King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human

"A fun game where forced snooping adds more to romance than copying spell chants from the manual"

In King's Quest III, the focus shifts away from Graham and to a lonely lad called Gwydion, who is being held captive in a house high atop a mountain by an evil wizard named Manannan. Your object is to help Gwydion escape the wizard, who means to kill him on this day his eighteenth birthday, and find his heritage. Although KQ3 is a similar graphic/text adventure to the earlier installments, the need to create and use spells signifies a shot at complexity. It's bad on the one hand because most of what you need to do is taken directly from the manual, but overall it works out well as you must prepare your spells in a secret basement laboratory.

The game has an interesting time restraint; Manannan snoops around his house for spells of five minutes before leaving or sleeping for twenty-five. While he's at home you will need to feed him and do the chores he requests. Although there are amusing punishments for not doing chores, you will be killed for not giving him his food. As there are only a few articles of food, this means there is some pressure on you. Also you need to make sure that any potentially magic items are hidden in your room(he can spot them on you and kill you,) and if you steal his wand or use his laboratory while he's gone you'd better put everything back. You also want to be around the house when he returns(he'll track you if you flee to another country,) so although an expert player may be able to complete all the necessary tasks in Llewdor on his first outing, the beginner will need to resist the temptation of completing one more chore, especially as a winding path stands between the mountain home and the country proper.

Although this game has plenty of imagination(Manannan has lots of animals) and the underground laboratory and the spells you create there are cool, it can feel like you're going to the grocery store with a shopping list. The manual tells you to create all the spells, and you just have to scavenge all the items. Only a purse of gold requires puzzle-solving and even that requires incredible patience with leaving and returning to a screen. You'll want to save before that, but it's even more necessary to save before casting a spell. While creating spells, you have some commands you type in on the command line along with a chant. Although you don't have to have every period in the same place you find it in the manual, an errant command may kill your whole game. At least the failed spells that backfire on you are amusing, and the preparations are imaginative. The spells themselves are pretty standard fantasy fare: create rain, listen to animals(opens up conversational humor absent before in the series,) cause sleep, teleport, or turn into a fly or eagle. But this game is the most original of the series as there's only one classic fairy-tale, and even that is handled well--those characters perform several cute actions.

As in previous King's Quests you don't need to do everything to win the game, although there is a first when you actually kill an enemy creature. The point structure also emphasizes spell creation over treasure found; there's only one treasure in the whole game. Not all spells are necessary to win the game, and indeed you must create all the spells and leave one unused for maximum points. Creating spells may also not be the quickest way to solve a puzzle--the maximum solution actually requires you to wait on a boat for quite a while after you flee Llewdor. This fight of abstract puzzling against efficiency knocks KQ3 down a peg, and ironically none of the spells you toil to create is as appealing or practical as a certain magic item you take from Manannan. On the one hand, the game's a fantasy, but on the other hand, the computer tells you, ''You'll run through the fantasy kingdom as I say.'' Magic certainly needs to be regulated in any successful fantasy book and that can even add humor(i.e. E. Nesbit) but in Llewdor the spells have a decided illogic. Still, I can deal with the slightly formulated spell creation in the laboratory that feels like a personal hideout and enemy headquarters at the same time. Surely once you are on the boat there must be a better way to give a beginning player time to figure what to do while letting the experienced player trying for maximum points glide, though--the try at denouement after taking Manannan out of commission is nice, but it takes too long.

The controls are the same as in the previous series, although you will need to master the general structure of the few complex sentences the text parser can handle. Many of the complex text commands you'll use will be verbatim from the book of spells, so although the game's vocabulary is greater, the variety is artificially inflated. Fortunately you have the quick option of pausing the game with escape(this went to the pull-down menu that presaged any Windows rubbish) so as not to lose time. If there's one degradation from the previous series, it is that although climbing rocks provides an interesting alternate form of long climb, stairs are much more annoying to navigate. You'll be able to go diagonally for a bit but will soon have to push horizontally as you'll run into a side railing and stop. Saved games get more precious with each installment in the series, and there are obvious times when they will be necessary--just watch that you leave a saved game with enough time to get back to Manannan's.

Gwydion's claret-and-blue outfit(West Ham or Aston Villa?) offers a welcome change from Graham's also-cheery outfit, and Llewdor's an even nicer place than Kolyma or Daventry with many new location types; besides the lavish living quarters(kitchen, study, bedroom and observatory) there's a desert in the west, a harbor along a shoreline to the east, and even a town, different sorts of trees, plenty of waterfalls and streams, and even a spider's cave. One screen is an extended network of caves, and you see the first snow in King's Quest. Even the scenes that tie into Daventry have their own touches; the cave with the stairs to the sky world, for instance, is partially reduced to rubble, and the well leading to the dragon is bricked up(thankfully, you do not have to cross the moat during your brief spell here.) Some of the graphics make for nasty puzzles, such as the slightly crooked ladder you can fall off, the part of the twisting mountain path hidden from your view, or the shark in the water that you're not sure can catch you. My biggest annoyance occurred with an eagle flying by. Some of the time it drops a feather you need. I saw that the feather had fallen, but it was obscured by a tree. Not easy to weed out, but not nice all the same as I was sick of waiting--especially when I kept hitting Take/F3/(up arrow) to feel blindly and eventually getting the message ''You don't need it'' to replace ''you're too far away.'' (translation: I already had it.) It's not quite as funny as the bug where, when the girl you rescue is trying to follow you, you manage to leave her behind and she pops up right behind on the next screen.

Yet King's Quest III does a half-decent job of being melodramatic. Manannan's dramatic teleporting through smoke to enter and exit remind me of James Thurber's _The White Deer_ where the court magician pulled that sort of thing to pester the king, although in this case Manannan holds both roles to scare Gwydion. Along with the cat that runs around(picking it up or kicking it causes amusing results) and may even trip and kill you on a staircase, there's a soft kind of creepiness on top of the mountain. The screen also shakes around after certain spells of mass destruction, with the expected gleeping and rumbling. Sound overall is a pleasant surprise in the game, with a neat tune for the pirate ship scene and a flourish replacing ''Greensleeves'' at the game's start. You even hear warning tones when your spell is about to wear off.

King's Quest III is overall rather fun to replay. Each time I play I try to cut my time down, but the main threat to my sanity is the long wait on the boat(I fell asleep waiting once, although sadly I can't blame setting my alarm for 7 PM during that wait on the game,) with waiting for an eagle feather to fall being a close second. These points aside, the first attempt at magic is a fair one, the story actually has mystery and urgency with the fantasy, and it's rather nice to look at. I've come back to it a few times and probably will again, although at the end of each game I swear never to transcribe another spell or chant.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 09/29/00, Updated 02/05/02