King's Quest: Quest for the Crown

"Yes, it's primitive, but considering its age, this is still pretty fun."

Introduction- Ah yes, King's Quest. Along with the Space Quest series, I grew up playing these games. This is the original, and to say the least, a landmark game. Without this, who knows how games would have evolved. This game successfully combined colorful 3D graphics with a text parser interface. Adventure games before this were either all text, or featured simple, static graphics. This was the first of its kind. It's not much to look at today, but it's held up well when considering its age.

Story (7/10)- You are Sir Graham, a loyal knight in the kingdom of Daventry. You must find three stolen treasures and return them to the dying king, so that you may claim the crown upon his death. You're pretty much left with that at the beginning of the game. No real advancement of the plot, but at least it's all laid out for you at the beginning.

Gameplay (7/10)- If you're expecting a real deep and involving quest, you're going to be disappointed. This game is pretty much a treasure hunt (I hate to use that term, but it is). You simply walk around Daventry, collecting various items, and using them to help you regain the treasures. And, there are plenty of items that you don't actually use, but are pretty much there to boost your score. Gameplay would be a lot better if there was a speed option of ''fast'' like the 2nd game. There's ''slow'', which is worthless, ''normal'', which is basically the most playable setting, and ''fast'', which is also worthless. You'll zoom off the screen, and die. What's the point? In the later games, this was ''fastest'', and ''fast'' was just a little faster than normal. The somewhat slow gameplay drags the score down a bit, but I'll admit, it gives the game a nice leisurely feel.

Another thing that bothered me was the inclusion of blatant fairy tale elements. At one point, you enter the candy house of Hansel and Gretel. It's these types of things that make this game hard to find believable (not that it was the most realistic thing ever in the first place). There are fairy tale and mythic elements in all of the King's Quest games, but they weren't quite as blatant as they were in the first two games.

Commands are done via a parser interface. In other words, if you want something, you'll have to type ''pick up ---'' to get it. Standard Sierra fare for the era. Primitive today, but it provides for a little more thinking, instead of a point-and-click interface, something Sierra adopted years later.

Still, despite the simplistic, primitive gameplay, it remains quite fun today. You'll get wrapped up attempting to recover the lost treasures, and there are some fun puzzles to solve (some with multiple solutions, so you won't get stuck as easy).

Graphics (7/10)- Very old, to say the least. Not so hard to understand, considering this is from 1983 (no, not 1984, the original PC Jr. version is from '83). Graphics are incredibly blocky and pixellated, but bright and colorful. Okay for their time period, overall. The engine used, AGI, would go on to provide so much more, though. Just look at the first Space Quest games, or King's Quest III or IV (yes, there was an AGI version of IV).

Sound (5/10)- There's the occasional bleep or bloop, and a nice theme plays at the beginning, but that's about it. Again, this was originally released in 1983, you can't expect anything too impressive.

Replay (7/10)- The slowness of Graham can frustrating, so you probably won't want to replay this game immediately. However, multiple solutions to many puzzles makes for decent replay value.

Overall- The series didn't start off with a bang, when speaking in terms of story or graphics, but this is the original, and you have to give it credit for being the first to do what it did. King's Quest II improved on it in some ways, but for the most part wasn't much better. It wasn't until King's Quest III that the series really got moving. But, for what it is, this game is a good time killer, and definitely a must have for historical purposes. In the realm of old adventure games, you could do much, much worse than the original King's Quest.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 03/15/04, Updated 03/03/05