It is an honor to be the first gamer on Backlogged dot com to write a review for the 1998 licensed Game Boy Color game based on the box office flop animated film Quest For Camelot. My dad took me to see this movie in theaters when it first came out and I remember liking it a lot, enough to want the Game Boy game. But I admit that I was completely unable to find all five of the farmer’s chickens in the first level during my several attempts at this dinky little game and ultimately put it aside every time. When I saw it came to Nintendo Online’s emulator on the Switch this month, I decided to let my big adult brain have a go at it.

Now that I’ve played it through, I honestly cannot blame my childhood self for having trouble. Quest For Camelot is an adventure game with clumsy controls, big hit boxes, and poor presentation at best. When it was clear what I had to do, the game’s puzzles and mysteries were actually a little clever, but most of the time I was left scratching my head at obtuse or non-existent instruction (including during the game’s final boss, who is invincible in his final phase, the win condition for which is not even hinted at anywhere). More trial and error was required than I had the tolerance for so I was very grateful to be playing this on an emulator where I could freely rewind and load save states; I am not ashamed to admit that, this game made so little sense sometimes. Shout-out to Weasel_Bob on GameFAQs who wrote the only guide I could find online for this game 23 years ago. I only referenced the guide when I was really, truly stuck but that happened about four times in a game that took me maybe six hours to play. So thanks Bob, I hope you’re doing well out there.

Visually the game is unremarkable. The still illustrations during the narrative portions are clumsy but I admit they have their own charm in their old age. The text walls during those same portions were a questionable choice and I honestly don’t think I could have read them if I was playing on original hardware. The music is enough to drive someone batty; there are so few songs in the entire game that even boss fights share the same repetitive tune as villages and almost all of them were tonally inappropriate for what was happening. Fighting through a vermin infested cave full of blood pools? Time for the lullaby song.

I have very little good to say about this game, but I was weirdly compelled to play it. I can’t think of any reasons to rate it higher than two stars but… I had fun here, somehow, and that’s what matters.