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King's Quest VI

I had never played any of the King's Quest series except for King's Quest: Mask of Eternity, which doesn't have much to do with the series outside of the name. As KQ6 was written by Jane Jensen, famous for the Gabriel Knight series, and is said to be one of the better entries in the series, I decided to give it a shot.

I met a spider. I did something and then saved my game. I saved because when you do something and you don't die it's a good idea to save, generally speaking. Then I read a UHS hint file and found that after doing that something I had to immediately do something else, which I had not done. I went away and came back, hoping the game would then give me another chance, but it wouldn't. It was the kind of thing you would probably not think to do, and once you thought of it it was too late. The game would have had to be pretty damn good to get me to look past something as stupid as that.

It wasn't. In spite of Jensen's later work, KQ6 looks to be a lightly plotted puzzlefest, and the only thing this game has in common with Jane's next one, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, is that the puzzles suck. I actually hadn't hit many puzzles, but the ones I had hit annoyed me and I'd had to cheat almost immediately. The best puzzle was the one with the five guardians of the Isle of Wonder, but the solution for the fifth guardian seemed stupid to me. And scaling the sacred mountain was so annoying, not for the puzzles, which had to do with reading the manual, but because the climbing itself was needlessly tedious and took a very long time.

Sadly, I hadn't started a new save game for awhile, so I would have to go through a good deal of drudgery to get back to the stupid, poorly thought-out puzzle that had dead-ended me. Maybe the game gets better beyond this point. Maybe there are many wonderfully imaginative and intelligent puzzles. Maybe a plot develops. I don't know. I will never know. Finding a puzzle that bad that early in the game tells me I don't want to bother finding out.

I read a review of this game that described it as the best adventure game Sierra ever put out. It also mentioned that if you don't do something at the beginning of the game you can't win it, which you won't find out until you get to the end. Stuff like that just really pisses me off. I play for pleasure, not for torture. The king can quest without me.

-- Charles Herold -2000