King's Quest: A Faithful Reimagining

As a recent point-and-click adventure fan, I do enjoy the King's Quest series and have made my way through a good amount of few of them, but the interest in the genre sparked from my love of Telltale and this entry in the King's Quest zeitgeist.

Before I even knew this was a long running adventure filled with twists and turns, familial drama, and humorous death scenarios, I knew of the 2015 reboot and its similar legacy.

The humor, the puzzles, the fan service within the story, there is something for everyone in this package. Devote fans of the series will enjoy the references and the retelling of some of the key releases and new players can enjoy the clever puzzles and beautiful art style.

My love for this style of not-too-serious adventure games is satisfied with this one game, and I do wish for a future where a sequel or successor to this game is released. For now, 5 episodes is enough to keep me at bay, and multiple endings allowing for repeated playthroughs helps the lack of a sequel feel justified.

King's Quest 2015: Heir Apparent

King’s Quest is one of the oldest gaming franchises as it dates back to the 8-bit gaming era on IBM PCs and Commadore 64, but it’s not very well known being a PC exclusive series. It also hasn’t been updated in a couple decades, so to see Sierra themselves publish this franchise got people excited, but King’s Quest landed in an era when The Walking Dead and Telltale Games way of doing adventure games reigned supreme. King’s Quest is a retelling of the life of King Graham and his family and his struggle to rebuild the kingdom of Daventry.

Chapter 1 starts out great with Graham trying to take down a dragon and steal a magic mirror. Graham’s past adventures are told through older Graham telling them to his granddaughter voiced by Christopher Lloyd. The typical adventure game stuff happens with walking around, talking to people, examining objects, trying to figure out which objects go where to progress, and the occasional button tapping and switch pulling. Chapter 1 has an action-oriented beginning segment and then the rest is set in Daventry with lots of backtracking and object hunting which I am not a fan of. I prefer The Walking Dead style of adventure games in which you walk around the immediate area, discover a few things, and have dialog choices and lots of scripted gameplay. Even games like Life is Strange does the exploration just right. I feel King’s Quest relies on this too heavily and it drags the game down in later chapters.

Once you get to Daventry you have to complete a series of trials to become King and you meet pretty much every main character in the game. I found the humor to be nice if not cheesy, the voice acting was great and the art style is decent, but the graphics are seriously dated. I also found some of the object hunting very vague and hard to figure out what to do and this was present through every chapter. I also didn’t like how you couldn’t skip dialog and cut scenes in the first chapter only. Outside of the constant backtracking through Daventry, the game is well balanced and fun. There are a few logic puzzles thrown in for good measure too.

Chapter 2 is where things fall flat with just a giant cave area to explore and you must rescue some of the characters, but it’s not explained that you can lose all the characters for the rest of the game if you don’t do things in a certain order. The object hunting vagueness is never more annoying than in Chapter 2 with the entire chapter completion relying on this solely. I could never figure out what objects were supposed to do what and go where and sometimes I flat out missed objects. You are supposed to sleep every day and each day the characters lose health. I didn’t know this until after day 3 and I lost two characters. Eventually, I found out I did everything completely wrong and was left with one character and the rest are out of the story throughout the entire game. It’s very unfair and difficult and wasn’t really all that fun.

Chapter 3 is probably the best as it feels more like other adventure games. A little bit of object hunting, but mostly story and action sequences. It was really fun and the story at this point was picking up and felt faster paced. Then when Chapter 4 hit it slowed completely down with nothing but puzzles. There are about 20 or so puzzles in this chapter and some are easy and some just make zero sense no matter how you look at it. It was better than object hunting as this chapter had the least amount of that including backtracking. Chapter 5 mixes everything up as the story concludes but you go back to exploring the same Daventry as Chapter 1 all over again and it’s just so tedious and boring. The ending consists of insanely difficult logic puzzles, a few are fun, but most of them make no sense. Then the game ends with an object hunting epilogue chapter that is also a chore fest.

King’s Quest just couldn’t pick one style of gameplay. One chapter is object hunting heavy, while another is all story and action, and the next is all puzzles. It’s very disorienting and makes the game feel like a chore to play despite the interesting characters and fun stories. I loved hearing Christopher Lloyd speak and there were a few nice plot twists, but nothing too crazy. The story is forgettable for sure but has a nice conclusion that doesn’t have a cliffhanger. But who is this game for? King’s Quest fans for sure, and maybe adventure game fans, but fans of just modern adventure games might be turned off by the old school shortcomings of this game.

Overall, King’s Quest is a fun 10-hour romp through Medieval times and following the goofy King Graham and co. through their adventures is fun while it lasts. The game suffers from poor pacing, indecisive gameplay choices, dated visuals, and some incredibly vague puzzles. With the small price tag these days, this is a fun weekend play through if you want something to veg out on or play with someone by your side. I would have wished the dialog choices had more meaning as most of them are pointless no matter what you chose and there is no real way to sway to the story outside of Chapter 2’s character starving mechanic. I enjoyed King’s Quest, but there’s just so much more it could have been.

Written with the disclaimer that I’ve never actually touched the game with my own hands, just absorbed dozens of YouTube playthroughs on it. I’ve seen how different decisions play out and the whole she-bang.

I don’t like to write negative reviews much. I just don’t think I have many interesting things to say about something bad. I find it so much more compelling to find a weird, forgotten game and polish off the dirt to find out what does work in it. Even beyond that, I’ve just always felt uncomfortable bandying about my negative opinion as fact. Sometimes I’ll just not mention problems I had with a game because I’m riding so high on the positives. I rewrote this review several times, adding or removing various “in my opinions” or “no disrespects” and so on, just to buttress my ranting with some “not that you shouldn’t like it!” cowarding out.

But it’s just… this just doesn’t work. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s one of the most ambitious storytelling ideas of all time. The creative team revealed that their goal with the game was to create the “real” King’s Quest story, with the main games being fairy tales based off of true events. Through this vein, King Graham retells the story of his life, from his application to knighthood, to a revamped version of the events of KQ2, to filling in gaps to the timeline, to more. Coupled with this, the game takes several, tragic creative risks with its story in its final chapter. As Graham winds down the story, his mind starts fading. Recurring characters vanish mid-narration as Graham forgets about them. The land of Daventry gets more sparse, and the frustration and panic he feels trying to figure out what he’s forgetting is… crushing. It’s an astoundingly ambitious way to use a character that’s supposed to be the Mario of adventure games. And I do respect how that story is delivered. This is for sure a buttress paragraph (as previously stated), but I do genuinely think the “King Graham Vs Getting Old” plot is well done.

But the writing… the writing falls apart. In its efforts to endear audiences to this version of Graham, he becomes a hyperactive weenie who loves to have silly victory dances. There’s worse places to write from, but it quickly becomes grating and never quite goes away over the game’s five chapters.

This is followed by Queen Valanice. How does one adapt the character of Valanice, who’s had so many different interpretations and conflicting characterizations across the KQ franchise, into someone consistent? Well, the solution KQ 2015 comes up with is that Valanice is actually twins. A fun-loving, creative one and a smart, serious one. Choose the one you want to marry, the other gets tossed off a cliff. No need to write a complex character here, just choose the archetype you like and shove the other into the abyss! And since they’re twins, we don’t actually have to write a lot of different dialogues or make new character models or pay different voice actors for the modern day, Old Queen. It’s almost like your choice didn’t matter at all.

But I think what ultimately grates on me is Alexander. One of the most tragic characters of KQ lore. King’s Quest 3 is one of the most ingenious video games ever made. Oppressively hard, aggressively harrowing, and a stunning depiction of living in an abusive environment. I would go as far to say it’s a masterful achievement of gaming. Even the fan remake, for all its minor improvements to the experienced, refuses to offer any relief in the oppressive, constricting, bleak tone of the game. The impact of this game is reflected in the wider franchise and in Alexander’s character. The expanded universe notes that Alexander never manages to see himself as more than a slave, viewing “Prince Alexander” as a mask for the real him. He doesn’t get a perfect happy ending. He just soldiers on, trying to be the person other people want him to be. There’s so much fertile ground with this character, from his relationship with Graham, his mother, his sister… The entire complicated web around Alexander is a rich tapestry waiting to be explored. And so is Rosella! While she’s the protagonist of a few games, she deserves a greater dig into her psychology just as much as Alexander.

Instead, Alexander’s an emo teen embarrassed by his goofy father. He says “whatever” a lot, he whines, he’s sarcastic… he’s nothing. And the game wants to get into the complexity of that relationship and untangle the strain between them. But it just doesn’t know how. Maybe this is a ridiculous way to react to a character changing in a reboot. Maybe I’m overblowing the issue. But to me, having Alexander rolling his eyes and muttering “Sure thing, Pops” is just a fundamental misunderstanding of the source material AND of how abuse works. Alexander was raised by a monster, so he’s sassy and kinda mean instead of kind and goofy.

But hey, this is the “real” version of the King’s Quest timeline, so clearly I’m just full of shit.

I don’t like to phrase writing in this way, I don’t like to think about a story in terms of failures, I always try to approach a story through the idea that all choices are intentional and with some kind of merit. But KQ 2015 just absolutely doesn’t have the writing talent to carefully approach the abusive history of Alexander with nuance or care. It doesn’t have the talent to write complex female characters for Valanice or Rosella. It doesn’t have the talent to make Graham compelling. It just doesn’t.

The expensive voice acting from Christopher Lloyd and Wallace Shawn is well-done. The ideas behind the game are ambitious and I do admire what it’s going for. But… when you arrogantly call your reboot the “real” version of a franchise, I’m sorry, you need to be able to back that up. And this just doesn’t.

Any chance of Alexander or Rosella getting more complex stories in the KQ franchise was shuttered for good by this game. I’m not really gonna be able to let that go.