Gaze Into My Crystal Ball!
See What Lies Behind the Wall!
The third game in the series and the third remake by AGD Interactive. The strongest point for this game is, beyond graphics, voices and music, that you get rid of the damn copy protection and need the damn manual to play. I had all the first 6 games in a collection box and with the manual, but in FRENCH (and I took German in elementary school). So if you were able to get it running you would run into the problem that you couldn't read the damn manual and thus not complete the game, especially when you had to mix spell ingredients and recite spells precisely as it was written in the book, or else it would fail.
Story wise you start as a slave at the wizard Mannannans household, Gwydion is your name, and every day you try to appease your master and cat's fickle minds. One day when he is away you venture down to town and finds a hidden book telling you of your predecessor. Realizing time is short before you are "switched out" you search the land after ingredients to release you of your shackles and find out who you are... *spoilers* he's Prince Alexander of Daventry, the son of King Graham and Valancie. After some complaints they also toned down their own overarching villain and such, but he still pops up. Bad parts of this game is also present in the original. The time constraints. You have a timer that goes up, and the gist is that you recorded every time Mannnannan was away or slept and planned out the best way to go around the area. I don't handle stress that well, and it also shows how short these kind of games really are, took me less than 2 hours to finish the game. No, the real play time is that you are supposed to play it over and over again as you learn how to avoid getting caught. I actually managed pretty well in the original, I even found the secret study, but since I couldn't make spells, I didn't get anywhere. On the other hand it took me far to long to find the magic map and realizing that your inventory hinted at what was allowed to have by Mannannan or not. Then again, I didn't realize you could hide your stuff under the bed, so I began avoiding the ingredients since they killed me.
Still, this game was the first in the series, with an actual story and characters, although at release you didn't know why it starred Gwydion in this strange land of Lewdorr, it might have been setting up a new kingdom and such, but must have been real nice for players getting to the end and realizing that it looked awfully familiar and then seeing King Graham once again. Here we even get a tear-dripping power ballad and I love it. One bad thing though is that the voice of Alexander can be... a bit grating. It's not the one from KQ 6 (which would probably have broken their budget). It could also be as they play him more in character of his current situation, as he sounds submissive all the time compared to the self assured Prince Alexander of KQ 6. I don't know, a bit of a turn off for me. Also, first time I played it the voice of Mannannan was a bit irritating as well, but it grew on me, apparently the same guy who is the narrator. Sadly they didn't get the guy who played Mordack in King's Quest V like the other fan remake of King Quest III got, they also got Josh Mandel for some reason.
Inga kommentarer:
Skicka en kommentar