King's Quest: Mask of Eternity

"Less magic, no jokes, no royalty, but still your USRDA of melodrama"

Not only does King's Quest VIII(KQ8) abandon puns in the subtitle, but it introduces an entirely new character(the royal family's all married off so we'd need to go twenty years in the future of Daventry for a new adventure) and passes into a new genre as well: the action RPG. Although there are some good ideas, and it is a positive step away from the utter mushiness of the previous installment, it's distressingly workmanlike, and the introduction of fighting to KQ may turn off some longtime fans. The game is not a straight point-and-click adventure, and you have nice tabs that pop up from below(standard combat and level information) and above(special items to solve quests.) It is also kind enough to offer an easy monster mode, which I took. The game never enchanted me, although it was a pleasant enough experience(a bit like my biochemistry lab in college, only the experiment actually worked after, at most, a few tries) with a crib sheet by my side. The good features are easily noted, and the game looks realistic, but it has some almost laughable incongruities, which is admittedly the only consistent humor you're going to get out of it--there's not even a way to kill good guys before a quick restore.

You start out as a fellow named Connor, who touches a piece of a mask, and soon after, most everyone in Daventry turns to stone. There is a wizard who has half turned to stone who will give you introductory help in order to find the perpetrator of the mass destruction. It turns out that you will need to collect all pieces of the mask and re-form them. It's a while before you get the second and long the way you'll find the Dimension of Death, which combines Egyptian and Greek mythologies, although talking to the boatman of the river Styx for the third time in the series is too much even if the area of the dead is vastly different between KQ2, 6 and 8. Then you go to a swamp area, an underground mine with Gnomes, a barren region with pools of fire, a huge cold area with a snow palace and mountain paths with holes you must squeeze through, a garden-like paradise area that requires no actual puzzling, and the Realm of the Sun where you get some blatantly didactic messages about virtue, but fortunately the plentiful pyrotechnics and new weird monsters between are worth observing. In the final orgy of location load there is a frantic push for the final confrontation with a nice puzzle that tests your knowledge of the controls. Overall KQ8 has an impressive if slightly gloomy plot(the paradise area is like sending a 'Cheer Up, Bud' card to someone whose home just foreclosed,) although like so many games it starts off nonlinear and doesn't end up that way(potentially visiting the next area that requires the CD to take a long load time without having the necessary prerequisite items does not count.)

Although you are given a score at the end(with no explanation or way to check it in the middle) you will be focused on improving Connor. He starts with no melee or missile weapon or armor. As you go through the game he will find more powerful implements. For instance, he may find stronger boots or gloves. He may move up to leather armor, then chain mail, and then to magic armor he can buy. Bows and crossbows with infinite arrows are also available, and with each level gained Connor gains strength; weapon damage is also tracked in your lower control box but only feels like an arbitrary number as you can't keep track of monster hit points or your own(you have an arbitrary bar for HP, which works less well than the experience bar.) Both solving puzzles and defeating monsters can win you experience, but there are only finitely many monsters, which curbs arbitrary level building. You also cannot cast spells at them(they are relegated to puzzles; wizards send you for the dirty work of finding the ingredients) although there are three objects for healing(mushrooms, crystal shards, potions) and also special potions for temporary powers(shields, strength, magic vision and invisibility) that can pop up after you kill a monster or break open a crate or urn.

It's easy to control Connor, and this is the best part of the game; you move the mouse to the top of the screen to pull down special items, and there's a panel of important items(sword, bow, magic stuff, auto map, and potions) that you can wield with a click or a keyboard button; you can also toggle combat readiness with the control key. Run mode is also useful as walking around is too slow but the odd physics of the game first make jumping continually faster than running and second make it easier to back flip onto a platform than to forward flip(this guy'd have some amazing dunks in the NBA except he'd kick the guy he's posting up in the teeth getting the the hoop.) But the best feature is the first/third person mode toggle. One may be more useful than the other for fighting or surveying the immediate area(there are puzzles where you must move objects to climb on them to reach something wedged in the ceiling,) and some may work better with looking up and down. For instance, it is much tougher to navigate standing on a ledge in first person mode although if you are walking on a narrow path next to a steep drop third person mode is tougher for turning corners. The initial impressive vertigo I felt from this wore off as I improved and also as I had to put up with the ultimately redundant rope-and-hook grappling process to scale walls with accompanying random grunts. These dented my enjoyment of busting into a locked cathedral from above or, as you must do early, jump down from a roof on someone who has a weapon you could really use.

Yet many standard RPG features feel peripheral. Gold is the most obvious one; for instance, you can buy a certain weapon, but it will become obsolete almost immediately as you solve a puzzle necessary to a game and get a newer, more powerful weapon. There's only one other place where it's useful, and Connor spends a lot of time 'borrowing' gold from houses with a comment such as 'poor people, in their plight I am sure they will not mind having given me their aid.' In light of how little gold is used(you don't need it to win the game, technically,) this is silly and almost disturbingly autocratic. In fact, rocks seem to be more important throughout the game. They appear in your bottom panel, they're much rarer, and they're needed to solve puzzles. Water is also quite useful as it helps you heal fully. There is a temptation to do as much as possible before going back for a drink and reconciling that with your skill level(although on easy you can use healing items with impunity) will help you avoid trying to do too much.

On the small scale the game also doesn't have all the events consistent or believable; you enter one location by walking through the moat, and when exiting it via bridge, with your mission complete, you hear 'The Old Castle Keep.' At least alligators don't eat you up if you even get close as in KQ. Then some enemies can fall safely off cliffs and some don't--you can't above a certain height. You also wind up being unable to cut down all but the largest tree in one area, and the rocks you can so easily pick up require a melodramatic lifting scene to throw two feet. I also found a flashback to KQ when entering Daventry Castle through a long hallway.

However, many ironies are continually perpetrated in graphical themes. My most memorable images are of undead creatures slam-dancing(at least you don't hear Men Without Hats's Safety Dance in the background) around your body after you die (yeah, they lost their souls, but it's STILL not nice,) but the very big picture is well done; you have first and third person views, the third-person rotating slowly so that you tend behind Connor, and the falls and jumps and vertigo-inducing views make the game more dynamic. The graphical realism extends so far as to leave bits of enemies' gore across the place, including in the handy snapshots at the save-game selection screen, but it still frequently lets Connor walk partially through barriers. He can even balance easily with one foot off a ledge. Also many of the times Connor will best be served by trying to run diagonally into the wall, amusing in any perspective; it seems impossible to skirt the edges of a room with lava in the middle(usually lethal to the touch) otherwise. You do however have some good subtle features; Graham and Valanice(who looks much nicer than in KQ7) only appear in portraits, and overall the graphics are nice if a bit too polygonal and dull. Scaffolds and keeps aplenty tower, while on a smaller scale arrows will come out of the mist, and the spotted mushrooms you must pick up are exotic. You also will find satisfaction in shooting a distant, helpless foe, backing into a narrow pass to narrow the odds against several charging enemies, or sinking an ambusher back into the ooze(and there are many types of ooze) he came from.

The dialog is less screechy than in KQ7; part of that may be that fewer characters take deep breaths before speaking, although computers also seem to render male voices better, and this makes not being able to skip important dialogs much more palatable. Connor still comes off as pleading: 'Just this once?' he asks the boatman at the Styx. 'Consider it done,' Connor says in one of many scenes which seem more like vocalized 'Why I Should be the Land's Savior in 100 Words or Less' essays. However although you can't break away from many important scenes(only intolerable the second time around after 'accidents,') there is one desiccated whiny magical creature that begs pitifully if you walk away in the middle. Special effects like this deserve credit, but KQ8 has stabs of action movie script combined with inaction. If it were a TV show, you'd have a ready-made spot-the-corny-phrase drinking game. The dragon with the cancer kazoo(that's what squirting fire through your throat DOES) and Ancient Figures with quavery generic touches of Middle English help create the nice garden-variety feeling of mythical magic that always suckers anyone who's ever liked a fantasy book, but with the repeated references to a 'Champion Eternal' I didn't need the game making it seem that way to drag it out. You also have some odd science mumbo jumbo mixed in to critical puzzle dialogs, often with holograms from 10000 years ago saddled with 1/2 second delays in their lip synching(ehh, close enough.) Nanoseconds? Magnetic poles? Not as cool as the 'Die Mortal' variations from rank-and-file baddies. The nonverbal part is less varied but fares better; noises accompanying Connor's movements are unambitiously faultless, and the background trumpet music during the game-load and CD scanning episodes is relaxing, but the slurps when you pick up items or drink water are bold and surprisingly appropriate.

KQ8 seems to be the most labored of the series. There are the obvious load times when you move between locations or restore a game(enough to preclude my revisiting of a full adventure, although I enjoyed browsing through the snapshots of my saved games,) and the locations and voices are often too ponderous, which counteracts the ease of controlling Connor. I also suffered the occasional crash with other programs running in the background, and saving during a popup dialog caused a crash on reloading, but I guess you can forgive that in the original release of a complex product. It also has some loose ends such as the teleportal rooms you never need to use. But it is fun to sneak around and take out your enemies or watch a row of skeletons crumple up. Too gory for fans of the earlier series and not complex or accessible enough for RPG fans, this game is stuck in a neutral zone and winds up feeling like a respectably written, low-budget movie.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 04/06/02, Updated 04/06/02