"New interface, sound and sluggish endgame"

In King's Quest V, you are once again Graham, and you must travel to the town of Serenia and find the wizard Mordack who has taken your castle away, and along the way an owl named Cedric will fly along and help you. There are perhaps more outlaws than usual to avoid, and there are still various animals. The most interesting part of the game may be the dark forest. However, a word of warning before you start the game: make sure you have sound or a walkthrough. I only had the second, so I had to read _The King's Quest Companion_ to figure what was going on.

The story and layout are still pretty typical Sierra. You have a mainland, with a desert that requires mapping(you can move across 8 screens without dying of thirst, and oases are scattered.) There are a few necessary items across the desert. When you've gotten the right equipment, you can then venture into the Dark Forest through a one-way entrance. There are lots of bad guys there, and getting out requires a far-fetched solution that is cute only after you've gone through it. You also venture across a lake before getting to Mordack's castle. Much of the game also consists of bartering in town; an item that doesn't seem to have any use may be more useful at the store, especially since money is scarce. You also get captured several times and have to find a way past a snake which will sit around until you've got about a hundred of the 260 points. Overall, there's a lot less picking up objects(except from bad guys) or helping others to get items, which makes the game feel more real.

As a nice touch, an old acquaintance from a previous King's Quest appears. There are only two opportunities for optional points in this game, but dealing with him correctly is one way to get them. The other way requires one of the sillier solutions and is in fact a precursor to this one. There are other silly puzzles like dealing with the yeti. However, some of them require you to position yourself correctly behind a certain landmark, which is a nice use of graphics above the climb-up-the-path sort, which is thankfully not overdone.

KQ5 brings a new interface to the series. The keyboard is out, replaced by right- and left-clicking with the mouse. Right-clicks determine the actions(walk, look, talk, use item, or take) and a left-click will activate it. For instance, a left-click with the walk icon will move you to the appropriate space. There's not much of a learning curve, and you'll get comfortable with it instantly, even if the ''X'' that appears when you try to manipulate an irrelevant object gets annoying. You can even move the mouse to the top to click directly on an option or to save the game, and although objects are represented graphically, you can click on them for a description. There's also an option to skip the longer scenes, which works well if you've been through them and forgotten to save your game. Unfortunately, there's no option to display conversations as text that you can browse through, and there's no way to display your score continually as in the previous games. A simple toggle for either of these would have been useful. It's also difficult just to walk straight across a screen, as you'll often need to click twice. As you never do much around the edges, perhaps Sierra should have expanded the area leading to the next screen. The opposite problem is apparent in the desert, where I frequently wound up walking to the wrong screen, which was fatal. You'll also have to use the hand(take) instead of walking to go some places. As the first in the series to implement the mouse interface, though, KQ5 holds up pretty well.

The graphics, for the second game in a row, gained a bit more detail, there even seem to be gradients, and perspective makes a debut in the desert. At any rate, pixelation is much less obvious, and you don't see a purple next to a black in the same object. My best graphical memory may be when you throw a rope at a branch on a snow path and try to climb up. On the whole, the people are better drawn, and the meaner animals snap at you if you get too close, but I'm not sure that the backgrounds have really improved from an imagination standpoint. However, special items show up very clearly. Another improvement over KQ4 is that there are different pictures after you die. Whoever killed you looks on as you're asked if you wish to continue. There's also the first 3-d perspective in a relatively simple dungeon, which is still a bit awkward, especially since during one phase you are following someone and they'll seem to go left, when you need to move forward and left. I probably could have done without the length of the movie scenes, especially the conclusion--while previous games had interesting denouements, this one's is lucky to be as interesting as an infomercial. But the square in the center of the screen that popped up when a character talked to you was effective. Unfortunately I am unable to check the sound on my current computer, but I am disappointed there's no text option even if you can click on the speaker's picture to skip a potentially game-critical sentence.

KQ5 isn't as memorable as some of the previous ones. Although it contains no more than the usual quota of silly puzzles in a Sierra game, and the enhanced graphics and involved conversations(if you have sound) allow for more detailed clues, that you can't really play the game without sound detracts from it. King's Quest had set a tradition for being accessible but still having neat twists, and this game, although a respectable effort, bars people without sound cards from enjoying it.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 04/29/01, Updated 04/29/01