For as long as he can remember, which isn’t all that long really because he’s still a teen but anyway, Gwydion has been held captive in the house of Manannan, an evil wizard and ten-year subscriber to Cat Fancy magazine. It’s a hard life for Gwydion, who must feed chickens and sweep the kitchen floor and empty chamber pots at his master’s demand, over and over, until he works out some way to free himself. Seriously, over and over.
“Gwydion, I have decided to take a journey,” said Manannan, for the seventh or eighth time in two hours. “Maybe this time, you might take the opportunity to go through my personal things – I’ve got heaps of cool stuff like a wand, and a magic map, and a secret subterranean alchemy workshop, you know, just saying.”
Publisher: Sierra On-Line
Year: 1986
Genre: Adventure
After what was basically a scavenger hunt with simple puzzles and a somewhat muddled sequel, King’s Quest III: To Heir is Human took the series into a more sophisticated, narrative-oriented direction, much like the first Space Quest game, also released around the same time, and was also significantly more difficult to solve than the others.
Like its predecessors, the third game used a pretty basic verb-plus-object text parser for interaction, although it was the first (ever, apparently) to use an auto-mapping and teleporting feature – something Sierra used as a major marketing hook, only to discover fans despised it because they felt it made the game too easy.
More than 25 years later, though, King’s Quest III remains not only my favourite in the series, but also a game I’ll still excavate from the cupboard and replay from time to time. Admittedly, I’m a big slut for old school EGA graphics but there’s something kind of enduring about such simplicity, that’s also saved it from the same retrospective OH-MY-EYES phantasm of early 3D games.
BONUS FACT! The game’s launch was initially met with some hostility from fans, who claimed it wasn’t a proper King’s Quest game because King Graham wasn’t in it. In the land before internet-time, games like this could take several weeks or even months to complete, and it wasn’t therefore until later than fans realised the connection the Gwydion and Graham. Epic fail, noobs.
BONUS FACT TWO! Indie devs AGDI and Infamous Adventures have released free VGA remakes of the game, in the point-and-click style of later games in the series.
Comments
Posted On
Feb 08, 2012Posted By
nukeheadI remember being six or seven and playing this game as a slave. That is as far as I got. I was too scared to leave because he would appear and I would die. Over and over.
Posted On
Feb 09, 2012Posted By
Matthew ViceHey, whoa, whoa. Talking about Sierra Adventure games without giving me a shout. That’s not on.
I loved the heck out of this game, and the whole series. I never finished it though. There was always some kind of problem I ran into. At first, the damn spells I had had a typo in them – a version difference – and you know what happens if you typed a single word in the spells incorrectly. Eventually I got past this, dealt with the Wizard, became free, and got kidnapped by the pirates. That’s as far as I got.
I’ve got the whole collection on a DVD – that was released some years ago. I haven’t quite gotten around to giving it another go, though.