Anyway, King’s Quest follows the story of
Graham… or Gram as he is referred to by most of the cast that can’t seem to say
Graham, as he recalls the stories of his youthful adventures to his
grandchildren. The first episode of the game, which is the pre-DLC game,
focusses on how Graham becomes a knight by winning a tournament.
The game
play has you move Graham around the relatively small open world town of
Daventry – a town name I hated throughout my time playing as it sounds a little
bit like a domestic cleaning product. The general aim of the game is to find
items to use to complete your quests, and occasionally make dialogue choices.
In terms of
what King’s Quest offers, its
essentially 60% story, 40% puzzles. Some of the puzzles without the use of a
guide would be tricky to figure out but it’s all reasonably fair in terms of
allowing you the freedom to figure everything out – there is nothing that’s
massively obscure.
Without
ruining the game, there’s not really a lot else to talk about other than style
and music. The graphics are reasonably cartoony which suits the story telling
aspect and the music goes with it quite well. It’s also telling that I played
the game and all DLCs for nearly 25 hours and the music didn’t get annoying in
the slightest.
Achievements – 1,800 Points – 53
Achievements
Right, so
while King’s Quest is probably listed
as an easy completion due to its gameplay and story focus, getting all the
achievements in one playthrough is a bit of a task. This is because 34
achievements are missable and not related to the story and it requires a few
tactical saves to reduce unnecessary play time.
For the main
game (episode 1), there is a lot of pissing about you need to do to net them
all. There are 17 Achievements in the main game with 13 random things you need
to do. A lot of these, and a theme for some of the missable DLC achievements,
involve you having to repeat a dialogue or action over and over again to get
all of Old Graham’s changeable dialogue to be played. Or dying stupidly which
causes one of those, ‘oh wait, that’s not how it happened!’ moments that make
the death just part of Graham’s awful memory.
Downloadable Content
There are 4
DLCs which extend the story of Graham’s adventures from the first episode. I’ve
said before with these style games that I don’t consider the additional
episodes to be DLC but this one carries 1,000 points from the from the first
episode alone with another 200 on offer per additional episode.
The first
two DLCs require partial multiple playthroughs to get every story outcome with
achievements attached and the most frustrating part of the hunt was having to
play through a story game for a second time. Thankfully though, the cutscenes
are fully skippable and this showed how the short the game is if you skip
through the fuzz.
From episode
4, things take a drastic turn from jovial to horribly dark storytelling. It
becomes even weirder when the dark turn issue is resolved, and everyone just
carries on as afterwards as if nothing happened. I won’t go into more than that
but it’s at this point that Graham’s character stops being charming and comes
across like a massive twat.
Things get
even more weird in episode 5 and even more depressing when we reach the end of
the story. Most of this last instalment feels a lot like playing through
Graham’s onset of dementia. It’s dark but also a brave move addressing a very real,
heart-breaking issue that people go through and actively capturing it in
gameplay.
King’s Quest was a slog at times –
especially during the second and third episodes where I had to replay a large
portion of them. But overall, it’s a solid story game that asks questions of
the players towards the end. I would definitely recommend it for a relaxed
playthrough just for the story alone.
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