
spoofs in subsequent games, such as Space
Quest VI, for instance). Far more important than the music in
the game, however, was the inclusion of Sierra’s first professional voice
acting cast for the 1993 CD-ROM version. Before King’s Quest VI, most of the voiceover work was still done by
regular Sierra employees working overtime — but here, for the first time,
they had the proper budget to hire professionals, and the effort paid off
splendidly. Robby Benson, who, ironically, had just provided his voice for
Disney’s Beast, was hired to bring to life Prince Alexander, and although his
character is one of the few in the game to have no sense of humor whatsoever,
he still manages to produce a likable character, with touches of innocence,
naïveté, sweetness, but also bravery and a bit of trickery where
necessary. Bill Ratner (who is perhaps best known now among gamers as
Ambassador Udina from Mass Effect)
is the stern, rock-solid, but clearly sympathetic Narrator, never intending
to show off but always trying to find the right emotional coloring to
describe whatever is seen on the screen. Veteran comedy actor Chuck McCann
voices most of the game’s goofiest characters, such as Jollo the Jester;
Shakesperian actor Tony Jay (The Supreme Being in Time Bandits!) provides an aura of superb nobility for the
guard-dog Captain Saladin; and a personal gift for myself is the first ever
appearance in a computer game of the inimitable Dave Fennoy (much-later-to-be
Lee Everett in TellTale’s The Walking
Dead) in a relatively small, but important role of Pawn Shop Owner. In short, the cast of King’s Quest VI is the real deal —
although the talent assembled here would arguably be matched at least several
more times in the studio’s history, the only time when they would assemble an
objectively more stellar cast would be with 1993’s Gabriel Knight: Sins Of The Fathers. This time, though, as usual,
it was the next-in-line Roberta Williams project that got all the breaks, but
honestly, I don’t mind: an overall excellently designed package like this one
deserved the best it could get. Anyway, from that point onward, most, if not
all, of Sierra’s games would be voiced — and most, if not all of them would
be voiced by professional industry workers, even if getting proper A-level
talent would still very much remain a hit-and-miss affair until the very end. |
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Interface In terms of actual
gameplay, changes from the interface of King’s
Quest V to King’s Quest VI were absolutely minimal: the same
overhead menu activated by the mouse, the same ability to right-click your
way through several different mouse cursors to quickly select the required
action (of which there are but four: Walk, Look, Talk, Operate). The good
news is that there are now many more actions with real consequences: many, if
not most, of the objects scattered around the screen allow for different
dialog lines from the Narrator depending on whether you look at them, «use»
them or even talk to them (e.g. «talk to wheel» — "The wheel is
well-traveled, but it says nothing of its voyages"). I only hope that
poor Bill Ratner was well-paid for all those extra lines, but in the end it
pays off splendidly, because for the first time in a point-and-click Sierra
game it really feels as if all those different options are there for a
reason. In King’s Quest V, for
instance, «talking» to anything but the animated NPCs just gave you a red
cross — here, it makes the game more fun even if you can rather safely
predict that talking to inanimate objects won’t ever get you anywhere proper.
(Other than, perhaps, on the Isle of Wonder, where quite a few allegedly
inanimate objects are... well, wond’rous). Navigating your character
with the mouse is relatively easy; although the land around you is definitely
not a safe space, there are few locations where you can fall to your death,
and most of these are fairly logical. The infamous King’s Quest Treacherous
Stairs™ are present only once — as the Cliffs of Logic, where one wrong mouse
click can leave you with a broken neck in an instant; however, it will take
some seriously shakey hands to fuck up that particular challenge. As usual,
some puzzles require timely responses, but other than that, there are no
distracting arcade sequences to break this quintessential adventure
experience. Overall, all the details of the interface and the gameplay system
are sparse, minimalistic, and pragmatic — no jokey options, no boss keys, no
zipper icons (hello, Al Lowe!), just a clean, easy-to-use mechanics which
honestly does not deserve a huge-ass Beginner’s Guide to familiarize yourself
with (but just in case you love reading lengthy instructions, you can enjoy
that Guide, as well as an equally long-winded Beginner’s Walkthrough, right
there on your screen after clicking the «About» button). |
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The King’s Quest series always worked as
the morning herald for Sierra: any major good news or any major bad news was
sure to be announced by the arrival of the next installment in Roberta
Williams’ pet series. King’s Quest V had previously announced a ratio
of about 50% good and about 50% bad news for the company — a model which was
followed quite strictly by most of the games for about a year and a half. King’s
Quest VI almost seemed to apologize for everything that was done poorly —
coming up with a better and less predictable plot, a more complicated set of
possible paths and choices, more intelligently designed puzzles, and more
entertaining use of the point-and-click system. Whereas the technical
enhancements in graphics and sound were pretty much to be expected, all these
other things had a 50-50 chance of being or not being implemented; but
there they were, largely courtesy of Jane Jensen, and they set a good model
for the next couple of years at Sierra, ushering in what I like to call the
company’s «Silver Age» (others might want to take it one step further and
call it Golden, but for me the system is simple: No Parser = No Gold). The most important thing, though, is not
how influential this title turned out to be, but that it is, I believe, still
eminently playable and enjoyable even thirty years later. The visuals have
aged nicely, obviously identifiable as coming from the early 1990s, but colorful
and distinct enough to be appreciated by any potential gamer. The MIDI and
voice soundtracks are crisp and timeless (other than ‘Girl In The Tower’,
which still remains a monumental cultural artifact of the cringiest kind).
And the story, though surely not on the Witcher level, still boasts a
reasonably high level of sophistication — about the same, I’d say, as the
average animated movie from the Disney Renaissance period (whose levels of
sophistication have certainly not been outdone by anything Disney has
produced in the past 20 years), or maybe even slightly higher in spots (could
you imagine a quest to find the Dangling Participle in any Disney movie?). My only serious (well, not too
serious) gripe with the game is that it still fails to be as immersive for me
as multiple other Sierra titles — as I wrote above, it is always more about
the plot than the atmosphere. Were it up to me, I’d make sure that the player
got to see more of the Land of the Green Isles, being able to wander around
the Sacred Mountain, properly visit the Chessland, actually enter the huts of
the druids on the Isle of Mists, and maybe even spend extra time in the Land
of the Dead. But I can also understand that it was hardly the intention of
Roberta or Jane to try and turn King’s Quest into a Quest For Glory
— the adventure-RPG hybrid which succeeded in putting a completely different
spin on Sierra’s fairy tale fantasies. And, after all, unlike the aimlessly
wandering protagonist of Quest For Glory, Prince Alexander made it to the
Green Isles for one specific and urgent reason. So it might be high time for
you to stop wasting it on this review and go help him secure the hand of
Princess Cassima, if you have not done so already! |
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