GOGathon: Sierra’s 1992

By 1992, Sierra’s graphical adventure credentials were well-established. After pioneering the form, first with the early King’s Quest games and then a range of other flagship series, they introduced their SCI scripting engine which would underpin most of their remaining adventures. The end of the 1980s found them producing more than ever, and then 1990 saw them take the plunge into full-fledged point-and-click, setting aside their old text parser after it had long since ceased to be cutting edge. 1991 found various hands at Sierra trying their hand in the brave new frontier of point-and-click, with mixed results.

1992’s crop of adventures enjoyed the benefits of an upgrade to the SCI system, SCI1.1. SCI0 had been the EGA graphics-based parser-powered adventures of the late 1980s, following the earlier AGI-powered adventures, and SCI1 had introduced VGA graphics and the new point-and-click system. SCI1.1 did a lot of backend housecleaning, which included setting up a brand new automated system for downscaling graphics to EGA, avoiding the need to do different versions of each game for different graphical standards. It also included better support for scaling spites, as well as support for including videos in games, like the prerendered 3D video that acts as the opening scene for King’s Quest VI.

This was ultimately an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary shift, and Sierra’s output for 1992 perhaps reflects this – it’s all sequels of established series rather than anything particularly bold. Let’s take in the year’s crop…

The Dagger of Amon Ra

Laura Bow’s second outing (following The Colonel’s Bequest) saw Sierra break with tradition somewhat: whereas the vast majority of Sierra’s ongoing series had been associated with a core designer or a pair of designers, much as a series of novels is sold in part on the reputation of its author, here Roberta Williams stepped back (credited solely as a “creative consultant”).

The initial plan, as recounted in a rather informative retrospective interview with the creative leads from the Campo Santo Quarterly, was for Josh Mandel (the voice of King Graham in King’s Quest V!) to write and design the game – a prospect he found daunting given the bar set by The Colonel’s Bequest and the fact that he had more of a knack for comedy writing than designing mysteries. Bruce Balfour had been lured to Sierra, having previously worked at Interplay contributing to various adventure games and RPGs – including Wasteland, the forerunner to the Fallout series – but the plan was that he’s write for a comedy game called Little Larry’s Guide To Life, a reinvention of the Leisure Suit Larry series aimed at a teenage audience with the intention of giving them advice about difficult topics like divorce, school, relationships and whatnot. (I guess the vision was some sort of edutainment take on Porky’s.)

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As Mandel tells the story, this put him in a bind – he thought Little Larry was an absolute dogshit idea (and I don’t disagree), but he felt it was outside of his wheelhouse with The Dagger of Amon Ra. The then-head of Sierra’s writing department made a call to switch the writing team around – putting Mandel on Little Larry and Balfour on Dagger, since Balfour had written mystery comics before and was more comfortable with that sort of format. Then Williams fired the department head for doing the switcheroo without consulting her, put Mandel in charge of the department, and then allowed Mandel to cancel Little Larry and put Balfour on Dagger with a promise that Mandel would oversee Balfour’s work and perhaps step in to give it a bit of a tune-up in the humour department if necessary.

In the interview Mandel seems confused as to why Williams would fire the department head for making such a change without permission and then allow Mandel to go ahead once he asked permission, but I think there’s good reasons why that would be the case. For one thing, doing the reverse of what you have agreed with your boss you’ll do without checking in is just plain asking for it; regardless of whether you think the boss’s decision was reasonable or not, changing up plans behind someone’s back creates a trust issue, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for people to decide they’d prefer to nip that in the bud rather than allowing a corporate culture where that sort of double-dealing is accepted.

For another, like I said, Sierra sold its games in part on the back of the names of its designers in these days. Changing up the designers on a project potentially sabotages the marketing on it. More broadly, Sierra knew the value of name recognition – a bad Laura Bow game could not just tank the series, but also mar the reputation of Roberta Williams herself, whose name was closely attached to the first game. (Recall that we’re talking about a pre-Wikipedia time, where even if a customer did remember that there was a Laura Bow series entry that Roberta didn’t design, the odds of them remembering that this was The Dagger of Amon Ra was lower than today.) Williams presumably gave the job to Mandel because she trusted him with it – for this department head to move Mandel off completely undermined that.

So much for the development backstory – what of the game’s story? Well, after graduating from Tulane, Laura’s decided to head to New York to take up a new job as a journalist for the New York Daily Register News Tribune. As her first story, she’s assigned to look into a mysterious burglary at the Leyendecker Museum. The Dagger of Amon Ra, a fabulous Egyptian artifact recovered by the famed Pippin Carter (cousin to the more famous Harold), has vanished – much to the consternation of the authorities, Carter himself, and Dr. Ptahsheptut “Tut” Smith of the Cairo Museum, who had been lobbying for its return to Egypt.

Making her way to a swanky reception at the museum, Laura’s evening of investigation becomes more complicated when she discovers the first of many corpses she’ll encounter tonight – fresh corpses, that is, rather than the millennia-old mummies that are the museum’s usual stock in trade! Can Laura uncover the truth behind the killings? Can she recover the Dagger of Amon Ra? And can she avoid being killed by ravenous rats, flesh-stripping beetles, a black-robed murderer, an underground sect of Egyptian solar cultists, or a poooisonous snake?

Whereas the original Colonel’s Bequest was an experiment in presenting an adventure game with almost no actual adventure content, The Dagger of Amon Ra is a bit more of a traditional affair, particularly in its opening acts, with much more in the way of traditional puzzles. Most of these are comparatively reasonable, although a few are absurd; there’s a bit where to open a particular mummy case you need to use as special snake-catching device to hook the little Uraeus-snek that sticks out of the top of the case. In fact, most of the fiddliest puzzles in the game are in the chase sequence, which is particularly annoying because, what with it being a chase sequence, it doesn’t give you that much time to think about your action and whenever you make s wrong choice it kills you.

Things become a bit less conventional once you get to the museum itself, an environment in which Balfour really went to a lot of effort to make the game responsive to your actions – so different things will happen in a different order depending on what order you yourself do things in. This has a minor return of the “clock to indicate passing time” mechanic from The Colonel’s Bequest, and just as in that game there’s mild issues where the game often either sticks at one time without really giving any guidance on what needs to happen to advance things, or jumps forward suddenly after you do something innocuous and it’s not apparent why.

Perhaps the biggest departure from conventional point and click design is the coroner’s inquest at the end, where you must answer questions about the plot to demonstrate that you understood it. A holdover from days when people took notes whilst playing adventure games as standard, this part has aged poorly – particularly given that Laura has a notebook in her inventory, but this doesn’t auto-fill with information the way we are used to games doing with character diaries these days.

Perhaps the most egregious part of this bit of the game design is that Laura has a notebook, but doesn’t take any actual notes in it beyond subject headings for use in conversation (and hieroglyphics for use in solving one puzzle), nor is there any means of taking in-game notes, nor are you allowed to consult her notebook during the inquest. Worst of all, Laura and Steve both get a good look at the mysterious murderer who chases Laura throughout Act V at the end of that Act, but the player doesn’t get to see, so in the inquest the player is actually acting with less information than Laura herself possesses. That’s not on.

The writing of the game also has issues, with the tone of the thing veering around wildly. Sierra games were often a bit jokey, but Dagger of Amon Ra slams incoherently between trying to be a serious murder mystery and being a yuck-it-up laugh-a-minute parody of the same. At its best, the comedy has a clear view on the excesses of colonialism – in particular, the way the cultural treasures of Egypt were looted with a passive Egyptian government under the British thumb rubber-stamping the process. At its worst the comedy is, well… racist.

Detective O’Riley is an Irish cop complete with “sure and begorrahs”, Lo Fat runs the local Chinese laundry, and literally all of the Egyptians you encounter in the game are secretly part of the cult of Amon Ra (and don’t appear to have even heard of Islam). In the case of Lo Fat, the joke is that he was born in New Jersey and most of his stereotypical presentation is an act, but since the act never slips this feels like a post hoc justification for making a bunch of racist jokes.

Between this and some just plain janky bits of implementation – I got really stuck trying to overhear the conversations which you need to listen to in order to advance the plot, because the mechanic for doing so is really obtuse and I don’t know how anyone would know to do it without looking up a walkthrough (and many walkthroughs aren’t much help in explaining how it is done) – and I’d have to say that whilst The Dagger of Amon Ra isn’t a total embarrassment, it’s also no surprise that the series ended here – among other things, the total tonal confusion as to what the gsmes actually are (is this a spoof or is this a serious mystery?) would make producing a followup astonishingly difficult, doubly so if you tried to make a sequel which also followed the lead of The Colonel’s Bequest.

That said, Phantasmagoria did manage to do the whole “climactic chase scene” thing with somewhat more panache, so the ideas workshopped here did at least end up being refined and reused interestingly. Josh Mandel’s later Sierra credits would remain in the point-and-click field; he’d co-design Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist with Al Lowe and Space Quest 6 with Scott Murphy.

As for Balfour, his next game for Sierra would be the ambitious Outpost – a sort of “SimCity on Mars”, before SimCity 3000 actually did that. Much-anticipated and much-hyped, it got people really excited about its promised gameplay and hard SF realism (it had an actual NASA scientist acting as a consultant and everything!) It even had glowing reviews from games journalist who had been given privileged access to a pre-release build.

Then on release day things went to shit. You see, the release ended up being rushed out the door – to such an extent that the version which shipped was not only broken to the point of being unwinnable and had an entirely useless manual, but it was actually missing a bunch of features which were implemented in the beta the early reviewers got to play and had been assured would be in the finished game, not all of which have been restored by subsequent patches.

This made Outpost one of the more infamous commercial bombs in mid-1990s videogames. It’s a shame that Gamergate would later a) make the phrase “ethics in games journalism” and b) popularise the notion that the problem in games journalism is being too kind to indie developers, when in fact this was an egregious example of the real problem with games journalism: namely, that many games journalism sites (or, back in the 1990s, magazines) end up in an altogether too close relationships with major publishers, who they are loathe to anger because those publishers represent big stacks of advertising money and exclusive previews, both of which can go away if you bug them.

Outlets which had given Outpost shining reviews based on features which were not and would never be implemented in the final game ended up with massive egg on their faces. No small blame lies with Sierra here, of course – they’d pulled a bait and switch on the reviewers as much as they did customers – but it’s still a really, really bad look.

For a more modern comparison, imagine if Aliens: Colonial Marines had come out as it did, crammed to the gills with appalling bugs, and a bunch of gaming outlets had published reviews for it based on the 2011 demo for it (which, despite being labelled as in-game footage, presented a much nicer-looking and more functional game than the thing which actually shipped). Sure, if that had happened people would have been absolutely unconscionably shitty about it, because the Internet knows no restraint or sense of proportion, but the general idea that the reviews were seriously flawed and misled the public would not be out of line.

As it stood, Outpost rapidly switched from being the new hotness to a punchline, making “worst of” lists and inspiring reviews like this charming thing (from an actual CD-ROM magazine! – yes, back in the day before we had the Tubes of You we got our gaming commentary videos on CDs like this with little menus presenting them in a magazine style).

Funnily enough, Balfour would exit Sierra after this, and it’s not hard to guess why. It’s a shame, because – to loop things back to Laura Bow after this fun little diversion – it’s evident that with a bit more practice Balfour could have been a pretty decent point-and-click adventure designer, but his sidestep into Outpost doomed him to never put out a new adventure through Sierra.

Quest For Glory III: Wages of War

After the events of Trial By Fire, your character in Quest For Glory was named the Prince of Shapeir by the Sultan. Your travels were not over, however: Rakeesh, the Liontaur Paladin (think like a centaur, only with lion bits instead of horse features and a lion’s head and rippling muscles worthy of a Chuck Tingle cover) who ran the Shapeir Hero’s Guild with Uhura, is summoned back to his home of Tarna – the greatest city-state in Fricana. (Think Central-to-East Africa in terms of ecosystems and cultures.)

You decide to accompany Rakeesh, along with Uhura, who has decided that the time has come to return to her people, the Simbani, with her baby son Simba. As it turns out, Rakeesh is a big deal in Tarna: he used to be King here, and was the first King of Tarna to ever step down voluntarily from that office in the wake of a great war between Liontaurs and Demons, when he decided that the Demon threat was not ended and he must venture forth and quest to end the threat once and for all.

Meeting Rakeesh’s wife Kreesha, a powerful magician and a member of Tarna’s Council of Judgement, you learn that there are dark tidings in the land. The Simbani are up in arms, complaining that the mysterious shapeshifting magic-users, the Leopardmen, have stolen the sacred Spear of Death. The Simbani are old allies of Tarna, and Rajah, Rakeesh’s brother who won the throne after Rakeesh stepped down, intends to honour that alliance and lead Tarna to war – especially after a peace mission sent by the Council was attacked by unknown assailants, with Reeshaka – Rakeesh and Kreesha’s warrior daughter who accompanied the expedition – missing, presumed dead. Rakeesh is not so sure that war is the answer here, and he enlists you to help him ensure that the city does not go to war. But is the situation as it seems, or is the dire hand of the Demon-Wizard from Rakeesh’s past behind everything?

This is a game which wasn’t supposed to exist; when Lori Anne Cole and Corey Cole planned out the original Quest For Glory plot arc, they planned for four games, with the next one after Trial By Fire being Shadows of Darkness. (Indeed, there’s a plug for that at the end of Trial By Fire!) However, after Trial By Fire was completed the Coles weren’t so sure about launching into a significantly darker-toned game immediately afterwards. Thus, Wages of War was devised to slot into the series in between Trial By Fire and Shadows of Darkness.

Unfortunately, Lori Anne Cole’s attention was divided during the development process, since the VGA remake of Quest For Glory I was also being cooked up for release in 1992 and she was tasked with handling both. The result of this is that Wages of War feels a little hollow and stripped-back when compared to the previous two games. There’s no side quests to speak of or other diversionary activities, there’s no Hero’s Guild in town (which you’d otherwise expect to be a significant tentpole location given the important role played by the Guild in previous games), and everything seems just a little sparse and rushed.

The ending, in particular, seems very rushed and perfunctory compared to the conclusion of the previous two games, with your character being summarily teleported away by hidden forces – a cliffhanger setting up the action of Shadows of Darkness. In addition, major locations in the game seem outright unfinished – particularly the city of Tarna. You’re told that the city has a western side and eastern side, with the Liontaurs primarily living on the eastern side and humans and other residents of the city living in the western half. It’s pretty evident that the original design included visits to the Liontaur district – there’s paths headed in that direction and everything – but it simply isn’t implemented.

This is also apparent in the general lack of direction; there’s several points in the game where it feels like you’re left a bit adrift, and it’s not at all clear what you’re supposed to be doing to progress things. Other aspects of the game seem to lack polish. I had to give up on trying to import my character and run them as a Paladin, start over, and re-import them as a Wizard, because the game seems to inherit D&D assumptions that Paladins are variant Fighters, whereas in the previous game any class could become a Paladin if you completed the game honourably. (This may be an error in Trial By Fire, mind: it could be the original intention was that only Fighters could become Paladins.) This didn’t lock me out of any of my magic abilities, except in combat, and since my character largely got through combat off the back of their magic, this was kind of a problem.

It doesn’t help that the combat system in this is still kind of awful. It’s based on clickable buttons instead of the keyboard, but still doesn’t show much sign of development over that in the second game. Why Sierra still considered these so-called “arcade” sections in their adventure games at all acceptable when it’s clear that they’re a janky mess which don’t hold a candle to actual arcade fighting sequences is a mystery to me. You can, at least, dial back the difficulty on these, so there’s that. The monster selection is not up to much – you have big ants, you have cavemen, you have demon worms, you have a poooisonous snake with wings.

The game isn’t all bad, mind. An African-themed fantasy game set in an Africa which displays a varied range of cultures – the forest-dwelling Leopardmen, the semi-nomadic (in that they move about between different village sites to follow their cattle across the savannah) Simbani, and the Egyptian-themed Tarna (where the Liontaurs, naturally, worship the Egyptian lion-headed goddess Sekhmet) are diverse enough to evade the typical pitfall of depicting Africa as just being this homogeneous mass.

They kind of mar it by having the list of Fricanan region guides in the Famous Explorer’s Correspondence Course booklet that comes with the game including East Fricana (where the game is set), West Fricana, North Fricana, South Fricana, and… East Los Angeles, which so far as I can tell is a “lol black people live in LA” joke. Not appropriate, not cool.

Still, this one slip aside the depictions of the various cultures in the game are pretty good. The Liontaurs have an interesting setup where the government of Tarna works kind of like how a lion pride works: the Council are the real power, making the laws and passing judgement and advising the King, and they’re all women, whilst the King traditionally gets the spot by besting the previous King in battle.

As for the Simbani, who we see much more of than the Leopardmen (who, as a wholly magic-based culture, have hidden their village so finding them in the first place is a challenge), there’s an interesting thing going on there where it’s clear that there’s a mixture of reactionary and radical forces in their tribe – the reactionary forces fearing magic and putting restrictions on women, whilst representatives like Uhura and the clan storyteller trying to nudge the Simbani towards a different way. Whilst your character’s actions do help inspire them to a different outlook in the long run, it is at least good that it’s made clear that this is allying with existing forces pushing for change in that context.

Specifically, when it comes to Uhura’s backstory we learn that she learned to be a warrior, but also wanted to become a mother; within the Simbani, she couldn’t have done this, since they expect women to marry in order to become mothers and they have a rule that a woman can’t simultaneously be a warrior and a wife. So she left on her adventures, had Simba, and then came back and presented them with a fait accompli: she’s a warrior, she’s a mum, get used to it.

Simbani traditions also relate to your first major romantic interaction within the series, with Johari. Johari is the chief’s daughter of the Leopardmen, and is captured at one point. To find the Leopardman village, you must free her and then, once she is free, persuade her to take you there. Before the Simbani will allow you to let her out of the special magic-dispelling cage they’ve trapped her in, however, they require that you pay her “bride price” – a traditional means of acquiring the freedom of a captured person. This doesn’t speak to an attractive aspect of the Simbani’s history, though the Laibon, their leader, doesn’t seem to entirely approve of it – he’s set the price high, in part to prevent his son Yesufu from impulsively buying Johari.

You end up paying the bride price for her, but the game fortunately doesn’t take this in the grim direction they could have taken it in. Johari runs away more or less immediately, and makes no bones about refusing to consider your marriage as legitimate (and why should she, when that isn’t how her culture does it?), and generally acts with agency to broker a meeting between you and her father. You can kiss her at one point, but that’s after you and she have had several interactions, after she’s befriended you and realised you just paid the bride price to give her a pretext to get away and you don’t intend to hold it over her, and – crucially – after you talk to her about romance to get consent before you go in for the kiss.

In addition, the Simbani don’t seem to put too much weight on the paying of the “bride price” – it’s no impediment to Yesufu and Johari marrying, after the process of seeking peace draws them together to allow them to become a bridge between their peoples. This avoids the Simbani from becoming entirely unsympathetic over this point – it makes the bride price seem like an eccentric old tradition they never legislated away, rather than something they take so seriously as to render Yesufu’s engagement to Johari illegitimate.

Overall, this plot point gets into thorny territory but comes out of it remarkably well. My main reservation about it is that it seems to conflate bride price in traditional African societies with prisoner ransom; I admit to being ignorant of the history here.

Elsewhere, the writing isn’t as consistent. It’s not so much that things get outright offensive so much as sometimes things get goofy – as though the game were prepared from a rushed draft where Lori hadn’t had a chance to go back and reconsider some of the jokes in light of the atmosphere. The tat stall in the bazaar of Tarna, for instance, has a World War I gas mask for sale (you can’t buy it), and the apothecary in town is a hippy in a tie-dyed shirt. There’s just a few too many flippant references to our world compared to the previous games.

A somewhat more amusing moment comes from a random encounter, where you could potentially run into Arne, an aardvark. This intrepid, extremely drunk earth-pig is drawn in a manner that’s very obviously paying tribute to Cerebus the Aarvark; though it’s important to note that the game was developed and released when Cerebus was still in the early phases of the Mothers and Daughters story arc – and, in particular, before the Reads and Minds portions of that arc had begun.

It’s in those two where Dave Sim ripped off his mask to reveal the glowing, radioactive misogyny which was lurking underneath, and prior to that the comic had more or less the reverse message to the sexism and homophobia Sim would promote going forwards. The two arcs before Mothers and Daughters – Jaka’s Story and Melmoth – are respectively a feminist narrative and a deeply sympathetic depiction of the last days of Oscar Wilde. The latter, Sim more or less brushes aside, and the former ends up subjected to extensive retcons – as do other feminist moments in the comments, like the information Cerebus receives at the end of Church and State – to fit Sim’s later worldview.

I felt kind of bad for Lori Cole playing through that encounter; given the values she had tried to express over the course of the Quest For Glory series (bar the occasional slip like the “East LA” thing), it seems likely that she’d have been among the many who either gave up on Cerebus after the rant in Reads, and equally likely that she’d have liked Cerebus for the more thoughtful plots that the comic had focused on until this point. Still, Arne is pretty cute.

In general, aside from the combat system Wages of War does a decent job of converting the action of Quest For Glory into the new point and click era, with one major exception. If you click on the “talk” icon and then click on another character, you end up with a set of subject to ask them about. Yes, good, fine. But these won’t be all the subjects you can actually discuss with them! There’s also a set of topics you can raise in conversation and tell them about, but to access that you have to click the mouth icon on yourself, as though you’re talking to yourself! This is astonishingly out of step not only with how other point and click games had been dealing with this for years at this point, but also how Sierra’s own point and click adventures going back to King’s Quest V had dealt with the matter. I don’t know what the Coles were thinking, but they should have thought about it more.

That’s the story of Wages of War, really. A lot of the problems with it could have been dealt with by a little more time and thought – but Sierra didn’t give Lori and Corey that breathing room, loading the remake project on them too. As a result, Wages of War is considered one of the weaker Quest For Glory games; certainly, I like it less than any of the others I’ve tried so far, and played through with a walkthrough solely so I could export my character for Shadows of Darkness, which I understand is regarded as something of a return to form, and according to some might just be the high point of the whole series.

King’s Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow

Late in King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder!, King Graham met a certain Cassima – a princess of the Land of the Green Isles who had been taken captive by Mordack and worked as his ragged scullery maid. Cassima had done what she could for Graham’s family, who had been kidnapped and miniaturised by Mordack to try and get Prince Alexander to reverse the spell he’d cast on Mordack’s brother Manannan in King’s Quest III: To Heir Is Human which had turned Manannan into a cat.

After Mordack’s defeat, it became evident that Cassima and Alexander had feelings for each other – Cassima having sympathised with Alexander’s plight and Alexander coming to cherish Cassima as the only friendly presence in Mordack’s fortress. Cassima promised that on her return to the Green Isles she would arrange for an invitation for Alexander to visit… but in the intervening time since King’s Quest V, no invitation has come.

Poor Alexander is disconsolate, which does not go unnoticed by the magic mirror of Daventry Castle – the one retrieved by Graham in King’s Quest I: Quest For the Crown, which summoned Graham to save Valanice in King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne, and allowed Princess Rosella to embark on her adventure in King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella. The mirror grants Alexander a vision of Cassima, evidently pining for him, and Alexander decides that he should be proactive and set out for the Land of the Green Isles.

A storm comes in and Alexander’s ship is wrecked; the Prince finds himself washed up on the shore of the Isle of the Crown, which as the name implies is the capital of the Land where its royal family resides. Visiting the palace, Alexander discovers that Cassima is secluded in mourning, for her parents have died suddenly, and the palace – including Cassima – is now in the hands of the sinister grand vizier… none other than Abdul Alhazred!

Yes, Abdul Alhazred. No mention is made of his authorship of the Necronomicon, nor is there much especially Lovecraftian content here beyond his name being applied to a magician, but that’s quite fun. It’s notable that Shadow of the Comet came out from Infogrames early in 1993, and I do wonder whether some at Sierra may have felt put out that they hadn’t snagged the licence from Chaosium and Arkham House for Call of Cthulhu point-and-click adventures first.

Anyway, you can see where all this is going: clearly, Alhazred had the old King and Queen done away with and has locked Cassima up under the pretext that she’s in mourning; as her mourning period comes to an end, he advances a plot to marry her in order to become King, at which point he can arrange for another “accident” to get rid of her. Alexander must hustle to explore the Land of the Green Isles, expose Alhazred’s plot, and save Cassima!

King’s Quest VI was primarily credited to Roberta Williams, but it’s actually a collaborative work between Williams and Jane Jensen, who did the lion’s share of the writing and turning the design document that she and Williams worked up into something programmers could take and code into the SCI engine. This was therefore kind of a make-or-break moment for Jensen – screw this up, and she’d have not just made a hash of one of Sierra’s flagship lines of adventure games, but the series specifically associated with the studio’s cofounder.

As it stands, it seems like Sierra were entirely happy with Jensen’s performance here, since after this she got to have a series of her own in the form of the classic Gabriel Knight games, and to be honest I can’t say that isn’t fair. Though I am going to complain about a few things below, most of the things I’m going to complain about are holdovers from the design approach of old King’s Quest, and I found this episode the richest, most satisfying, longest, and all-round most enjoyable entry in the series I’ve played so far.

In the storytelling stakes the game is another strong step ahead, with Williams and Jensen crafting a world which combines the fairytale whimsy of classic King’s Quest, Greek and Celtic mythology, and a dose of Arabian Nights besides. Alexander’s quest to help Cassima is a strong theme throughout the game which helps give it structure, in general there’s plenty of reminders of Alhazred’s corrupt influence in the Land to ensure that, even though you don’t interact with him very much directly, you see his hand everywhere.

This is particularly true of his main agent, the genie Shamir, who uses his shapeshifting magic to spy and set traps for Alexander in various disguises, from mysterious merboys to spying ferrets to creepy old men or women to a poooisonous snake. There’s a neat way to tip you off that Shamir is there whilst keeping his disguises effective: Shamir has a curious golden glint to his eyes, which you’re shown in the first cut scene he appears in when you have your initial interview with Alhazred and which carries over to whatever form he adopts.

The writing here also has a solid sense of the series’ history. Late in the game you find implications that Alhazred belongs to a wider organisation of evil wizards – the Black Cloak Society – of which other members were going to be Manannan, Mordack, and a mysterious figure called Shadrack, and possibly also Hagatha from King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne, since there were apparently mentions in the official companion books that she was a sister to Manannan and Mordack.

This was a Jane Jensen idea, and Shadrack never showed up in any subsequent games, which feels like a missed opportunity – the idea of there being this hidden hand in the world that the royal family of Daventry kept inadvertently foiling (heck, maybe Lolotte from King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella could have been an associate member) would have been a fun basis for a future game, and also helps feel the world a bit more interconnected rather than these isolated regions which don’t really have much traffic with each other except when some Daventry toff wanders across the border.

Other interesting bits of setting colour include the idea that the seas of the Land of the Green Isles have strong currents in them, to the point where you cannot wade out far without being swept away, and there’s hints that this is because the Realm of the Dead is an actual geographical place in the world which the Green Isles happen to be in proximity to. Depending on which route you take through the game, you may end up visiting the Realm of the Dead, and a nice feature is that the entrance you to through is also depicted when you get killed earlier in the game as part of the death screen, so by the time you see it in the flesh it’s nice and dramatic.

That said, not every bit of worldbuilding is belaboured. The royal palace guards are all dog people. No explanation, none really needed, they just are. They are all very good doggos and extremely cute.

The graphics are tuned up here, and after the debacle of King’s Quest V‘s appalling voice acting Sierra realised they needed to get professionals in to do the job, and that’s quite welcome. A nice Easter egg comes in when Robby Benson, who voiced Beast in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, is voicing Prince Alexander – who encounters a King’s Quest take on the same story at some point in the game.

Again, the writing makes sure that Beauty doesn’t lack agency: yes, you go and make a sales pitch to her to try and persuade her to go marry Beast, but you don’t mention the curse that’s been put on you to require you to find a bride for Beast until she’s already made it very clear that she is super into the idea of doing this anyway; Beauty in fact comes across as being super horny for the idea of meeting a man turned into a pigdude by magic and tending to him, so there’s that at least.

I feel like there’s a strong Quest For Glory influence here – not only is the plot point about Alhazred stealing important items from each island and blaming the other islands for the theft to seed conflict literally taken from the core conflict of Wages of War, but the “dazzle” spells used by Shamir seem to be inspired by the Dazzle spell in the Quest For Glory magic system.

The big shift in game design this around has Williams and Jensen playing more with alternate puzzle solutions, as well as being more generous with the writing – with the death scenes usually giving some form of clear guidance on what you did wrong and maybe a nudge in the right direction, and multiple ways of getting useful information too. There’s a bit where you are posed a riddle and must give the correct answer, and the answer can both be inferred from the riddle itself on its own terms (as should be the case with a riddle that isn’t cheating) or discovered earlier in the game as a scrap of paper that’s been separated from the riddle book it belongs to, which is quite nice. (It also helps that the puzzles this time around are more flavourful – my favourite might be the wordplay-based ones on the Isle of Wonder.)

The non-linear design even extended to including entire different paths through the game towards the end, with a shorter and a longer path available to beat Alhazred.  The branching point between the two paths is whether you spot that a small bundle of pixels on the bookshop’s counter which doesn’t particularly look like a book is, in fact, a book – specifically, a spellbook. (This is a bit of an exception – by and large the game is actually quite good at making sure there isn’t too much pixel-hunting, with important items standing out on the screen prominently.)

The short route requires no spellcasting on Alexander’s part at all, and gives a somewhat less satisfying ending than the longer route, which requires Alexander to master the spells in the book at crucial points. Given the role played by spells in To Heir Is Human, I think there’s quite a neat parallel here; Alexander doesn’t start the game with any enchantments and has apparently abandoned the practice of magic since the end of that game, perhaps as a response to his experiences with Manannan, and it’s interesting that he needs to accept these strange abilities in order to get the best ending.

That said, there are some issues with this. To get the absolute best ending variant, you need to acquire a lamp which matches the one Shamir resides in, so that Cassima’s loyal court jester can pull off a switcheroo to leave you with command of Shamir and the wishes his magic can enact. However, to know which lamp is the correct one, you need to watch a cut scene in which Shamir is commanded back into his lamp by Alhazred – which means that Alexander has to make use of knowledge he does not and cannot possibly have, but which the player does.

Indeed, the same is true of those puzzles which require the use of information in the accompanying document – a guidebook to the Land of the Green Isles which Alexander doesn’t possess. (You can come across copies of it stashed in Alhazred’s trunk during the endgame – which only highlights the point that Alexander’s been using information that he has no in-world way of obtaining.)

This sort of profound confusion on the part of Sierra – an inability or a refusal to recognise that the player’s knowledge and the character’s knowledge are two different things, and if you tell a story in which a character must do stuff on the basis of information they don’t have then you’ve introduced a plot hole to your story – is a perennial one, and feels like a particular quirk of Sierra to me – at least, they’re the only point and click adventure design house which seem to have steered hard into this particular paradox.

It’s a particular shame that the game does this, because there’s other bad habits of the King’s Quest series it manages to shake, or at the very least dial back. It’s really a breath of fresh air that there’s no “big empty wilderness” for you to explore this time around. There is a maze, but it’s eminently mappable – there’s even details of the layout provided in the manual – and the maze screens are much more clearly presented than the one in Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder!.

A nice fast travel system for journeying between the islands is provided – a magical map which allows him to teleport from island to island, but will only work on the shoreline of the islands in question. This also allows for an interesting plot point – the ferry which usually carried passengers between the islands is in a state of disrepair, after the various islands ended up in hostilities towards each other due to a spate of thefts devised by Alhazred, and this division and lack of communication is a significant thread running through the game.

But alas, just as you are getting used to the quality of life improvements, along comes one of the series’ absolute worst habits: the game going into an unwinnable state because you forgot to pick something up several screens back, and now can’t backtrack when you need it. Both the short and long route also involve potentially killing yourself by making your bid to sneak in the palace and rescue Cassima too early. Earlier in the game, it’s possible to get into an unwinnable state by getting sent into the minotaur’s labyrinth without the items you need to survive it – but the labyrinth is gated behind the Cliffs of Logic, a series of riddles without which you can’t access the interior of the Isle of the Sacred Mountain.

This is largely a bid at copy protection-by-manual by having some riddles require reference to the manual, but that’s somewhat redundant – I feel like there’s several riddles where if your photocopy of the manual is detailed enough to answer it, you’ve also got enough details to answer the others as well. It wouldn’t have hurt to swap out some of those riddles with puzzles requiring the essential items needed to survive the labyrinth, gating the labyrinth so that you can’t access it until you can solve it, so being locked in can still be a dramatic moment but not one which screws you over.

(The labyrinth also has the absurdity of a bunch of instant-death rooms where you die if you walk in because Alexander is a goddamn fool who doesn’t look where he’s walking. Seriously, they are well-lit rooms containing massive pits which Alex can’t have failed to see unless he was looking directly upward, it’s so silly.)

The annoying thing about this that it really seems so needless. It would not have required that much more mapping out of the puzzle logic to ensure that this sort of situation couldn’t happen – it’s just that Sierra seemed to still, after all this time, be under the impression that it was at all acceptable for this sort of thing to happen. I submit that a light-hearted fairytale fantasy adventure like this one is the wrong venue for this sort of harsh game design, and indeed it’s never really been a good fit since the first King’s Quest.

What’s really galling is that Williams and Jensen seem to have been fully aware of the shortcomings of previous King’s Quest games; if you look on some of the shelves in the pawn shop here there’s all sorts of items referring to infamously annoying puzzles like the collapsing bridge in To Heir Is Human and the whale tongue in The Perils of Rosella.

And then they have the gall to include not one, but multiple bits where if you don’t pay close enough attention when instructing Alexander to walk around he’ll goof his pathfinding and, rather than walk a sensible route, just deliberately wander to his death. It is truly, properly absurd that in a game this late in the series, with the point-and-click interface and pathfinding at the level it’s attained and with the accomplishments of other point-and-click adventures in the field to learn from, that there are still sections like this in a King’s Quest game.

The analogy I would make is this: the early King’s Quest games, seeing how they are pioneering an entire gaming genre, are frequently guilty of trying to run before they can walk. King’s Quest V and King’s Quest VI both do the opposite, at least in game design terms: they are walking when they really ought to be able to run. King’s Quest VI represents a very impressive technical accomplishment when you consider that it came out in 1992 – the graphics are lovely, that opening cut scene is an impressive use of 3D graphics even if it is pre-rendered, and the voice acting is a massive improvement over King’s Quest V.

But from a pure game design perspective, it has not only aged badly – it was also shockingly behind the curve even by the standards of the day. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a big step forwards from previous episodes in the series, and I feel like Jane Jensen probably had something to do with that, but it is still significantly lagging behind the work of competitors.

Indiana Jones and the Fate of the Remakes

1992 also saw the end of Sierra’s efforts to produce remakes of their earlier graphical adventure games, with a reasonably well-liked VGA version of Quest For Glory I and a drab, ugly VGA edition of Police Quest I. As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, the remake project was a bit of a bad call on Sierra’s part for several reasons:

• Updating the graphics and sound on old games without doing a real root and branch rethink of the gameplay just puts a big spotlight on the gameplay limitations of earlier Sierra games whilst robbing them of their nostalgic EGA charm.
• The remakes diverted time and money away from other projects. On the commercial front, the remakes apparently sold poorly; on the time front, I’ve said above how I think Quest For Glory III feels rushed, and we can only ponder how much better it could have been if the time and resources spent on the Quest For Glory I remake had been spent on III instead.
• Technology was still progressing at a fast enough pace that the remakes would start showing their age by the time the remake process caught up. Would Sierra have then done remakes of the remakes?

Meanwhile, over at LucasArts, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis was also doing the “multiple routes through the adventure” thing, though in that case the major branching-off point was clearly signposted (it really isn’t in King’s Quest VI) and involved fundamentally different gameplay in each of the branches.

Despite having some lingering bad habits, it does feel like Sierra was still keeping up with the competition. Certainly, in terms of the graphical and audio presentation of the games, Sierra was the equal of anyone and ahead of most. Unfortunately, with lingering bad gameplay habits in place, all of Sierra’s 1992 adventures ended up being more interesting for the game they might have been – the sort of experience they suggested – than for the games they actually were.