"King’s Quest…for the ladies."
by Stuart Newsom

No, not The Princess Bride, and don’t go finding The Princess Bride game. It’s a piece of R.O.U.S. droppings. No, this is King’s Quest, the godfather of adventure gaming. It also was one of those game series where it was believed that it would never ever die, especially with the super success of Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow. The technology was changing to allow tighter graphics (yes, I SAID TIGHTER GRAPHICS!) and use actual voice acting to tell their stories. So in 1994, Roberta Williams and Co. decided to tell a story not from King Graham or Prince Alexander’s side, but from both Queen Valanice and Princess Rosella’s side of the castle. Now, Rosella had gone on an adventure before, in King’s Quest IV, but it was the Queen’s first adventure, and the first time the game focused on two characters. Not only two characters but two headstrong female characters at that, with no mention of King Graham at all. It also, when released, got a myriad of poor reviews and was considered a disappointment following Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow. Well guess what. They’re wrong. You know why they’re wrong? Because I liked it.

The number one complaint against The Princeless Bride was its style, in that it looked too much like you were playing a Disney animated movie. Wasn’t there another game that came out only three years later, one that I have reviewed on this site, which actually got praised for that stylistic shift? Ah well, I’m sure CURSE it’ll OF dawn on MONKEY me ISLAND later. To me, it’s a pretty silly argument. “BOO! The graphics are too nice looking! It looks like an animated movie! Give me my blockier, obviously early 90s computer graphics!” I think the game looks awesome…well maybe not awesome...pretty good… just don’t look at the opening cut scene too much… and the animated feel gives it a personality outside of anything King’s Quest had ever done before. Another complaint about the animated style was that it made the series seem too “kiddy”. It might on the surface, but Valanice and Rosella still get violently killed if you do the wrong thing. One wrong turn and its get stung by a giant scorpion. Or get bit by a poisonous spider. Or get mauled by a Were-Bear (only one animal away from the dreaded ManBearPig). Or eaten by the freaking WIND! So, yeah, that King’s Quest tradition stays: the game’s evil and will kill you constantly. For every. Single. Little. Thing. For everything that stayed the same, there was still another thing that Princeless Bride did that had never been done before in the King’s Quest series that caused a firestorm among the fans. A change the control scheme.

The main control scheme for most of Sierra’s later adventure games, later being post 1988, was a system called Sierra’s Creative Interpreter, or SCI. SCI basically ran the game on the computer and had it’s language so it could interact with the operating system, starting with DOS and going from there. Well, Princeless Bride changed all that when, while still having the latest version of SCI on the backend, the interface changed into something a little simpler. Instead of picking the action, the curser did it for you, where all you needed to do what click on place to perform the action necessary. The complaint was that all you were doing was taking inventory and clicking it on hot spots. Yeah. So? Isn’t that what you were doing before? Isn’t that what adventure games are, especially at that time period? It was talking to people and figuring out what items to use where. That’s the puzzle. So what if, because of the interface changes, there’s some glitches that make the game unwinnable? Oh wait. That does suck. But it’s only one.

The story’s strong though!

It starts with Queen Valanice lecturing Princess Rosella on the importance of marriage while Rosella, rebellious as she is, wants to skip that and go out adventuring. Then Rosella sees some sort of magic seahorse and a castle in a nearby pond and dives in after it. Seeing her daughter and the princess dive into the water, Queen Valanice takes it upon herself to go get her and dives in after her! This leads to the magical transporting vortex to the Realm of Eldritch, where the two are separated when Rosella is snatched by a legion of trolls, who then turn Rosella into a troll herself so she can be betrothed to the King of the Trolls. With that, the quest starts for Valanice and Rosella to travel the lands of Eldritch like the Desert, the Vulcanix Underground, Etheria, and Ooga Booga Land to find each other and return home. It’s pretty standard King’s Quest stuff, but its chapter form makes the segments interesting and hopping back and forth between Valanice and Rosella creates a good dynamic and keeps the game interesting.

Is the Princeless Bride perfect? Eh, no. Not quite. The graphics, though lovely, still are very early cel style animation and some of the looks can be a little frightening. But it doesn’t deserve the bashing it got. Overall, it’s a very good adventure game, though it might be a little easy for the super hardcore because of the curser change, it shouldn’t dissuade you from trying it out. Now excuse me. I have to go get a peanut. Anybody want one?

Overall Rating: 7 out of 10