Game 162: King’s Quest VII: The Princeless Bride (1994) - Introduction

Written by Michael

The story of Roberta Williams and King’s Quest is a well-known one.  Over more than a decade, King Graham and his family have entertained many a gamer.  The series started out academic, with plots and characters ripped from classic literature, and an awful puzzle involving the spelling of one of their names.  While the references to the classics never went away, more modern sensibilities made their way into the games.  With new people helping steer the boat, the references started getting a little more modern.  Alice in Wonderland.  Beauty and the Beast.

But it’s, um, inconceivable that the title of the seventh game references the works of William Goldman and the (recently taken from us, too soon) Rob Reiner. 

Perhaps it’s because Roberta started to share the top role.  Both to be a mentor, and also for possible selfish reasons (like, say, working less or having more time for other projects), Roberta started letting other writers and producers take charge.  In King’s Quest VI, for example, former Hewlett-Packard employee Jane Jensen co-designed the game, bringing a fresh breath of air and a lot of positive reviews, especially after the venomous reviews they sometimes received for the fifth game in the franchise.  

After a few small writing stints, and the success of King’s Quest VI, she was let loose on her own game.  I recently played through it on the blog, where it also did rather well.  So, Roberta needed a new protegee.

Sadly, the creator of Jem and the Holograms had already left the company, so enter a horror writer who, although she hadn’t published anything noteworthy yet, showed a lot of promise.  That would be Lorelei Shannon.

This picture MUST have been ripped from her MySpace profile.

Sierra, and the wonderful ladies at the helm of this game, suddenly saw users with more powerful computers and more impressive graphics cards.  No more pixelated blocks for them!  In the style of their long-ago former publishing partners, Disney, they went with animation for the newest installment in the franchise.  While the first six games had a somewhat formal and proper presentation, this game had a new, bright energy in the advertisements and the art direction.

Where’s stodgy old King Graham?  

No, this is the long-awaited return of Princess Rosella.  You remember her, right?

This was BEFORE Roberta was willing to share the director’s chair.

From the back of the box:

Unfolding in book-like chapters, The Princeless Bride begins when Princess Rosella is lured into a magical pool and the enchanted world beyond. Her mother Queen Valanice plunges in after her, and they find themselves in a land beyond dreams.

The Realm of Eldritch is inhabited by delightful and fantastic creatures; talking stags, friendly trolls, a magnificent crystal dragon, and many others. But Eldritch is in the darkest peril. An evil enchantress plots to destroy the magic Realm, forcing Rosella and Valanice to use their courage, wisdom and heart as they battle her for the survival of an entire world.

Using breathtaking feature-film quality animation, this epic story takes you through a series of magical regions: a mystic and ancient desert, the volcanic crystal caverns of the trolls, a delightfully spooky land of surprises, and so much more. As Rosella searches for the beautiful Etheria, Land in the Clouds, Valanice searches for her daughter, and both become caught up in the adventure of their lives.

Okay, this seems a little different than we’re used to.  The sixth game was a little less stuffy than the first quartet, and this one seems even more mystical.  The series started off with simple fairy tales, after all.

What else is different?  Well, it’s got an instant-replay button, in a way.  If you die, you’re treated to the demise, but then brought back to before whatever mistake you made.  The interface is largely a one-click icon system.  And saved games are rather different, too.  You start the game with your name, and every time you quit, it saves your progress.  Because you can’t (permanently) die, there’s no need for multiple save slots.

But also, a down note: there’s speech, but no subtitles.  Which would not have been a problem for me back in the day -- heck, I routinely turned them off when I was 16 -- but it’s going to make it tough to blog, when I don’t remember all the dialog.  Guess I’ll have to record videos or something.

But for now, screenshots.  An emulation note, though.  I tried like the dickens to get this to run as authentically as possible, but we’re approaching the era where that all goes to hell.  First, I tried to run a CD version that was originally intended for Windows 3.1, by using ScummVM.  It worked great, at least for the intro.  That’s where the images below come from.

But when I got to the actual game, the music wasn’t playing.  Searching online makes me think it happens to a lot of people.  So, I used an old bug fix from the Sierra Help web site to apply all the Sierra released bug fixes and provide some baseline settings for DOSBox.  That’s what I’ll be using starting in the next post. 

Don’t dock your score guesses because of emulation troubles.  That’s just one of the problems we are going to be dealing with more and more going forward.

The DOS version has a really low-res intro compared to the Windows version.

We start with Princess Rosella singing about her problems.  You’ll notice she’s not the prim and proper farm girl-looking Rosella from the third and fourth games.

Okay, well, it’s really well animated, but then looks choppy as heck because of the technology of the time.  Shame.

Her mother, Queen Valanice, comes by and repeats what Rosella was singing about:  

“It really is time you thought about getting married.”

“Oh, mother!”

“Now, Rosella, you’re nearly 20 years old!  Most of your friends are already married.”

“Oh, mother, I’m not ready!  There’s so many things I haven’t done yet!  I want to have fun!”

In flies a horsefly of sorts, and Rosella gets distracted while Mom drones on about getting hitched.  Eventually, the flying seahorse tricks Rosella into trying to grab it from the pool of water they are near, and in goes Rosella.

Mom notices what happened, grabs something Rosella dropped, holds her nose, and jumps in after her.

They fall through a vortex of sorts, and Mom reaches out to daughter.  They almost connect, and then a bulldog-looking hand reaches in and grabs Rosella’s arm away.

And so, they are separated.

Now, let’s begin.

After naming our game, which will be how our progress is tracked, we’re given a choice of chapters.  I’m guessing the idea is, if you get stuck on one, work on another?  But I’m not going to get fancy here, and I’ll start at chapter one.

“My daughter!  Rosella!  Where are you?”

The twister drops the Queen Mother in a desert scene worthy of Wile E. Coyote, and as we walk through the scene, we tear our dress on a cactus.  This movement, though, shows us that the screen is a side-scroller.  There’s a scroll bar just below where she is standing on the screen at this point, and it moves as she makes her way east.

Something bounces by really fast, and I barely get a glance at it.  I think it’s a mouse that is bouncy like a kangaroo, but is wearing glasses.  And he makes a loud boing-boing sound as he bounces.  Soon after, another creature that looks kind of like a cross between a rabbit, a deer, and even a small bit of anteater chases by, making sounds almost like a stereotypical Native American from an old cartoon.

Yes, this is weird.

(Could this be the creature?)

So as the game begins, the score guessing begins as well.  Place your bets, please. The previous games in the series, volumes I through VI, including a remake of the original, has gotten scores ranging from 48 (the very first title) to 62 (the most recent).