This time we finished the first game in the King’s Quest series. And it was pretty cool. And even though there are remasters and remakes of the game available, I wanted to experience the original game as it would be played back in the 80s. And even though I was warned by multiple people that you die too much in this game, you can softlock yourself easily, that the game is frustrating… My experience was pretty good. Yes you can softlock yourself, but it’s pretty obvious when you do that. And if you save after every important event, it’s pretty easy to reload and fix your game state immediately. Also the game is pretty small, it’s easy to complete the whole game in minutes from the very beginning once you’ve figured out the puzzles and mapped the world.
Speaking of mapping. It was a cool experience on its own to go and make a map of the whole world like in the good old text adventure times. It probably took me the most amount of time in the playthrough, but it helped quite a lot. I would take me way more time to complete the game without the map.
And about the puzzles: I’m somewhat proud of myself that I managed to figure out almost everything on my own. I was ready to use a lot of hints, but I only used them twice. I don’t think I’d be able to figure those out on my own. And I blame the game’s graphics and the lack of the ability to “look around” like in normal text adventurers.
And looks like there are quite a few puzzles left unsolved, we finished the game with the score of 114/158, I couldn’t figure out a couple of puzzles before completing the main quest. But we still can do it next time, because…
Next Friday we’ll try out the enhanced EGA (SCI) version of the game, with improved graphics, proper sounds, and point-and-click controls instead of the text input. And if we have some time after that, we’ll also check out the fan-made completely redrawn and fully voiced remake from AGD Interactive.
