King’s Quest VII - Final Rating

Just how deep is my despair for having played this game?

Written by Michael

I was thinking of taking some time off between my last post and writing this scoring post, but I didn’t want my memories to fade.  This isn’t a bad game, but certainly not the best Sierra has to offer.  One could argue that they hit their peak with Gabriel Knight, although they certainly have a couple more well-done stories to come, mostly from Al Lowe with Larry 7 and Torin’s Passage, and two more Space Quest games that almost reach the luster of the earlier titles.  The FMV titles to come have their fans, but they aren’t perfect either.  The rest of Sierra’s output from this point on is a collection of arcade, action, and WalMart-friendly shovelware.

Yes, I know that those last few sentences are bound to start some arguments and paint a target on my back from some, but the good news is that, while the glory days of Sierra are largely over, other publishers will be picking up the slack for the next few gaming years.  The genre itself doesn’t “die” just yet, and some quality titles from other houses are yet to come.  I often mention Sanitarium as such an example, but there’s also Syberia, The Longest Journey, and Discworld Noir, all from publishers that have not had any real impact on our blog so far.

I bring all this up because we are about to score the final true adventure entry in Sierra’s original animated adventure series.  Before 1984’s King’s Quest: Quest for the Crown, they only made text adventures with accompanying pictures.  Mind you, they were the first to do that as well, and they did it successfully.  This is the end of an era for Sierra, and after 1995’s Phantasmagoria and limited input on the action King’s Quest 8 title, Roberta Williams will avoid adventure game design for almost 30 years, enjoying the riches of her success yachting with her husband.

But I digress; back to the title in front of us.

Puzzles and Solvability

Most of the puzzles in the game are inventory manipulation, or just plain inventory use.  There’s no opportunity for dialog puzzles, as your words are always chosen for you.  Early on, there’s a few clever puzzles, such as the alternate solutions to survive the giant scorpion in the temple, or getting the iron worker to fall asleep in order to steal his gear, but as the game progresses, the game starts to repeat puzzles.  We need to use the smelly flower more than once, enter Malicia’s house the same way twice by both protagonists, and so on.

Actually, that last item brings me to another point: the random timing puzzles.  Want to go to Malicia’s house?  Randomly, she will be home or not.  Need to go into the undead teenager’s playhouse?  Randomly, the bucket lift will be either up or down.  Is the Boogeyman home?  No rhyme or reason, although the troublemaking boys teach us a protective rhyme.

That’s just a few of the random occurrences that we have no control over, thwarting our progress and sometimes killing us just for the sake of prolonging the game.

Things that are clickable for Rosella are often not for Valanice visiting the same location, or vice-versa.  If it has nothing to do with the chapter, it was just hard-coded out.  As the game wore on, the handholding increased.

Much like this wand, I’m tempted to give this game an F.

And I still haven’t mentioned the magic wand puzzle at the end; there was no hint or reason to look at the wand, and throughout the game, only a tiny number of inventory items needed to be looked at (the feather on the chicken, for example) and it was largely a wasted feat of programming, although rotating inventory items 360º was likely added just because of games like Myst.

Some bonus points, perhaps, for trying to make it less linear by allowing some puzzles to be solved earlier or later, by keeping most of the gameplay areas connected, but largely, this just meant going back and forth through places you’ve already conquered.  Didn’t find the salt in the first chapter, when you were in the desert?  Well, you could walk a trillion screens away in the third chapter to find it, but if you didn’t find it at the start of the game, you likely would spend hours of pixel hunting each screen to do so.

This could have been a stronger effort.  I might be generous by giving it a 5.

Interface and Inventory

We’re in the era of the dumbed-down interface.  I’ve made it clear before that I’m not a fan of the single-click systems, because it takes out some of the thinking.  In the first game of the series, you had to decide what verb to type in a command, which may have been challenging at times, but Sierra tended to program in common synonyms.  In the fifth game, the new point-and-click interface still made you decide, do I use the hand icon on the mouse and try to grab it, or use the talk icon and have a conversation?

But in this iteration, you wave the cursor (a magic wand) around the screen, hoping the tip lights up, meaning you can interact with something.  Then, you click on it, not knowing what will happen.

Don’t click here.

Sometimes, this results in insta-death, like when you click on the jack-in-the-box in the kid’s clubhouse.  Before that click, you think, maybe I’ll pick it up?  Maybe I’ll look at it?  Nah, you wind it up and... get scared to death.

The inventory system is a small window where you can click on the item, and if you wish to examine something, you then click the item on an eyeball set in the bottom of the screen.  Sadly, you can’t click the eye icon on anything else, which would have been nice, being able to look at things in the game world.

Saving is somewhat automatic; when you quit, it asks if you want to put the bookmark here.  It’s largely unimportant, because you cannot die, so it’s just keeping your place.  However, not having old saved games to look at means you can’t revisit something for a clue or to re-listen to a conversation.  Most players don’t press the screenshot button every 3.5 seconds like we do here on the blog.

A generous 4.

Story and Setting

Why, oh why couldn’t Jane Jensen come along for this ride again?  

The story’s not bad, really, but it’s weak.  They started, it seems, with the gameplay twist: let’s change from real characters to a cartoon.  With that set, it feels like they then tried to fit a story around it.  They had ideas early on, and it faltered.

Lorelei came up with a whole new set of lands for the women of Daventry to explore.  Queen Valanice and Princess Rosella get sucked into a pond that transports them to a different land, the land of Etheria, which has mythical creatures like trolls down below, corpses living like people on the mainland on one side of the forest, and anthropomorphic animals on the other, and Greek gods flying about up in the clouds.

What’s the story of the game?  “We need to get out and go home.”

Where’s the other 100 puppies?

The first gameplay scene evoked Looney Tunes vibes, while the main antagonist could be a distant relative of Cruella DeVille.  Most of the rest are less well-defined.  It’s disjointed.  In the fifth chapter, I’m given no story guidance whatsoever, and just make it up as I go along.

The ending was unsatisfactory, and the ret-coned connection to Rosella’s last game felt forced, especially when they fall in love seconds later.

This category was a big let-down after the incredible effort in the previous game of the series.  Another generous 5.

Sound and Graphics

The graphics are the high point of the game.  The hand-drawn animation matched the vibrant backgrounds, and were quite the step up from the pixelated faces of characters in the previous game and most others from before this time.  It fits the mood well.

The music, on the other hand, was mostly forgettable.  The same tunes in each land, playing over and over on repeat, largely elevator music.  Not enough variety, and no real signature style.  The sound effects, at least, were trademark cartoon-style, and did feel like they were stolen from a Chuck Jones piece.

It’s a shame the two nearly cancel each other out, because the graphics are very well done, even if it’s a mix of realistic and ridiculous.

A score of 6.

Environment and Atmosphere

Separately, each land within the game world evokes the right feel.  The desert is dry and desolate, the dying meadows come back to life vibrantly.  My favorite is the land of the undead, which is a beautiful sight and generally well-done. 

M.M.B.U.

But all of this loses some of the vibe when you realize that most of it cannot be interacted with, or at least only when the game wants you to.  That was a point loser for the puzzle category as well.  Some of the places have too few screens, while others have perhaps too many.  And that damn desert.

A score of 5.

Dialogue and Acting

As with my comments earlier, the characters and dialog were inconsistent.  Rosella starts off the game as a whiny, entitled girl, but in some chapters, she’s kind, polite, and deferential.  Queen Valanice alternates between indignant and gracious.  It’s as though different people wrote the different chapters and didn’t compare notes with each other.

The voices themselves were generally well-done, although none of them stood out as impressive, and none were spectacularly bad.

Yet another 5.

(5 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 5 + 5) / .6 = 50, a score that’s lower than all the other titles except the remake of the first game, although the first few were scored high by Trickster compared to contemporaries, rather than the entire field.  

And the winner?  We have a tie, one point above guessed by LeftHanded Matt, and one point below seemingly guessed by “I confuse Numbers with Bodyparts”.  Most of the guesses were significantly higher, but at least one commenter later regretted their wager.  But the game could have been a lot worse.  I’ll quote PsOmA from the final gameplay post: “It isn’t terrible. In fact, if it were anyone other than Sierra, Lucasarts or maybe Revolution Software putting this out, it would be lauded as an admirable effort.”  I was disappointed, but don’t regret having checked out the game.

Still, I’m also looking forward to playing something else soon. Perhaps we will go back in time, to the Enchantment Under the Sea dance?

CAP Distribution

100 CAPs to Michael

• Tedium Delirium Award - 100 CAPs - for blogging about King’s Quest VII for our enjoyment.

20 CAPs to LeftHanded Matt

• Sharing the Gift of Prognostication Award - 20 CAPs - for being one of two commenters with the nearest score guess for King’s Quest VII.

20 CAPs to I confuse Numbers with Bodyparts

• Sharing the Gift of Prognostication Award - 20 CAPs - for being one of two commenters with the nearest score guess for King’s Quest VII.

15 CAPs to Leo Vellés

• Looking on the Bright Side of Life Award - 10 CAPs - for sharing the credits of a future game.

• The Choice of an Old Generation Award - 5 CAPs - for a classic adventure game puzzle throwback.

10 CAPs to MenhirMike

• Don’t Bring the Franzia in the Taxi Cab Award - 10 CAPs - for bringing the reviewer down the rabbit hole of speedrunning for King’s Quest VII.

10 CAPs to Alex Romanov

• MadDog 20/20 Award - 10 CAPs - for also detailing the Franzia reference, although four hours after MenhirMike.

10 CAPs to PsOmA

• Simpatico Award - 10 CAPs - for generally being in agreement with the reviewer for most of KQ7.

10 CAPs to TomCaT

• Combing the Desert Award - 10 CAPs - for figuring out how the designers actually wanted us to play the Valanice segments.

9 CAPs to Laukku

• Making a Good Point Award - 10 CAPs - For realizing he has been slacking in writing comments on posts lately.

• My Precious Award - (-1) CAPs - A needed point reconciliation.

5 CAPs to Andy Panthro

• Coding in Python Award - 5 CAPs - for slithering into the comments with an inspired one-liner.

5 CAPs to arcanetrivia

• Scenes from an Olive Garden Award - 5 CAPs - for catching an obvious reference to DOTT.

5 CAPs to Arix

• Tick, Tick, Boom Award - 5 CAPs - for saving the reviewer the agony of replaying a section to check a death scene.