King's Quest

Overview

King's Quest is an early PC Adventure game. The player navigates Sir Graham through dozens of brightly colored two-dimensional game screens, collecting items and interacting with strange characters. Most of the encounters and quests are based on classic fables and fairy tales: Jack and the Beanstalk, the Billy Goats Gruff, and Rumplestiltskin are among the stories depicted.

Gameplay

The player can move in any direction using the arrow keys, and is occasionally called upon to do some tricky climbing of irregular surfaces. Interaction with NPCs and objects is done via text inputs - i.e. "pick up pebbles", "talk to gnome". Sierra published a remake of the game in 1990, the first of several such remakes of their early games. Unlike the other remakes, though, it did not use Sierra's 256-color point-and-click interface introduced later the same year, and retained a textual interface while introducing higher resolution 16-color graphics, an enhanced storyline and some changes to puzzles.

Quests are free-form, and often an item found near the beginning of the game would come in handy near the end. Progress is recorded using a points system, with simple tasks like taking an item granting a few points, and more complicated tasks like solving a major puzzle granting many more.

The opening screen rolls the game's credits and is accompanied by Greensleeves, a 16th-Century English folk tune.

Availability

The game is available online in King's Quest collections at GOG.com or Steam.