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Studio: |
Sierra
On-Line |
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Designer(s): |
Roberta
Williams / Lorelei Shannon |
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Part of series: |
Kingʼs
Quest |
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Release: |
November 22, 1994 |
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Main credits: |
Producers: Mark Seibert, Craig Alexander Music: Neal Grandstaff, Dan Kehler,
Jay D. Usher |
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Useful links: |
Complete
playthrough (5 parts, 325 mins.) |
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The best thing I could
probably say about King’s Quest VII
is that it loyally upholds the classic Sierra tradition — no two King’s Quest games should feel
perfectly alike, and each new King’s
Quest has to announce the beginning of something completely different. In
this case, though, the «something» in question began on an entirely personal
level: King’s Quest VII was the
first game in the series where the involvement of Roberta Williams was almost
purely nominal. She’d already shared the designer’s seat with Jane Jensen for
the sixth title two years earlier, but at least that experience still took
form of active collaboration, where the two ladies would regularly toss ideas
off each other, even if the technical routine of designing and writing was
largely handled by Jensen. By the time King’s
Quest VII came along, though, Roberta was clearly more interested in
horror than fantasy, and, being far too busy with Sierra’s new spearhead
project of Phantasmagoria, she more
or less transferred all control
over the game into the hands of Lorelei Shannon, an aspiring young writer of
supernatural and horror fiction whose previous experience at Sierra had
mainly consisted of writing hintbooks for King’s
Quest — so, clearly, no stranger to the franchise. She also had done some
writing for The Dagger Of Amon Ra
(Roberta’s second mystery title in the Laura
Bow series), and later, she would also go on to carry Roberta’s torch for
the second Phantasmagoria game — and,
frankly speaking, the writing in Phantasmagoria
II blows the quality of the original out of the water, so the trust in
the new designer was clearly well-funded. Transfer of power into the
hands of Shannon ensured that the game would both be similar in spirit to
Roberta’s vision, given Lorelei’s previous experience with the franchise, and different from it, reflecting her
deeper obsession with all things morbid and creepy (while still making sure
that the game could be playable by children). It also had the potential of
continuing to bring the King’s Quest
series into a more modern age, with deeper and more complex plots and dialog
than Roberta was capable of — not because Roberta was intellectually
incapable of such a thing, but rather because a decade of working on the
simple-and-stupid model of the early games had made it difficult for her style
to evolve (sort of the same problem we see with, for instance, Fifties’
rockers trying to stay relevant in the post-Beatles era). Whether Shannon did
or did not succeed in following in the footsteps of Jane Jensen’s King’s Quest VI will be made clear shortly;
but first, a few words on things that went far and beyond Shannon’s zone of
control and/or responsibility. Because on the surface, the
most noticeable changes concerned not
the game’s leading writer, but the game’s visual style and interface. Dissatisfied,
perhaps, by failing to achieve properly realistic standards with Sierra’s
regular models of 2D graphics, Ken Williams was pushing the studio into two
completely different new directions — one of them being FMV (full-motion
video), which he and Roberta were testing on Phantasmagoria, and the other being cartoon-style animation,
something that had just worked admirably well with Day Of The Tentacle, Sierra’s major competitor in the adventure
game genre. But if LucasArts, with their comedic flair, copied their visual
style from old-school Looney Tunes, Ken rather found himself looking at
something more dramatic, gracious, and, uh, commercial: Disney. With the
Disney Renaissance in full bloom, what with Beauty And The Beast and Aladdin
both being the talk of the town, Ken’s idea was to begin releasing Sierra
adventure games that would work like interactive Disney movies. In all honesty, this was
not the most creative idea he ever had — somewhat symbolically, it was the
second time that Sierra agreed to become a follower of somebody else’s model
rather than a leader (the first time, of course, happened when they abandoned
the parser for the point-and-click system), and from some points of view, the
beginning of the studio’s downfall. Eight years earlier, with Al Lowe working
on the game adaptation of Disney’s The
Black Cauldron, the studio specifically made it a point to not make a game that would look, feel,
and play out as a carbon copy of the movie (though, admittedly, at the time
they simply lacked the technical capacity to give it the same look) — they
even contested their right to make various changes to the plotline where it
made sense in the context of the game. Now, even if they were not borrowing
any actual storylines from Disney, their next King’s Quest would still be explicitly targeted at fans of Agrabah
and Villeneuve — a bit of a cold shower for those old-school fans who still
thought they knew the meaning of the word «sell-out». In the short term, it probably looked
like Sierra had made the right decision. Sales were allegedly good (though
precise statistics are hard to find), and early reviews were seduced by the
prettiness of the visuals. However, after the original enthusiasm had
settled, and after further advances in graphic resolution and both 2D and 3D
textures had inevitably made the game look antiquated, history pretty much
kicked the game in the balls. Together with the even more universally
despised King’s Quest VIII
(Sierra’s one and only clumsy attempt to bring the franchise into the 3D
era), these two typically find themselves at the bottom of every
Sierra-related list, and while the eighth game is usually berated for its
godawful graphics and its betrayal of the core values of the adventure genre,
the seventh is more commonly critized for its Disney looks and, perhaps more
importantly, for its Disney feels,
as a serious step backwards from the maturity and wittiness of King’s Quest VI. Let us, then, quickly
run through each particular aspect of the game and then try to conclude
whether the game in general is way past saving, or if it still deserves a
pass at rehabilitation. |
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Content evaluation |
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True to its story roots at
least, King’s Quest VII continues
the story of the royal family of Daventry, brushing the dust off the character
of Princess Rosella, whom we last had the chance to play as way back in King’s Quest IV; however, this time
around Rosella also receives active support from her mother, Queen Valanice,
whom King Graham had married at the end of King’s Quest II and who had, up until now, always been strictly
an NPC. So — for the first time in King’s
Quest history, two different
playable characters, and both of
them female — chalk up one for innovation, and one for girl power. The story itself is
probably the most convoluted in the entire franchise, making me wonder if
Lorelei Shannon had not played one too many JRPGs while looking for
inspiration. To be as brief as possible, Princess Rosella is lured from
Daventry into the Troll Kingdom, where she is turned into a troll herself and
is then betrothed to the Troll King.
The King, however, is a fake one, substituted from the real one by the evil
sorceress Malicia, who plans to use her decoy in order to awaken a dormant
volcano and destroy the entire kingdom, if not the entire universe (why exactly she wants to do that is
never explicitly stated, I think, but isn’t that sort of thing just typical
of your average evil sorceress?). Now Valanice has to find the abducted
Rosella, while the abducted Rosella has to de-trollify herself, expose the
impostor, save the world, and punish the bad guys. This main quest takes both
ladies through a whole series of sub-quests, involving travel to the
undead-populated Land of Ooga Booga, the nonsensical gingerbread town of
Falderol, the Land of Dreams, some deserts, some pastoral areas inhabited by
Olympian gods, and the Place Between Worlds. Eventually, all ends predictably
well (though it is possible to trigger bad endings), and Rosella even gets a
chance to emotionally, if not altogether intimately, reconnect with an old
acquaintance from the days of King’s
Quest IV. This basic plot — you can find more
details and spoilers on Wikipedia or elsewhere, if you so desire — is not
really that much better or worse than the average plot of any King’s Quest game: it is simply more
complex and twisted than most, which makes sense since this is a longer game
as well (though, admittedly, in my detailed playthrough it runs shorter than King’s Quest VI — for the simple
reason that the latter had much more dialog relating to possible interactions
with the environment). Unfortunately, complexity
of the plot is not the equal to intelligence
of the plot. If at least Valanice’s motives through much of the game are
easily understood — she is just a caring mother looking to find her daughter
— then Rosella, at least once she manages to regain her human form, seems
stuck for way too much time looking for I-don’t-know-what to save
I-don’t-know-whom. The motives and personalities of both the good and the bad
guys remain vague and poorly defined, and their behaviour is notoriously
erratic. A good case in point is the main
antagonist, Malicia, clearly written as a classic eccentric Disney
villainess, somewhere in between the Evil Queen from Snow White (visually) and Cruella de Vil (in terms of behavior).
She harbors an almost irrational hatred toward Rosella (without even
consulting the mirror beforehand or anything like that), whom she can ignore,
lock up, or exterminate fairly
randomly throughout the game. Her being pissed off at just about everybody is
never given a good explanation; her clichéd repartees barely amount to
the level of average Disney clichéd repartees; and her choice of
household pets frankly sucks. King’s
Quest has never been famous for particularly memorable baddies, of
course, but Malicia is the first baddie in a King’s Quest game who keeps popping up at fairly regular
intervals, and for that reason alone she could have used much better writing. As could probably the entire game, for
that matter. It becomes clear fairly quickly that when it comes to clever
dialog, Shannon is no Jensen. Not only do the characters speak in platitudes way too often for a game whose age
already made bland dialog less forgivable than it was several years before,
but the game script constantly makes the characters look like idiots. One
example will suffice: Matilda
the Troll (pissed-off as hell): "Baloney, little girl! You’re trying to
steal our throne! Usurper, usurper!" Rosella (begins crying): "BOO-HOO-HOO!" Matilda
the Troll
(calmly and with sympathy):
"Why, you’re no usurper, you poor little thing! Don’t cry! I didn’t mean
to be cross!" Things like that crop up all over the
place: characters seem to have very little idea about how to interact with
each other in ways that make logical and emotional sense. Rosella herself
seems lost between different psychological states, sometimes acting more like
the old-fashioned damsel in distress and sometimes breaking out a defying
feminist attitude — and she, I have to say, is probably the best defined
character in the game, certainly more fun to play for than her mother, who
spends way too much randomly
allocated time drowning in her own tears. Most of the principal locations in the
game and the main plot elements associated with them are hardly tremendously
interesting or original — the underground Troll Kingdom is predictably thick
on gross troll humor and magic potions made of all sorts of disgusting
things, while the Olympian god paradise in the last part of the game somehow
manages to be flat-out boring, with lots of obligatory backtracking, not a
lot of humor, and stiff characters whose personalities do not really go much
deeper than their predecessors in the EGA-era King’s Quest games, something that was naturally forgivable in 1986
but not in 1994. The game does become a bit more
exciting when we get to spend time in the less easily predictable spaces. The
quaint little town of Falderol, for instance, is like a distilled-for-kids
version of the Isle of Wonder from King’s
Quest VI — populated with vain aristocratic poodles, bull owners of china
shops, mock-turtles, odd-looking rat-type city guards extorting ridiculous
gifts, and a mocking bird who actually mocks you with an incessant torrent of
jokes carried over directly from Carlos the Concierge in Leisure Suit Larry VI (yes, at least it should warm our hearts to
realize that Sierra On-Line was still one big happy family at the time). It
is a very silly place which advertises itself exactly for what it is, and
while most of what goes on there has no relevance at all for the main story,
it will very likely stay with you for a much longer time than the main story. Even better is the «Land of
Ooga-Booga», in which Shannon really let herself go — this is one part of the story which would probably never make it
to any Disney Renaissance movie. It represents an alternative version of the
Land of the Dead from the previous game, and a fairly original one — it is
essentially the Land of the Dead as seen from the perspective of bedtime horror
stories by and for mischievous kids (two of which are actually important
characters in Ooga-Booga itself). Full of gruesomely comic elements, like a
dead gravedigger using a rat to power his gravedigging machine, the Bogeyman
prowling around for fresh meat and hitting on ghost ladies at night, a literally spineless doctor who can
send you to the Land of Dreams by putting you to sleep in a coffin, piles of
predator bones, man-eating plants and what-not, Ooga-Booga is a solid
combination of morbid fun, tragic storytelling (one of your tasks is to help
reunite a betrayed husband, a grieving wife, and their loyal dog in life
after death), and, of course, mortal danger — you can die much more easily in
Ooga-Booga than almost anywhere else. In other words, King’s Quest VII is not a complete waste; it has its moments
which deserve to be treasured among other fine memories of the franchise. But
on the whole, it does feel like the entire game was built around several
exciting locations, which were really fun to design and populate by the
writers... oh, and then they had to
come up with, uh, something to bind it all together. It does not work —
certainly not in the «climactic» final battle scene between Malicia and the
good guys, which is seriously an insult to all the previous climactic battles
of King’s Quest. (Maybe blame it on
the animators, though: there is one moment there when the main combatant,
instead of fighting, suddenly begins to slowly and deliberately turn his back
on Malicia for no other reason than wanting
to get zapped — and, honestly, nothing in the game up to that moment
predicted that he would want to go out like Wagner’s Tristan. Anyway, that
entire scene was so poorly choreographed that Disney clearly had nothing to
fear). On top of it all is the clichéd
exposition which Roberta and Lorelei nabbed straight from the recent Disney
movies: Rebellious Young Girl Proving That She Can Take Care Of (a.k.a. Mess
Up) Her Own Life. Suddenly Princess Rosella, who kinda sorta looked like a
serious and capable young adventurer in her own right back in 1988, is
presented to us from a very corny side ("Mother, but I don’t want to wed
Prince so-and-so, he’s so boooooooring...!") — the introduction to the
game really makes you feel inside a
Little Mermaid or an Aladdin style movie, and I can imagine
how painful this must have seemed to those who took their previous King’s Quests just a tad more
seriously. This here Rosella has quite a few solid moments, but on the whole,
it does feel a little sad when a certain character from a certain adventure
game franchise produced a more wholesome and serious impression way back in
1988 than she does in 1994. |
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So much for the
disappointment over the game’s story; now, onward to the disappointment over
the game’s challenges. The first thing to be mentioned is a technical one, to
which we shall later return in the «Interface» section: King’s Quest VII really takes the point-and-click principle to
its absolute extreme, since most of the time this is exactly and literally
what you are going to do — point
and click. In an almost Spartan fit
of minimalistic attitude, the designers have eliminated any choice of icons,
leaving only one fully neutralized option: Interact (with one of the hotspots
on the screen). With your wand cursor, you click on people to talk to them,
click on small objects to pick them up, and click on large objects to open or
move them. At best, you can select an object out of your inventory to operate
it on a hotspot. Genius, right? The result of this strategy
is that the entire game really has only two types of issues that could cause
you a minimal amount of trouble. One is actually identifying the hotspots —
which can get tricky, considering that some are fairly tiny and the only way to identify them is
wave your wand cursor over them and see it change color... actually, no, not
change color, but rather begin to light up and shine, and when a
white-and-gray wand cursor begins to emit small white-and-gray rays of light
over a space of three square pixels, it can take quite a sharp eye to notice
(I got hopelessly stuck a bunch of times that way). Of all the pixel hunt
problems in Sierra games, King’s Quest
VII’s are a strong contender for worst ever. The second issue are the «extra»
rebus-type and constructor-type puzzles which are supposed to break up the
monotonousness of point-and-click interaction... except that you get most of
them already in the very first chapter of the game, trying to break Valanice
out of her desert prison. They are not particularly frustrating, but
deciphering the «hieroglyphs» on the grotesque pagan statue in order to learn
how to turn salt water into sweet can be tricky for those whose imagination
cannot properly handle the semantics of pictograms, and it may well be that
you will have to rely on the good old trial-and-error instead. Also, closer
to the end of the game you have to play a little Loom-style memory game with a magic harp in order to get the
necessary clues from the three Fates, which quickly gets annoying since you
have to do the exact same thing on more than one occasion (bad, bad, bad design!). That said, mind-breakers like these are
quite scarce on the whole in King’s
Quest VII, as are action sequences (as usual, though, there are some
timed sequences which would become a major pain in the ass on faster PCs; in
particular, one sequence where you had to blow up a crypt door with a
dynamite stick would render the game practically unwinnable and required a
user-made patch to get through). The regular puzzles, on the other hand, are
typically quite simple and logical — even in Falderol, whose absurdist
environment, one might think, would require you to think in more of a Monkey Island / Day Of The Tentacle type of way, but no dice: Valanice assuredly
behaves like the only grown-up and rational person in a world populated
exclusively by little children (I do like the possibly subtle jab at
LucasArts in which Valanice actually has
to use a rubber chicken — albeit with no pulley in the middle — in order to
put the moon back in the sky). On the whole, other than pixel hunting,
the single most encumbering thing about the game is that you will have to do
a lot of backtracking. As the game
begins, Valanice and Rosella operate in relatively small and closed spaces
(the Desert for Valanice, the Troll Kingdom for Rosella), but as it
progresses, more and more areas open up for each of the two characters, while
previous ones, except for the Troll Kingdom, remain accessible as well.
Eventually, mother and daughter even become able to traverse each other’s
areas, without being able to meet up face to face (e.g. Rosella finds
evidence of her mother’s stay in Falderol, while Valanice tracks her in
Ooga-Booga) — it is actually fun to investigate the same locations from
different characters’ perspectives. But it also means that sometimes, in
order to solve a particular puzzle, you have to trudge all the way back to a
fairly distant place, which most players might simply be too lazy to do (e.g.
in order to solve a simple puzzle in Falderol, you have to go all the way
back to the desert to make another trade with the Rhyming Mole, though
absolutely nothing in the game hints at this necessity). Again, some will see
this as bad design, while others will argue that «laziness» is not a word
that should ever be uttered in the setting of a classic adventure game. Who
knows who’s right and who’s wrong? |
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Given all that was said
above, I think that our two main questions for this section shall be as
follows: (a) does King’s Quest VII
actually feel like an interactive
Disney experience? and (b) if it does, is this a good or a bad thing? — at
least, in the sense of whether or not this reimagining of the King’s Quest universe goes against the
spirit of the franchise in general, or something like that. The answer to the
first question is, surprisingly, a no
with a faint shadow of a yes (so as
not to make the second question irrelevant). The biggest difference between
the game and the typical Disney movie is that the latter constitutes «family
entertainment» which is supposed to be accessible for little kids; King’s Quest VII is way too complex
and creepy to be an adequate experience for anybody under the age of, say, 10
years or so. No Disney movie has anything even remotely approaching the
uneasy spookiness of the Land of Ooga-Booga, and no Disney movie would dare
to depict the same degree of random absurdity as the town of Falderol. All of
which makes King’s Quest VII an
even more frustrating ball of contradictions — a game that jumps almost
unpredictably between non-trivial adult-oriented humor (sometimes black humor at that) and corny kiddie
tropes that wouldn’t be seen as acceptable even at the dawn of the age of
video games. King’s Quest VII is not
Sierra’s equivalent of Aladdin;
rather, it is the equivalent of stuffing Aladdin
in the same mixer with, say, Beetlejuice
and Alice In Wonderland and proudly
framing the results. And do these results
actually work? One thing is for sure: King’s
Quest VII takes more risks with setting seriously different atmospheric
impressions throughout different parts of the game than any previous title in
the series. In King’s Quest VI, perhaps,
it looked like you were taken to a completely different game when you entered
the Land of the Dead, but this was just one small sub-section. Here, you
alternate between a grim and lonely survivalist vibe (Valanice in the
desert), a Muppets vibe (Rosella in the Troll Kingdom), a Tim Burton vibe
(Ooga-Booga), a Roald Dahl vibe (Falderol), and a «Greek Mythology For Junior
School» vibe (most of everything else). Not all of these are completely
dissimilar, but they do require some emotional adjustment, and at the very
least, there are high chances that you might absolutely love parts of this
game while at the same time absolutely despise others — a situation that is
much less likely to arise while sharing the plight of King Graham or Prince
Alexander. My personal support goes
out first and foremost to the Ooga-Booga setting: I think there is something
unique about the design and dynamics of that place, at least in the world of
computer games — I have never seen a better attempt to make the Land of the
Dead feel funnier (almost to the
point where it begins to come across as a really cozy and welcoming place to
be) while at the same time retaining the sense of mortal danger: it is quite
a good thing that Rosella and Valanice are very much allowed, if not welcome, to die in semi-gruesome ways
on almost every screen in that place, as it keeps you on your toes, sharp,
alert, and tense, even as you’re laughing all the way to the bank while
reading hilarious tombstone inscriptions or watching the shenanigans of the
young undead hoodlums. On the other hand, the
lush, flowery, and blissful landscapes inhabited by all sorts of deities and
spirits whose help is required by Valanice to help defeat Malicia’s evil
plans — that section of the game, I
am afraid to say, turned out fairly boring in terms of atmospheric
excitement. Perhaps it is the result of having to do too much backtracking
through the exact same set pieces. Perhaps it is the fault of the graphic
design, which makes you feel stinted and restricted to narrow walking paths
when making your way from Point A to Point B. Perhaps it is the intentionally
emotionless, mechanistic personalities of all those supernatural characters
that you encounter — intended to stress their superiority over all of us
flesh-and-blood mortals, but coming off as bland and lifeless in the process.
In any case, I’d much rather walk once more all over the lush and freedom-loving
spaces of King’s Quest IV’s
graphically inferior Tamir than again set Valanice on her straightjacketed
journey towards the Dreamweaver’s Cave. In short, if you haven’t
already gotten the point, King’s Quest
VII is all about mixed emotions. You cannot blame it for lack of trying —
while it does set up Disney as a primary role model, it is not all about blindly following that
model (as long as you live through the cheesy Beauty And The Beast / Aladdin
rip-off song in the introduction), and it is still willing to take an
occasional artistic risk or two. As a result, there are parts of that game
that I’d be willing to proudly show off for anyone, and parts of that game I wouldn’t want to be caught dead playing
on my computer. Yet even the embarrassing parts may end up being memorable —
in a "I really don’t believe how it was possible to fuck up that badly!" kind of way — and,
in the end, my memories of playing the game stay more on the positive than
negative side, even if it takes me some time to decide about whether I am
really going to say this or not. |
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Technical features |
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If there is anything for
your memory to carry out of this experience, it will almost certainly be the
visuals. Directed by Andy Hoyos, a Sierra veteran with more than 15 years of
experience in artistic media, the graphics of King’s Quest VII were designed to dazzle and stun with an
outstanding mix of shapes, colors, detalization, and animation — it is safe
to say that no other Sierra game ever rose to the same level of quality (though
at least Al Lowe’s Torin Passage
shakily tried to follow in its footsteps). King’s Quest VII was the first game in the series to boast a native VESA
resolution of 640x480, which, in fully layman terms, means that it is the
first King’s Quest that will not
look so horrendously grainy and pixelated on your modern hi-res screen. This
meant not only increased possibilities in terms of rendering detail of
immovable objects, but also meant that your characters could have slightly
realistic facial and bodily details while standing around or moving, instead
of the inevitable «matchbox-on-two-sticks» effect of just about any game
prior to 1994 (alas, even my beloved Gabriel
Knight). Throw in the razzle-dazzle of as many different shades of color
for their fantasy lands that the artists could think of, and there you have
it — a game fit for Disney’s recognition, though, of course, the overall work
on animation here probably constitutes like a 100th part of the work
necessary for the average Disney movie. In terms of artistic
imagination, the game is no slouch, either. Chief praise should, as you
probably already guessed, go to the design of the Land of Ooga-Booga, whose
dark blue eternal-twilight landscapes consist of almost nothing but twisted,
contorted grotesqueries, be it the leafless trees (which look as if someone
laundered and wrung them out on a daily basis, without ironing) or the oddly
deformed tombstones (which look as if they were melted down into random
shapes, then left to cool off in the chilly breeze). It contrasts sharpest of
all with Falderol, made to look like an amusement park built off the concept
of the Gingerbread House — pink, white, and yellow being the dominant colors,
and all the buildings shaped and decorated like dollhouses. If anything, the
variety of colors sometimes becomes extreme, as all the razzle-dazzle makes
these shapes morph into a psychedelic mess, in which your moving active character
is just one more blob — too much sugar in one cup can be a bad thing, you
know. One thing that does not
stand up so well to the ravages of time is the opening sequence — a 4-minute
intro which was essentially made to look like a proper Disney sequence.
Probably to make it less taxing on the graphic cards, it was compressed into
occupying just a part of the screen, and while back then it was supposed to
prove to customers that the PC industry has pretty much caught on to
traditional animation, today it actually shows just how far away it was at
the time from doing that. In a way, that opening sequence is the single most Disney-worshipping bit
in the entire game, and while it is not completely misleading, it still sets
a very wrong impression from the start — in fact, I’m pretty sure that some
older fans may have refused to buy or play the game just because they’d
forced themselves to watch that "Mother,
he’s so boooring!..." intro. |
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Sound I do not know much about the composers
who worked on the King’s Quest VII
soundtrack (apparently, at least one of them, Neal Grandstaff, is an
accomplished jazz musician), but the soundtrack itself is... generally okay.
At least, it is much more generally okay than it would be if the music, too,
tried to follow the tendency of Disneyfication throughout — as such, the only
true horror you will be subjected to is the opening song (‘Land Beyond
Dreams’), written by our old friend Mark "Girl In The Tower"
Seibert and most likely intended for us to draw a beeline from Princess
Rosella to Princess Jasmine, but don’t fall for that, my friends. Other than that, the soundtrack tends
to be more on the ambient side, and is quite faithful to your immediate
surroundings. For instance, the Desert Theme is suitably desolate and
minimalist, with melancholy-drenched woodwinds occasionally erupting over
emotionless and merciless waves of quiet synths. The Troll Kingdom Theme is
all about friendly folksy guitar arpeggios that would, perhaps, not sound out
of place on a prog-rock album by an aspiring beginner band. Falderol is all
about whimsical baroque court dancing; Ooga-Booga is suitably funereal, with
a lot of moody organ; and so on. Music is everywhere in the universe of King’s Quest VII, and it never becomes
annoying since most of the various areas and characters get their own themes.
But it is hardly ever memorable, either. Similarly, the voice cast assembled for
the recording sessions is also far from the best and far from the worst in a Sierra game. Arguably the best choice
is Maureen McVerry as Rosella, who comes off as a bright, intelligent, and
even occasionally sarcastic young woman — that is, whenever she is not
emotionally overacting, which she just does not do very well (her "I’m a
TROLL! How can I be a TROLL? I’m not a TROLL, AM I?.." is decidedly more
cringey than her excited readings of the grotesque limericks on Oooga-Booga’s
tombstones). Carol Bach Rita as Valanice, on the other hand, comes across as way too motherly, though I guess she
was instructed that at no time was Valanice prone to losing her stern regal
countenance, not even when briefly transforming into a jackalope for safety
reasons. Of the less often heard NPC voices,
70-year old Ruth Kobart as Malicia is memorable, but her crappy dialog and
hyper-stressed EVIL nature still make her into a caricature. Denny Delk, who
was such a great Hoagie in Day Of The
Tentacle, is disappointing as the Troll King, not least because they run
his voice through a series of annoying distorting effects to be more
«troll-like» and it kinda sucks. Actually, the gold prize for acting should
probably go to the extremely skilled and versatile Roger Jackson (who voiced
literally hundreds of characters in dozens and dozens of other games) for his
portrayal of the Three-Headed Carnivorous Plant — all three heads, that is, which you would never guess were voiced
by the exact same actor. Come to think of it, the Plant is probably my
favorite character in the entire game, which makes me only too happy to feed
it both Valanice and Rosella from
time to time. It should perhaps be noted that the
game has no role for a Narrator — for the first time in a voiced Sierra game,
all the reactions to all of your clicks are voiced by Valanice and Rosella.
This, too, may be the result of Disneyfication, i.e. bringing the game ever
closer towards the status of an interactive movie; but even more so, it is
the result of drastically simplifying its playing interface, which is now
structured in such a way that it does not even need a separate Narrator.
Which logically brings us to our last, and, in some ways, most problematic
section: the gameplay. |
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|
Following the usual
pattern, the next King’s Quest had
to announce upcoming big changes for Sierra in everything — including the
basic modus operandi for the
upcoming games as well. The first of these changes made itself obvious right
from the start, once you’d watched the introductory Disney-style sequence:
Sierra had discarded the holy-of-holies — the old save-and-restore system. In
its place came the possibility to play as several different users, giving
each of your games a separate title, while all the saving within each single
one of these games was being done automatically. This meant that you could
not just go back in time and replay the game from any point you’d wish to —
for instance, to rewatch a scene which you particularly liked, or to boast to
your friends about how ingeniously you’d solved that particular puzzle
yesterday. Admittedly, 99% of the
reasons for which people saved and restored games weren’t those particular ones, but rather (a)
fear of getting hopelessly stuck and (b) fear of dying — two problems that no
longer existed in King’s Quest VII,
since (a) it was no longer possible to get hopelessly stuck and (b) any death
situations immediately carried you over to the last safe space before dying.
Still, not being able to save my game
always gives me a sucky feeling, regardless, and while Roberta Williams would
strictly cling to that principle in her other games from then on (most
notably, in Phantasmagoria), it is
a good thing that the other late-period Sierra games (Quest For Glory, Gabriel
Knight, etc.) refused to follow suit. Making things even more
confusing was the availability of the option to begin your game — right from
the start! — from the beginning of any of the six chapters into which King’s Quest VII was divided. It is
unclear what was the exact meaning of this design: either to take pity on
infuriated players stuck behind some particularly tricky puzzle and let them
skip ahead, or to let computer game critics, too lazy to play the game, take
a quick peek at all the cutscenes and animations at the beginning of each
chapter. Regardless, it gives you an odd impression, and probably takes a bit
out of the general satisfaction you should feel upon completing a chapter
(because you know that any lazy dork could get the same rewards without
putting pressure on a single brain cell). Being able to rewind back to or
skip ahead to any specific location which you have already explored is one
thing, but being able to start off an adventure game right in the middle is
quite another. As the game itself begins, another
major change becomes obvious, quite liable to throwing an experienced
adventure game player off balance, though possibly welcoming to a total and
absolute novice — the harshly laconic nature of the overall interface.
Although a rather large chunk of the screen is eaten up by the menu overlay,
all it really has are three things — a large window containing all the
objects in your inventory, an «eye» option which you can use to look at these
objects, and a red gem, clicking upon which brings up the options menu (which
does not offer you too many options, either). Meanwhile, your playable
character’s activities are limited to walking across the screen and
interacting with persons or objects which are clickable (as indicated by the
lighting up of your cursor wand). And... that’s IT. As I already mentioned earlier, this
drastic simplification of the interface leads to the predictably drastic
simplification of the puzzles — in a way, being the logical, though
nearly-absurd, conclusion of the path that began by eliminating the text
parser and replacing it with a multi-optional point-and-click interface. Now
it has been made single-optional —
most likely, for the simple reason that Roberta wanted the game to look,
feel, and act out ever more like an interactive movie, in which you would not
want to break the immersion too
often by wasting your time on useless things (like clicking «Open» on your
dialog partner). Or, who really knows? maybe it was just a matter of spending
all the budget on art and animations and not having enough time and money
left to write up all the dialog necessary to cover those superfluous options. Regardless, players who came to King’s Quest VII from an already rich
history of other games would almost certainly get a «completely naked» kind
of experience here — almost up to the point of feeling betrayed (and not the
first time in Sierra history, I should add). No scrollable or selectable
options; no ability to save or restore your game; not even a bloody «About
the game» option in the menu window, which had always been there for the
loyal fan! Throw in the total lack of subtitles (especially uncomfortable for
non-native English speakers) or even the inability to change the movement speed
of your character (particularly
awful for all those backtracking parts of the story), being forced to watch
Valanice and Rosella elegantly strut their stuff at snail’s paces all over
the place — and, well, here is your answer to why «less» does not always mean «more» when it comes to
daring designer decisions. At least when you play more modern
brands of adventure games, e.g. most of TellTale’s products, the game kind of
self-justifies such a laconic approach to player freedom by insisting that
the major meat of the game lies in the player’s choices in specific
situations, rather than in the antiquated art of puzzle solving. King’s Quest VII, however, offers you
no freedom of choice whatsoever (except at the very end of the game, where
you have the ultimate choice of fucking up or not fucking up) — you are
railroaded into a single path from the beginning, and you proceed along that
path by clicking your left mouse button from time to time, not needing
anything else in the world. This is probably the single worst thing about King’s Quest VII — much worse than its alleged
«Disneyfication», and worse even than ‘Land Beyond Dreams’, if you can
believe this. |
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|
For almost a decade, the King’s Quest
series served the important function of heralding Sierra On-Line’s
breakthroughs in design, mechanics, and technological progress of computer
games. Other games would come along and introduce more memorable characters,
better puzzles, deeper and more meaningful atmospherics, but you could always
count on the next King’s Quest to show these other games the proper
road up the mountain. It was only too logical, then, that when
the time came to crash and burn, it would also be King’s Quest to take
the initiative and show all those other guys in the royal train just what it
takes to set your own pants on fire. King’s Quest VII was Sierra’s
first fully explicit attempt to make a game that could, perhaps, conquer the
hearts of millions rather than dozens or even hundreds of thousands —
by making it look more and more like an animated movie, and by making the
gameplay so easy that most of these millions would truly feel more like being
inside a movie than like playing a game. It was a gamble that tried to lure
in masses of new fans at the risk of alienating, or even downright offending,
quite a few old ones. And it was a gamble that, ultimately, did not pay off. When it comes to the old question of «why
did the adventure game genre die such a miserable death at the turn of the
millennium?», people often bring up the issue of extremely convoluted,
illogical, and nonsensical puzzles as one of their answers (e.g. the famous Old Man Murray essay
on the ‘Death Of Adventure Games’ which I will be sure to mention quite a few
times, particularly in the upcoming review of Gabriel Knight III). My
experience, however, suggests that this issue is but an unfortunate, and
often inavoidable, side effect which, moreover, has always been there from
the very beginning of the adventure game genre. What had not been
there from the very beginning, however, and what quite specifically arose in
the mid-to-late 1990s, was the lack of integrity, as the genre began
to doubt itself and make concessions to other, more popular ways of gaining
mass public attention. King’s Quest VII was, essentially, Sierra’s way
of admitting that the adventure game genre as it used to be — even as it used
to be just one year earlier, with games such as Gabriel Knight — was
doomed, and that the only way to save it was to dilute and compromise future
titles, in vague hopes that doing this would ensure their survival. To
paraphrase Churchill, Sierra was given the choice between extinction and
dishonour — it chose dishonour, and it would have extinction. That said, on the whole I do not think that
King’s Quest VII is an altogether bad experience. It is, by all
means, a bad game, and a dubious product of a wrong (morally wrong,
I’d say) designer and marketing strategy. But as an immersive digital
adventure, it still reflects a lot of the good things that made Sierra
products so magical. The gorgeous art, the fun animations, the pretty
soundtrack, the (sometimes) memorable and well-voiced characters, the cool
mix of dread and humor, all of that makes the game well worth revisiting from
time to time, if you can get it running in your DosBox or in your ScummVM
engines (a bit of a chore these days, as with all the games from the early
Windows era). Besides, if anything, it just gives you a good history lesson —
by being both fairly representative of what it used to be in the
mid-Nineties, and fairly unique against the background of everything
else that was going on in the mid-Nineties. Good times! |
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