#oneaday Day 175: I picked what to play for #DOScember

As you will know if you’ve been reading for the past few days, I’ve been mulling over what to do for “DOScember” this year on my YouTube channel. I was fairly firmly set on doing another full adventure game playthrough, but hadn’t quite settled on what.

Well, after being recommended the excellent looking The Crimson Diamond, I’m… not going to play that right away. Instead, I’m going to play at least one of the games it cribs extensively from, and a series of adventure games I’ve always wanted to check out but never got around to: the Laura Bow mysteries from Sierra.

I’ve spent a little time familiarising myself with the first game The Colonel’s Bequest this evening, and I think I’ve got a feel for what to expect now. This was a highly experimental game for creator Roberta Williams, and modern commentators tend to agree that it doesn’t quite succeed at what it’s trying to do, but it’s a thoroughly interesting game nonetheless. That sounds like ideal fodder to play, talk about and discuss. Plus, like I say, I’ve wanted to play both Laura Bow games for ages and never made the time to do so.

For the unfamiliar, The Colonel’s Bequest is a mystery-themed adventure game in which you play the 1920s journalism student Laura Bow, who has come along to provide moral support for her friend Lillian while she attends a family reunion of sorts. Said reunion is taking place on the plantation of Colonel Henri Dijon, a former war hero, and is, for maximum creepiness, in the very depths of a bayou in the southern United States.

Upon arriving at the mansion, Laura notes that despite the Colonel announcing that he has left an equal share of his fortune to everyone present (except Laura, obviously), all the family members immediately start being absolute dickheads to one another, and it’s clear that mischief is about to be afoot. What then follows is a curious twist on the usual adventure game formula, where you, as Laura, must wander through the mansion and its grounds, attempting to gather pieces of evidence and knowledge that will allow you to leave the situation 1) alive and 2) with a full understanding of what happened.

The Colonel’s Bequest mostly lacks conventional puzzles, aside from a couple of instances. Instead, the game is mostly about being in the right place at the right time to witness or discover things; the game is split into hour-long Acts, which in turn are split into 15-minute time blocks, and discovering something significant causes time to advance. It’s possible to advance time before gathering important items or speaking with certain characters; indeed, it’s possible to “finish” the game with almost complete obliviousness to what happened around Laura, and you are not penalised for doing so, other than receiving a low “Sleuth” rating in the finale.

What this effectively means is that The Colonel’s Bequest is a game in which taking notes of what happens when, where, how and why is quite important, particularly if you plan to replay the whole thing. Having pieces of evidence or knowledge to ask or tell people about can lead to learning more about what’s going on, and you’ll need to follow all these threads to their various conclusions as much as possible to get the best rating.

I stopped playing for this evening because I don’t want to spoil too much for myself. I suspect my playthrough won’t conclude with me getting the elusive “Super Sleuth” rating at the conclusion of the playthrough, but I’m looking forward to giving it a go anyway. In typical Sierra style, there are some delightful characters involved, along with some fun narration, and this is what I’m really looking forward to: having an excuse to do some silly voices.

Anyway, yeah. So that’s the plan. The Colonel’s Bequest, at the very least. And if I get through that fairly quickly, on to The Dagger of Amon Ra. And if I beat that before December is through, then I’ll look at The Crimson Diamond. After all, I felt like I should probably familiarise myself with the “source material” before jumping into something that is a direct and unashamed homage to it, right?

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

2017: Quest for the Crown

It’s weird to see a new King’s Quest game on sale. I haven’t tried it myself yet — I’m probably going to — but the early buzz surrounding it is very positive indeed, even sans involvement from series creators Roberta and Ken Williams.

For those not quite as old and jaded a gamer as me, King’s Quest was one of the very first graphical adventure games. I hesitate to call it a “point and click” adventure, because although it supported mouse control, you actually had to type things in to a text parser in order to actually do anything. As the series progressed, it gradually and noticeably improved; by the fifth installment, it had made the full transition to a more conventional point-and-click interface as well as offering a “talkie” CD-ROM version; the seventh installment abandoned traditional pixel art in favour of some distinctly Disney-esque animation, and the eighth… well, most people don’t talk about that one.

For me, King’s Quest as a whole is an important series to me. It represents one of the earliest game series I played, and also some of the earliest games I actually played to completion. They also represent an early form of using the video games medium as a means of telling a story — albeit a very simple one in the case of the first couple of games; from the third game onwards it started to get quite ambitious — as well as a wonderfully vivid realisation of the world of fairy tales.

Back in the days when King’s Quest first appeared, it wasn’t at all unusual for games to take heavy inspiration from existing works of art. Numerous games made use of famous classical tunes for their “themes”, for example, and others drew liberally from popular mythology for inspiration. The original King’s Quest games were no exception, as they saw you running into everyone from Rumplestiltskin to the Big Bad Wolf — and, in many cases, dying horribly at the hands of fairy tale monsters.

Despite the fact that it drew heavily on popular mythology, though, King’s Quest had a feel and an atmosphere all of its own. Like the best fairy tales, it presented a world that appeared colourful, happy and vibrant on the surface, but which was mean, horrible and out to get you underneath. The King’s Quest games were notorious for having a wide variety of means for the protagonists to die throughout them, ranging from being eaten by a giant to tripping over your wizard master’s cat while being too far up the stairs, and subsequently breaking your neck when you hit the ground. So frequent (and frustrating) were the death scenes in King’s Quest and other adventures from the same stable Sierra that main rival LucasArts made a specific marketing point of the fact that it was impossible to die or get stuck in most of their games — with the Indiana Jones games being the only real exceptions, and even there it was pretty difficult to die.

But as frustrating and irritating and, at times, downright illogical as the old-school King’s Quest games could be, they represent one of my formative experiences. They’re something that helped me understand a medium that, as you’ll know, is very important to me. They’re something I shared with my family, since many of us used to play them together and try to solve them. And they’re something that I will always have fond memories of.

It’s for this reason that I’m really happy to see King’s Quest making a comeback — and, moreover, to see that it’s being received very well so far. I’m excited to give it a try for myself very soon, and I look forward to seeing how the subsequent episodes develop over the course of the series.

#oneaday Day 886: King’s Space Police Quest for Glory Suit Larry

I’ve been playing through the Quest for Glory series recently for the Squadron of Shame’s upcoming podcast. I’d never played them before, and it turns out they’re rather good — particularly once you get on to number 4 and you get John Rhys-Davies on narration duty. I shall refrain from further discussion of that particular series for now, however, as that would get into spoiler territory.

I do want to talk about Sierra in general, however. Sierra, if you’re unaware/a young whippersnapper, was the developer and publisher of these games, and was notorious for being one of the “big two” names in adventure games in the ’80s and ’90s. The other was, of course, LucasArts.

Sierra and LucasArts took wildly differing approaches to what was ostensibly the same genre — the point and click adventure. While LucasArts embraced movie-style presentation and player-friendly interface features such as an intelligent cursor (i.e. one that automatically highlighted interactable objects for the player), Sierra games were punishing. LucasArts made a point in their game manuals to say that they wouldn’t kill off the player character unnecessarily, and indeed in most of their games it was impossible to die or even fuck things up beyond all recognition. The exception to this was the Indiana Jones series, in which Indie found himself in danger and could indeed die — but generally only if the player really messed up.

Sierra games, meanwhile, at least in the early days would kill players if they took a wrong step on a mountain path. Or if they said the wrong thing to another character. Or if they got caught by a wandering monster. Or… you get the idea. They were hard, and not necessarily fair about it either. But the constant sense of peril that you felt a Sierra protagonist was in (at least until later games such as King’s Quest VII and Gabriel Knight, anyway) provided a very distinctive flavour.

This isn’t the only way in which Sierra adventures were unique. They’re some of the earliest “auteur” games I can think of, where a selling point of each game was who it was written by. Each of Sierra’s stable of game designers had their own specialisms — Roberta Williams handled the fairytale King’s Quest series, Lori and Corey Cole handled the adventure/RPG hybrid Quest for Glory series, Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy worked on Space Quest, Al Lowe was in charge of the smutty Leisure Suit Larry series, and Jane Jensen worked on a variety of titles including the seminal Gabriel Knight. Each had their own distinctive “voice” and “style” that was all over their respective work, despite the things all the games had in common.

Different people were drawn to different series for different reasons — King’s Quest provided a Disneyesque take on popular fantasy and fairytale tropes, for example, while Space Quest was a self-consciously silly sidelong glance at the world of sci-fi. Despite the early titles all being very clear parodies or homages to existing work, each series evolved over time to develop its own unique flavour — and, curiously, pretty much all of them managed to self-destruct with disastrously awful final instalments, the most notorious being King’s Quest VIII‘s inexplicable shift into becoming a Zeldaesque action RPG rather than the gentle, light-hearted and family-friendly adventure it had been before.

Despite the fact that each series managed to commit seppuku in its own distinctive way, that doesn’t make the earlier titles in the series any less worth checking out. Sure, many of the early entries have graphics that weren’t exactly bleeding-edge even at the time of their original release, but their gameplay is solid, and their stories are the sort of thing I’d describe as being part of a gaming “canon” if such a thing existed. (It doesn’t, making that whole statement pretty much redundant. But they’re certainly fondly remembered by pretty much everyone who played them — even with the frequent and frustrating deaths taken into account.)

They’re a reminder of a simple time when there weren’t quite so many new games being released each month, and “a new game from Roberta Williams” was an exciting prospect. That excitement is still present in gaming to a certain extent today — many people are keen to see what auteurs like Jane Jensen (who’s still steadfastly producing adventure games), Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, Hideo “Metal Gear Solid” Kojima, Swery65 (Deadly Premonition) and Suda51 (No More Heroes, Lollipop Chainsaw, Shadows of the Damned) are up to today. The difference is that these “auteur games” are regarded as niche interests or cult hits today rather than big releases.

If you’ve never tried any of Sierra’s games, head over to GOG.com and check ’em out now.