Tag: the odd gentlemen

2190: Rubble Without a Cause

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I played through the second episode of the new King’s Quest game today. It’s a lot shorter than the first one, so I was able to get through it in a single sitting. Despite being fairly short, though, it’s an interesting contrast from the previous episode; rather than being a relatively large (for an adventure game) open world with a non-linear series of puzzles for you to tackle at your leisure, Rubble Without a Cause, as the second episode is known, takes place in a much more confined environment, and largely focuses around one big puzzle: how to free everyone from captivity at the hands of the goblins.

Yes, instead of throwing us back into Daventry, Rubble Without a Cause puts us underground in a goblin prison complex. Graham is dismayed to discover that most of the major characters from the town of Daventry appear to have also been abducted, along with the eccentric merchant’s “unicorn” Mr. Fancycakes. Thus begins a quest to find a way out of this predicament.

There’s a twist, though: unlike most adventure games, you don’t have all the time in the world with which to achieve your goals. Unfolding over the course of several days, the adventure sees the health of all of the prison’s occupants — with the exception of Graham — decline as the days pass. Thus you’re presented with some difficult, mutually exclusive choices throughout as you determine who it is best to give medicine and food to as they require it. And once you start getting closer to escaping, you need to determine which potential companion is going to provide you with the best chance of succeeding, and ensure that they are in good health for when you make your attempt.

The small scale of the episode initially felt a little disappointing, but on reflection after finishing it, I very much liked the concept of it being based around one central problem for you to solve, and felt this was a good use of the episodic format to provide a short-form but complete-feeling experience. You can solve it in a number of different ways, too — it is, I believe, even possible to complete the episode without anyone running out of health and being carried away by the goblins, but I most certainly did not succeed in that particular endeavour today.

In many ways, the King’s Quest episodes we’ve seen so far are a great example of “gaming short stories” — quite literally, since they are presented as stories narrated by the ageing King Graham (whom I’ll be very surprised to see survive the fifth episode) to his grandchildren. This presentation of the narrative as a participant narrator looking back on his past actions is an interesting twist on how old Sierra games such as the original King’s Quests used to work, with a strong contrast between the omniscient, non-participant narrator and the in-character dialogue between characters. King’s Quest, as a series, maintained this style of presentation until its seventh installment, and it’s good to see new developers The Odd Gentlemen returning very much to the “feel” of the classic Sierra adventures.

So was Rubble Without a Cause worth playing, given its short length? Well, if it was a standalone game by itself, I’d perhaps feel a little short-changed at its small scale and short length. In the context of the whole series, though, it makes a good, nicely contrasting follow-up to the excellent first episode, and has me once again hungering to know what happens next!

2019: Hero of Daventry: Some King’s Quest First Impressions

0020_001Following on from my post the other day, I downloaded the first episode of King’s Quest on PlayStation 4 today, and gave it a bit of a go earlier. Andie seemed to be enjoying it, so I paused for a bit while she went and had a nap, then we went and had dinner. Will probably play some more tomorrow.

First impressions are very good indeed, though. The game has a gorgeous art style, wonderful animation and a spectacular voice cast, including Christopher Lloyd, Josh Keaton and Maggie Elizabeth Jones.

Most notably, though, the game is very much aware of its heritage. I was concerned that a new developer taking on such a legendary series would lose some of the magic of the original — or worse, try and retrofit their interpretation over the top of the existing format, or “reboot” it — but my mind has been very much set at rest so far, with a story and characterisation that feels very true to King’s Quest’s lightly comedic (but, at times, surprisingly dark) fairy-tale nature.

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Of particular note in the animation regard is how much care and attention has been lavished on protagonist Graham. Although he’s now a beautifully animated 3D model with a dramatically billowing cape as opposed to a tiny pixel dude with yellow skin, there’s a bunch of wonderful little touches in the new game as callbacks to the original King’s Quest games. Make Graham walk instead of run, for example, and his slightly cocky strut looks just like the crude walking animation of the original game’s sprite. And in one sequence, you jump into a river; the animation as Graham flails about in the water is pretty much exactly the same as his old sprite did any time you wandered into a body of water and forgot to type “swim”.

And, pleasingly, the new game incorporates the original series’ fondness for killing you off in a variety of horrible ways — though, given the game’s narrative framework of an elderly Graham narrating his past adventures to his granddaughter, any unfortunate demises are represented as Graham either making a mistake in his memories or cracking a joke.

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The use of old Graham as narrator allows the game to do something that a lot of modern adventure games these days don’t do: use a narrator. This is one thing that made Sierra adventures unique and distinct from their biggest rivals LucasArts — in every one of their games, the narrator was as much of a character as the characters who had actual dialogue. In most cases, the narrator wasn’t a participant in the narrative, instead taking an omniscient viewpoint of what was going on, but there was a very clear sense of authorial voice that was often distinct between Sierra’s different series. The narrators of King’s Quest used flowery language and occasional cringeworthy puns — a habit Graham has picked up in the new game — while Space Quest and Leisure Suit Larry used lowbrow humour to good effect. Gabriel Knight, meanwhile, took the bold step of having a narrator with a very strong Creole accent explain what was going on — stylistically appropriate, though initially jarring if you were used to the somewhat cleaner, more easily understandable tones of the American narrators of Sierra’s other games. (Once you became accustomed to her drawl, however, she delivered some delightfully sarcastic zingers at Gabriel’s expense throughout the game.)

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Pleasingly, old Graham’s narration pays attention to what you are doing and has a variety of responses for when you try to do the same thing over and over again. There’s no Discworld-style “That doesn’t work!” here; instead, keep trying to do something that’s clearly wrong and old Graham will come up with more and more fanciful reasons about his futile attempts, until eventually his granddaughter stops him in most cases. There’s also a delightful running joke about That One Adventure Game Item You Use For Everything when you discover a hatchet which comes in useful for a while. After its final task, however, Graham leaves it behind, with old Graham putting special emphasis on the fact that he would “not need it ever again”. (Prior to this, of course, you were free to attempt to use it on anything and everything, with suitable comments from both Graham and Gwendolyn along the way.)

So far, then, I’m delighted by how King’s Quest has turned out. It’s smart, funny, beautiful and captures the essence of the old games while bringing them right up to date. I’m looking forward to see how the remainder of this first episode continues — and how the series as a whole develops over time.