King's Quest: To Heir is Human

This game could well have been called King’s Quest: Something Completely Different, as its introduction throws out everything previously established in the series thus far in favour of a brand-new set up. So much so, that initial reactions to the game were negative simply because Graham and Daventry were nowhere to be seen. And if there’s one thing that fans hate, it’s change.

The opening introduces us to a seventeen-year-old boy called Gwydion, who lives as a slave in the clifftop mansion of a cruel wizard called Manannan in the land of Llewdor (yes, Roberta Williams had clearly been reading up on her Welsh mythology). He lives a lonely, miserable existence, longing for freedom and the answer to the question: “who am I?”

The game manual reveals that this Gwydion is only the latest in a long line of Gwydions, for even though Manannan is powerful enough to conjure spirits to do his housework, he prefers the cruelty that comes with having a mortal child at his beck and call. As such, he’s been kidnapping babies for years in order to raise them as his slaves – only to realize that with age comes agency. After the first Gwydion was found dabbling with spells in Manannan’s secret laboratory, the wizard vowed never to let another child live past the age of eighteen.

So the clock is ticking on the latest Gwydion – quite literally, as there’s a timer at the top of the screen that eventually spells doom if the player does not complete the game quickly enough. Unlike the quest narratives of the first two games, the main goal of To Heir is Human is escape. The player must wait for Manannan to leave the house or go to sleep, at which point you have approximately twenty-five minutes to put an escape plan into effect. This involves rummaging through Manannan’s house, discovering his secret laboratory, and descending into the countryside to search for magical ingredients – specifically to perform the spell that permanently transforms a person into a cat.

Having made this “cat cookie,” you must then find a way to trick Manannan into eating it, never forgetting that you’re constantly at the mercy of the clock. If Manannan catches you somewhere you shouldn’t be, or in possession of something you shouldn’t have, then you’re immediately blasted into ash. The evocative cover art on the box effectively captures this scenario – Gwydion is being constantly monitored, trapped within the confines of the wizard’s magical control. 

Suffice to say, it’s a harrowing scenario to play out as a child. Not only does Manannan sporadically appear in various rooms with a menacing musical cue (often to just stare at you silently for a few seconds) but you have to continually remember to get back to the house before his return, concealing your belongings under the bed before he discovers them. If you obtain his magic wand, then that also must be returned to its cabinet in the study before it’s missed. One must always be conscious of how much time has passed; always remember to conceal the evidence of what you’re doing.

I well remember the horror of Manannan appearing if it took too long to return to the mansion, and the desperate scramble to try and escape the screen – though once he appeared in that billow of smoke, it was already too late.

Although the game is far from over once Manannan has been defeated, it is a very front-loaded game in the sense that you spend most of its run-time trying to get rid of him. One has to wait until he goes on a journey or retires to his bedroom in order to start your mission, then spend yet more time searching the house and picking your way up and down the horrific path that leads down the mountain. Seriously, just look at this thing:

The search for ingredients also takes up precious minutes, and the land of Llewdor is not without its dangers. There are bandits in the forest and a gorgon in the desert that stand between Gwydion and the materials he needs in his spell-craft, not to mention irritatingly timed puzzles that rely on being in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. It’s bad enough waiting for the Three Bears to leave their home so you can pilfer their porridge, or poking around the oak tree in search of three dried acorns, but I was almost reduced to tears waiting outside the tree house for the bandit inside to fall asleep. It took me about fifteen minutes before the screen-text told me that he’d fallen asleep.

And then there’s the eagle feather. AARRRGGGHHH. Every now and then, an eagle will fly across the screen and drop a feather that you need for an essential spell. But it only appears on five screens, and according to this video, only has a twenty-five percent chance of turning up. And even on the off-chance it DOES appear, it still doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to drop a feather – those odds are fifty-fifty. It is so frustrating, and one gets the sense it was designed that way to prevent the player from doing too much on their first trip.

But of course, that only posed a challenge to me. Could I get all the ingredients for every spell, including the more difficult items (the porridge, the acorns, the eagle feather, the purse that allows you to buy things from the store) on a single trip down the mountain, then return to the mansion and perform all the spells before Manannan returned from his initial journey? Turns out, yes, I could – and that includes getting rid of the giant spider in order to access the cave and meet the oracle, an interaction which triggers the arrival of the pirates in the tavern.

But of course, the pirates don’t stick around for long, and I found the game unwinnable after arriving back at the dock to find that they had left without me. The game automatically ends at that point.

So I had another go, and on my second try I got everything done in time to get to the pirate ship within thirty minutes of game-time – only for a glitch in the system to stymie me when it turned out I couldn’t retrieve any of my possessions from the captain’s quarters. (I was also curious to see what would happen if I boarded the ship without dealing with Manannan, but it turns out that distance is no object, and he appears once the timer runs out – though oddly, he kills Gwydion over the fact his wand is missing, not that his slave managed to hide himself on a ship bound for another country).

Having proved I could at least manage it, I paced myself the third time around, and finally ended up on the pirate ship, heading towards Daventry, all tasks completed. Why Daventry? Because it turns out that our hero isn’t an orphan boy called Gwydion at all. As the mysterious oracle informs us, Gwydion’s real name is Alexander, the son of King Graham and Queen Valanice of Daventry, who was kidnapped by Manannan as a baby from his cradle. (I believe supplementary material informs us that the family was specifically targeted in revenge for how Graham thwarted Hagatha – Manannan’s sister – in rescuing of Valanice from her captivity).

So the clue to Gwydion’s true identity was in the title the whole time! It’s a play on the phrase: ““to err is human, to forgive divine” by Alexander Pope, pointing to the fact that Gwydion is secretly Graham’s heir, and ending the complaints that this story had nothing to do with its predecessors. The oracle puts a new task before him: to travel home across the seas and mountains to save a princess – his own twin sister Rosella – from a three-headed dragon that’s ravaging the kingdom of Daventry.

At this point the game becomes more of a straightforward quest narrative, with very little in the way of puzzle solving. In fact, the only thing that stretches out the run-time is that you have to spend an interminable amount of minutes waiting for the pirate ship to get where it’s going, and picking your way across pixelated pathways through the mountains that are so narrow you’ll be ready to throw your computer out the window by the end of it.

But once you’ve climbed and descended the mountain range that lies between you and Daventry, you use the remaining magical spells in your arsenal to defeat the dragon and save your sister. The pair of you arrive triumphantly back home, and though Gwydion-Alexander is probably going to need several years of intensive therapy to deal with the ordeal he’s gone through, it’s all a happy ending when Graham takes his adventurer’s cap from the hook on the wall and throws it toward his children...

Or IS it?

The ending is something of a cliff-hanger, as it freeze-frames just before the hat reaches either Gwydion or Rosella’s outstretched hands, and the next game in the series, The Perils of Rosella, picks up right where this one finishes. But I’ll leave that for my next post...

***

Growing up, To Heir is Human was always my favourite of the games, though now I’m hard-pressed to say why. Even though I never actually completed it on my own (heck, I never even got as far as turning Manannan into a cat – if memory serves, I was never able to retrieve the purse from the bandits’ treehouse, which prevented me from ever buying the necessary goods from the store) I loved the basic premise of the story and the way in which ingredients had to be collected for spell-casting.

(Although, being the bizarre child that I was, I occasionally just played as the obedient servant: doing all the chores required of me, and just wandering around harmlessly when Manannan left the house).

That said, spell-casting certainly sounds more fun on paper than it does in practice, as the way in which it works in the game is very fastidious. Each manual came with a few pages of the book that features in the game itself: The Book of Sorcery. These pages come with a list of ingredients, the instructions for performing the spell, and an incantation that must be spoken aloud (that is, typed out in a text-box). The hitch is this: every spell must be performed exactly as it is written in the manual. And I mean exactly. Everything must be done in the correct order. All the ingredients must be used properly. The incantations must be written out with the correct spelling and punctuation. And that last one is particularly hard, since the manual has them written in cursive.

If you do something wrong, you’re dead. If you don’t have one of the ingredients (or other tools, like the bowl or the knife) you’re dead. In fact, you’re worse than dead: you’re living forever under the consequences of the botched spell. Did you do the cat spell wrong? You’re half-boy, half-cat. The causing a deep sleep spell? You fall asleep and never wake up. The teleportation spell? You’re teleporting uncontrollably on and off the screen. The brewing a storm spell? You have a perpetual thundercloud over your head. Game over.

This could be one of the most stressful aspects of the game, as once you’ve started casting a spell, you can’t back out until it’s finished. And there are so many of them. Well, seven in all, but it takes a while to get through them all, and four of them are absolutely essential in finishing the game.

***

King’s Quest III boasted an upgrade in graphics, and although Llewdor is much smaller than either Daventry or Kolyma (only four by five screens) it’s beautifully rendered, with natural rock formations, wind-swept trees on the bluffs, woodland groves, and a desert. Just try not to contemplate the absurdity of an endless desert existing only a hop-skip-and-a-jump away from a vast ocean. That’s extremely questionable topography. Perhaps to make up for it, there’s a village on the shore with an actual economy in the form of a general store and tavern.

The ocean to the east and the desert to the west go on forever, so there’s no point trying to traverse either one without the proper transportation – and indeed, if you go too far into the desert, you’ll never be able to find your way back. But this has always been my favourite screen, with the cross-section of the water:

And of course, there’s the magic map. If you search Manannan’s wardrobe, you’ll find a blank sheet of parchment with a grid on it – and once you start exploring Llewdor, the squares fill up with the places you’ve been, allowing you easy access to them by placing the arrow curser over the area you want to visit. (Of course, as I played this game on-line, that option wasn’t available to me, as pressing F6 had no effect whatsoever – that meant I had to keep manually walking up and down that blasted mountain path!)

It was a fun innovation at the time, and really gave you the sense that you were performing actual magic. Later, the map depicts the pirate’s course across the ocean to Daventry, and then the pass through the mountains and the very limited geography of Daventry (though by that point, the gameplay is so linear that it really makes no difference that you can teleport around).

And hey, if you really can’t get enough of disappearing and reappearing in a cloud of smoke, you can also perform the teleportation at will spell, in which an amber stone given to you by the oracle is magicked to take you anywhere at random just by rubbing it. It’s the most negligible of all the spells, as you can’t control where you end up and can easily finish the game without it. It can be used to escape the pirate ship and get past the Abominable Snowman, but there are easier (and more rewarding) ways of doing either of those two tasks.

***

Because I’m a bit anal retentive about these things, I was curious about how quickly one could finish this game, and what the lowest achievable score was. As mentioned, I was able to collect everything required in Llewdor before Manannan returned from his first journey away from the house, and turned him into a cat before completing the rest of the spells and going straight to the waiting pirate ship – but a glitch in the game prevented me from getting any further due to the fact I wasn’t able to retrieve my belongings from the captain’s quarters.

Eventually I managed to obtain a perfect score at a time of 1:18:20, though there are plenty of shortcuts you could potentially take. As it happens, you don’t need the teleportation spell or the communicating with animals spell to win the game (the latter’s only real purpose is to give you access to the buried treasure, which you also don’t need) and the causing a deep sleep spell isn’t necessary either. I was warned that if you didn’t cast it in the brig to put all the pirates to sleep, a stray pirate would appear on the shoreline to kill you – but after a quick experiment, found out this wasn’t the case.

So those three spells, plus all the ingredients you need to collect in order to perform them, can be skipped. I also discovered that you can change yourself into an eagle on board the pirate ship and (at the fastest speed) fly in a matter of seconds across the ocean and up the cliff face to the Abominable Snowman’s cave. However, the game very sneakily does not let you bypass this monstrosity by turning into an eagle or a fly:

You simply cannot enter this screen as one of the two creatures, and if you attempt it while on the screen, the wings/feather will be caught in an updraft and lost forever. You can, however, use the spell after completing this nightmare screen and fly straight into Daventry – not that it’ll make much difference.

You also don’t need the extra points that come from listening in on the bandits’ conversation in the tavern about where their hideout is located (which requires you to transform into a fly, then enter the hole at the base of the oak tree to discover the secret rope that activates the ladder). Instead, you can simply find the rope manually, by sticking your hand into the hole. Which means you don’t need to pick up the fly wings either.

Come to think of it, you don’t actually need the magic map at all, except to move around faster – but because I couldn’t actually use the map in that way thanks to the formatting on my computer, it becomes superfluous. In doing (or rather not doing) all this, the lowest score I could attain was 142 points out of 210, and the fastest time at 53:54 minutes.

***

As the third game in the series, To Heir is Human was also (at that point) the most ambitious, with better graphics, better sound quality, and – most importantly – a more elaborate story. As Roberta Williams herself said: “My previous games... were essentially glorified treasure hunts... your object being to win the game by finding and collecting items. It was not possible to have bigger and more complex plots than that thanks to technical limitations.”

But there’s much more going on in this game, and it’s easy to get invested in Gwydion’s plight. Unlike Graham, who went on quests for valuable MacGuffins, Gwydion is in a fight for his very life, and the format of the gameplay – which included chores, punishments, a ticking clock, and limited windows of opportunities – added to the immersive experience of actually being the captive of an evil wizard.

With that in mind, it’s inevitable that Gwydion would feel more three-dimensional than Graham, simply because there’s more at stake, as well as an actual mystery to solve regarding his true identity (which caused no end of confusion for me as a child when I started playing The Perils of Rosella before finishing To Heir is Human, only to see a guy dressed in Gwydion’s clothes in the throne room and being referred to as Alexander).

With the light-hearted quest narrative replaced with a fraught escape from slavery and certain death, the game can’t help but feel considerably darker – especially when you take into account the events of the Time Skip. Graham and Valanice have clearly not had a happy seventeen-year marriage, what with the kidnapping of their infant son, the destruction of their kingdom, and the near-sacrifice of their last remaining child.

As a youngster I just absorbed the story as it was given to me, but as an adult, it’s rather depressing to realize just how dire it all is. It’ll take years to restore Daventry to its former glory, the entire royal family is probably suffering from PTSD, and Gwydion lost his whole childhood to the machinations and cruelty of an evil wizard. And there’s still another crisis to come, which takes place within the opening seconds of the very next game.

Ah well, at least the scavenger hunt for all the spell ingredients was fun.

***

As it happens, there are not one but two remakes of this game, one from Infamous Adventures in 2006 and the other from ADG Interactive in 2011. The latter also created the King's Quest II remake, of which this is a direct sequel, with several of that game’s original ideas carrying over into its gameplay (namely the existence of The Father, a Greater-Scope Villain who deliberately targets the royal family and governs over the Society of the Black Cloak).

The Infamous Adventures version is a pretty straightforward remake with a facelift. The music and graphics are obviously better, and it uses the opening title-card from KQ5 and the font from KQ7 for their introductory sequence (since this predates both the AGV remakes, I wonder if this earlier game is where they got the idea for that, not to mention the fact that each remake of To Heir is Human starts with Gwydion having strange dreams that provide hints as to his past. Both also have a fake-out regarding whether or not the cat cookie has worked on Manannan).

Infamous Adventures, 2006

King's Quest V, 1990

But there’s not a huge amount to say about this one, only a litany of minor changes and Easter eggs: the exterior visuals of Manannan’s manor are divided into two screens, with the house and the chicken pen spread further apart. The house itself also feels larger, with a more opulent-looking interior, including a grandfather clock on the upper floor to remind one of the ever-ticking passage of time.

The laboratory looks more like an underground cave, while the mystery of the bizarre object hanging from the kitchen ceiling is solved: it’s two baskets!

The game repurposes the opening shot from the official King’s Quest V (which there depicts Graham picking some flowers) as part of Gwydion’s backstory, in which a woman hurries through the rain with a baby in her arms, handing it over to Manannan waiting on the docks while a ship waits on the water. Naturally, she’s immediately killed once the evil wizard has custody. (Later, the graphics for the suspended walkway inside the cliff are the same as those seen in the official KQ1 remake).

The spell-casting has been streamlined, to the point where you simply have to have all the correct ingredients and click the curser over the spell you want to cast. The game then says: “you mix the ingredients exactly as the spell books says,” followed by Gwydion automatically reciting the incantation. I dunno, I feel this is almost TOO easy. Half the challenge of the original game was being ever-so-careful that your typing was correct.

The robbers in their treehouse are always asleep, which spares you the agony of having to leave the screen and return again, while the storekeeper looks just like Stephen Spielberg. I’m not sure if that was on purpose or not. A lighthouse has been added to the township (though you can’t explore it) and on being turned to stone, Medusa cries out to her sisters to avenge her. That’s cool, though it amounts to nothing. 

When Gwydion speaks with the Oracle, we’re treated to a cutscene of Graham and Rosella in Daventry, in which the latter volunteers to sacrifice herself to the three-headed dragon – though honestly, the most exciting part is seeing what Graham and Valanice’s private chambers look like. And hey, Josh Mandel returns as the voice of Graham!

Later, there’s another cutscene that demonstrates the journey across the mountains was a cold and arduous business, and later Gwydion is given the line: “up until a few days ago I believed my name to be Gwydion,” which suggests his captivity on the pirate ship and in crossing the mountains took a while. The sprite for the Abominable Snowman is the Yeti from KQ5, and once you reach Daventry there’s a better sense of the fire-damage and desolation that’s been wrought. Also, the entire Daventry sequence is set at night, which provides a nice excuse to contrast the devastation below with the cold stars above.

It's in the final ten minutes that things get really interesting: first of all, this remake mercifully drops the need for Gwydion to prove his identity by showing his sister the birthmark on his butt-cheek. Furthermore, the journey back to the castle involves Rosella quelling her brother’s fears by telling him the entire kingdom searched for him after his kidnapping, and the reunion with Graham and Valanice takes place at the castle gates. (Rumpelstiltskin also gets his cameo, and he’s given a strong Scottish burr).

There’s also another post-game cutscene which depicts Alexander and Graham engaging in some father/son bonding while rebuilding the kingdom – and hey, they’re working on the woodcutter’s cottage from King’s Quest I! That’s a nifty Easter egg. All this happens before they reach the cliff-hanging finish in which Graham flings his adventurer’s cap toward Alexander and Rosella... so I liked the fact that this remake gave the family a chance to get to know each other before the next crisis hit.

I watched this game on a YouTube Let’s Play channel, and the uploader also managed to get all the necessary ingredients within one trip down the mountain, and got through the entire game in just under one hour. I have to admit, the close-up faces whenever there was dialogue weren’t particularly attractive, and for some reason a voice-actor was credited as “Mordack”, even though I’m extremely certain that character never appeared in the game.

In any case, watching it drove home the fact that this game feels more like an actual story and not just a quest. The stakes are both high and personal, there is a mystery to be uncovered, and there is something genuinely emotional about Gwydion finding his way home and being reunited with his long-lost family.

All of which meant I was very excited to play the AGV version of the game, which had already expanded the world and story of King’s Quest II. As noted, this operates as a direct continuation to that remake, in which various original concepts and characters are carried over from one game to the next, to the point where the curse of The Father, as uttered at the end of Romancing the Stones, kicks off the gameplay: “Thrice now I curse, and from the first, your family shall feel the worse...”

That character was established as the leader of the Black Cloak Society, who was once a sorcerer called Morgeilen, brother to Legenimor, the founder and first king of Daventry. It’s hinted he’s in search of a magical artefact known as The Item (yeah, not the greatest word for it), and his entire purpose in posing as Graham’s Prime Minister and sending the king off to Kolyma to search for Valanice in KQ2 was to provide him with the opportunity to search Castle Daventry for it without interruption.

And as we learn in this game, the royal family was deliberately targeted by Manannan on the behest of the Father, with Alexander kidnapped as a baby precisely because he was the child of Graham and Valanice. There is a Canon Welding plot at work here, which draws together all of the series’ villains under the umbrella of the Black Cloak Society.

The game’s cold open depicts Manannan stealing Prince Alexander from his cradle and taking him to Llewdor, which is an effective start, and one that’s followed by Gwydion awakening from a dream in which someone is calling his name, climbing to the tower room where Manannan’s telescope is kept, and looking through it to see the oracle beckoning him from her cave. From there, it cuts to the familiar beats of the original introduction: Gwydion stares sadly out over the countryside from the clifftop before Manannan demands that he return to his chores.

Whereas Romancing the Stones added elaborate new subplots and character motivations, here the designers hew much more closely to the original To Heir is Human game, presumably realizing that the plot was complex enough on its own to sustain a remake. That’s not to say there aren’t some extra puzzles and paths, with minor structural changes made to the two halves of the game.

When it comes to the first half, during which Gwydion explores Llewdor and gathers spell ingredients, added depth is given to some of the original obstacles. For example, Gwydion’s encounter with Medusa (here renamed Smaude by rearranging the letters of her name, just as they did in KQ2 in calling Dracula “Count Caldaur”) now takes place in a desert cave, where the gorgon forces Gwydion through a test of character, making him answer a number of questions to win her favour.

The stone of amber is given to you by her, not the oracle, and though the mirror can be used to destroy her, it can also be given as a gift after she transforms back into a mortal woman. She also seems to be some sort of seer, telling Gwydion: “a great change is encroaching upon you. Beware those that offer help, particularly those that ask a price.” (Is she referring to the pirates? Because that description fits, but you have to trust them to win the game, which renders the warning moot).

A brand-new spell is also introduced in order to extend the gametime, since it must be completed in order to start the domino effect that leads to Manannan’s defeat. First Gwydion must gain musical talent in order to obtain the lute from the barmaid, then give the lute to the minstrel to gain his magical flask, then use the flask to fill the hollowed-out rock with water, which allows him to reach the bottle with the torn-out page of The Book of Sorcery inside – the one that contains the spell for transforming a person into a cat...

This isn’t the only way in which the game slows down the speed with which a player can move through the action. In the original, it’s perfectly possible to get everything you need and turn Manannan into a cat within the timespan of his first journey abroad. Here, Gwydion must see the oracle before he can obtain the mandrake root, and gain an eagle feather through cunning means before he can defeat the spider at the oracle cave, and eavesdrop on the bandits by turning into a fly before he can gain access to their treehouse. You technically don’t need to do this in the original game (you could just find and pull on the rope immediately) which always seemed like a waste of a puzzle.

I’d be very surprised if anyone could do everything that needed to be done within the time allotted to one wizard’s sleep or journey.

***

The second half of the game, in which Gwydion voyages with the pirates to Daventry, is expanded through the inclusion of the developers’ own worldbuilding. In the second half of the game, in which Gwydion voyages with the pirates to Daventry, there is a lot more of the developers’ personal worldbuilding. On the way to their destination, the pirates send Gwydion through an island of magical obstacles in order to retrieve a treasure (here, nothing of this nature is overheard from the ship rats) which ends up being the stash of Daventry’s founder, the King Legenimor. 

Gwydion obtains an orb of power that will provide instant rejuvenation to the land of Daventry at the end of the game, and a strange artefact that looks like two hands cupped together, described as: “a vessel in the likeness of the First King’s hands in his tomb.”

The final act proceeds as you’d expect, though said orb and vessel have their part to play. The game cleverly includes the latter end of the cutscene from Romancing the Stones, in which Graham is standing on the parapets and tempted by the Father, who tells him that he’ll call back the dragon if he gives him his crown. We don’t see this happen, but it’s clearly just taken place when Gwydion returns to the castle with his sister.

The fiery landscape is rendered very well, with the familiar layout and landmarks from KQ1, though if you’re not careful, Gwydion can perish right at the finish line. As the family is reunited, a thread is tied off just as another one is left hanging: Graham realizes that his crown reacts to the presence of the vessel in Gwydion’s possession. Realizing that this is what the Father was searching for the whole time, he throws it from the castle parapets. In our last cutscene, the Father picks up the pieces with a scowl...

A scene midway through Romancing the Stones

The conclusion of To Heir is Human

It all points to a much broader story arc, but sadly, whatever AGV Interactive had in mind never materialized, as their plans to adapt King’s Quest IV fell through (I think it came down to budgetary reasons). What would have happened next with the Father and how they would have explored their own variations on The Perils of Rosella, we’ll never know.

But what we do get is done very elegantly, melding the plot-points of both the original game and what the studio established in Romancing the Stones. Not all the changes and additions work, but it contains a better sense of history and new context for familiar puzzles that make a lot more sense.

The graphics alone make it a more detailed, immersive experience, and are quite lovely. As with Romancing the Stones, I was particularly impressed when some logical world-building is done: in this case, the township of Llewdor has more buildings you can enter, and a honey tree is situated close by the Three Bears’ house.

On a more technical note, the game also updates the formatting itself, making certain elements easier to function. This is a point-and-click adventure, with no requirements to type in commands, which is most notably utilized in the making of magic spells. It’s a little more complex than the Infamous Adventures version, as you do need to manually prepare the ingredients, but the speaking of the incantations is automatic so no spellchecks required!

You can also speed up Manannan’s absences by having Gwydion take a nap in his bedroom, and the timer at the top of the screen turns from green to orange to red to indicate how much time you have left. Items in your inventory have a blue outline if they’re dangerous to carry. There’s even a new interface for buying things at the general store or stashing things under the bed.

Miscellaneous Observations:

As ever, the designers have a bit of fun with the gameplay. For example, Manannan will sporadically give Gwydion one of four chores to perform: sweeping the kitchen, dusting his desk, emptying his chamber pot, or feeding the chickens outside. If you don’t have Gwydion complete these tasks in a timely manner, Manannan will punish him in one of four ways: locking him in his room, magically hanging him by his feet by the kitchen ceiling, transforming him into a snail, or forcing him to do calisthenics in the entry hall. It’s all quite funny (for the player, if not Gwydion) and worth checking out at least once.

There are a couple of other fun Easter eggs: you can buy a drink at the tavern which results in Gwydion stumbling around drunkenly for a few seconds, and look under the tapestry in the upstairs hallway to see some notes for King’s Quest IV, which was currently in development at the time. Much later on, you can visit the Abominable Snowman’s cave if you are so inclined, provided he doesn’t appear on the previous screen to block your way, and with the understanding that there’s nothing you can do or see in there besides the gory remains of his previous victims.

Manannan can also appear in his study to write (at which point you don’t want to interrupt him) and in the tower room where his telescope is kept. This is where things get particularly interesting in a Cryptic Background Reference sort of way, for sometimes you can chance upon Manannan peering through his telescope, getting increasingly agitated by what he sees and ranting to himself:

What is he referring to? Who is he watching? Given the direction the telescope is pointed, we might infer that it has to do with the bandits that live in the forest, but we never find out for certain, and the scene has no impact on the plot whatsoever. It’s an enticing detail to add to the proceedings, demonstrating that other characters have a life outside the immediate gameplay.

The familiar fairy tale featured in this particular game is Goldilocks and the Three Bears, with Gwydion in the role of Goldilocks (in that he enters their house while they’re away and helps himself to their belongings). Breaking-and-entering is necessary in this case, as you have to retrieve Baby Bear’s bowl of porridge from the table (in which the cat cookie is disguised) and the thimble from the upstairs drawer (with which you collect dew from the flower garden outside for another spell).

But the game has some fun with the proceedings: interacting with the Bears is never fatal, but if you knock on the door while the family is at home, Papa Bear will throw you off the front doorstep. Likewise, if you dare to tread on Mama Bear’s flowerbed while she’s working in it, she’ll go a step further and throw you clear off the screen.

Finally, if the mood is upon you, you can choose to re-enact the story in its entirety, by tasting the three bowls of porridge (too hot, too cold, and just right), sitting in the three chairs (too hard, too soft and just right – at least until the little chair collapses beneath you) and lying in the three upstairs beds (you know how it goes). But by lying in Baby Bear’s bed, Gwydion will fall straight to sleep, and it’s only a matter of time before Papa Bear returns home and rightfully throws you from the house. It’s probably the most amusing way a fairy tale has been integrated into a King’s Quest game.

On that note, the Greek myth featured in this game is Medusa, who lives in the western desert and can only be defeated by taking a page out of Perseus’s book and showing her her own reflection in a hand mirror pilfered from Manannan’s bedroom. It’s a neat little puzzle that requires a degree of timing and nerve (you can’t show her from too far away, you have to wait until she’s closer) as well as foreknowledge of Greek mythology.

Ever since I’ve been a child, I’ve been haunted by this portrayal of Manannan’s kitchen – specifically just what on earth is hanging from the rooftop. When you type “look at roof,” the game tells you that “pots, pans, baskets, and drying herbs and spices are hanging from the rafters”, but I still can’t figure out what that yellow thing is meant to be. It looks like a megaphone, but perhaps it’s meant to be a basket. The mystery endures.

Try as I might, there was no way to take The Book of Sorcery from Manannan’s laboratory. At first, Gwydion claims that Manannan would immediately miss it, which is fair enough, but after his transformation into a cat, you still can’t take it. Any typed command to do so just goes to an irrelevant comment on the state of the laboratory. At least say it’s too heavy, or magically stuck to the table, or something!

If it wasn’t obvious before this game, then it’s made very clear in this one that Roberta Williams does not like cats. Manannan has a black cat that Gwydion despises, which can send you plummeting to your death should you trip over it on the steps down to the wizard’s laboratory (and if you have the communicating-with-animals dough in your ears at the time, it will openly rejoice your demise).

To get the necessarily cat fur for the transformation spell, Gwydion has to grab the cat and tear a handful of fur from its body (resulting in a loud screech and Gwydion going “heh, heh, heh”) and if you’re so inclined, you can also kick the cat for absolutely no reason.

Speaking of communicating with animals, you have the chance to concoct a spell that allows you to listen in on the conversations various animals are having: the chickens have nothing interesting to say besides complaining, and the cat is only to happy to see you suffer, but Llewdor’s wildlife knows quite a lot about Gwydion: if you put off visiting the oracle in her cave, the birds, squirrels and lizards can fill you in on his backstory – that he was kidnapped as an infant, that his parents are Graham and Valanice of Daventry, and that he has a twin sister called Rosella.

It's a little anticlimactic hearing it from them than the oracle, who relates the entire story with a crystal ball and a light show, but what could be more fun than eavesdropping on conversations between wild animals? It’s also kind of heart-warming that they all feel sorry for Gwydion, and hope that he can successfully escape the clutches of Manannan.

More importantly, you can overhear a pair of mice in the brig of the pirate ship, who apart from worrying about a ship’s cat and the possibility of the pirates making their latest cabin boy walk the plank, also discuss the location of a buried treasure on the shore. Having stolen a shovel from the pirates, Gwydion can retrieve this treasure, though only if he overhears the mice disclose its exact location.

Entering Daventry can be a bit of a trip, as although Gwydion can’t remember any of it, there are plenty of landmarks from the first game: namely the old well, the royal castle, and the stone stairwell up to the clifftops where Graham once obtained the magical chest of gold, which is now the dwelling place of the three-headed dragon. Granted, they’ve all been terribly damaged by the dragon’s rampage, but it’s really the only time the games will geographically intersect in any meaningful way.

That being said, there’s already a bit of dramatic license going on, as these three landmarks definitely weren’t in close proximity in the first game, whereas here they’re all within three screens of each other.

Outside the royal family there weren’t many recurring characters in these games, but this marks the second appearance of Rumpelstiltskin (or Ifnkovhgroghprm, if you want to be facetious) who greets Gwydion as he arrives back in Daventry and gives him the lowdown on the whereabouts of his family. He’s inexplicably whistling the theme tune to The Smurfs when you come across him, and seems to have upgraded his abode from a lean-to to a tin shed, but it’s a fun little cameo. In the AVG remake, he’s called “the royal weaver” by Valance, which is a nice nod to his fairy tale roots. (Though for some reason he looks and sounds more like a leprechaun than a gnome, complete with making a little rainbow bridge for the twins to cross).

Hands down the game’s most WTF moment is when you introduce yourself to your sister and prove your identity by pulling down your pants to display the birthmark on your butt cheek. Mercifully you don’t actually see Gwydion moon his long-lost sister, but it’s an extremely bizarre way to stage that particular family reunion. Even stranger is how Rosella came to even know that little factoid. For some reason, the AVG remake keeps it as well, and this time we even get to see it happening.

On that note, the AVG remake is filled with fun cameos and Easter eggs, from the aforementioned bard (who is introduced with his musical cue from KQ4) to a brief glimpse of Cedric, to being told “you feel a strange pulling sensation” whenever Gwydion uses the map (this being amusing refrain that is constantly used whenever you use the map in Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow). And good old Josh Mandel returns as the voice of King Graham.

Also, there’s a mysterious scene in which you can enter the desert and see this:

I’ve no idea what’s going on here, but I’ve the sneaking suspicion it’s a nod to Quest for Glory, as this game is also referenced later on if you go through Legenimor’s archway the wrong way.

The credits have some funny brick jokes, like the Bear family (here spelt “Behr”) leaving their home, then doubling back to lock the front door, and one of the pirates appearing back in Llewdor after messing with the magic map onboard the ship (the developers must have realized the map was fairly obsolete after Llewdor, and so remove it from the game). But I particularly liked the very last one: Manannan exits his house in cat form and sits on the cliffside, swishing his tail in quiet contemplation.

In terms of the visuals, Manannan’s house is a lot dingier (and the strange object is missing from the kitchen ceiling) and there are some fun little details, such as the cat actually catching the fly before you retrieve its wings. After Manannan’s death, his portrait on the walls darkens to a black square, and (as in the previous game) you can find a letter from another villain – this time Lolotte, who encourages Manannan in his schemes, alludes to her son Edgar, informs the reader that Gwydion was “handpicked” by the Father for kidnapping, and tells him to: “usurp control from the unfaithful, and prepare for the Great Day.” (Sadly, the end of AVG’s remakes mean we’ll never know what this could refer to).

It fills in other minor plot-holes (or at least answers some lingering questions) of the original game. Like, what was Manannan doing on all those journeys? A conversation that Gwydion hears between the animals has the chilling answer: he’s looking for a replacement servant. The malevolent black cat (which in this game doesn’t just trip Gwydion over on the staircase to the laboratory, but actively attacks him) was himself one of Manannan’s rivals that he transformed into a cat. And of course, the aforementioned reason why Alexander was kidnapped in the first place.

There’s an early cameo appearance from the minstrel that Rosella encounters in King’s Quest IV, whom Gwydion provides with a lute from the tavern that a previous Gwydion used to play for the customers (right before Manannan caught and obliterated him); the very one that his sister will eventually obtain in her own adventure.  

And just lots of cute little details. The key to the cabinet containing Manannan’s wand is found in a black cloak hanging in his wardrobe, which is a nice touch. When the bard first appears, you can hear his musical cue from KQ4, and you see him arrive in Tamir during the end credits, taking his familiar seat on that tree stump.

The same sprite is used for the Abominable Snowman as the Yeti in KQ5, and if he corners you in his cave, Gwydion can reuse the sleeping powder to get past him (it also being a dank place) – though it wakes up in time to chase him through the cave network, elevating the risk of that particular sequence. When Graham goes to fetch his adventurer’s cap to fling at Alexander and Rosella, he briefly clutches his heart, foreshadowing the very start of the next game.

Apart from all this, there are some variations on the familiar puzzles. To open the trapdoor to Manannan’s secret laboratory, one must first pull a series of levers in a particular order, while the eagle does not randomly appear, but instead waits from its nest in the foreground of the path down the mountainside. To obtain a feather, Gwydion places a leg of ham on an outcropping and waits for the eagle to swoop down and retrieve it.

Early on, Gwydion can find a number of vials in Manannan’s bedroom drawer, each filled with hair of different colours that are all labelled “Gwydion”. Later, it makes for a rather harrowing scene when Gwydion breaks into an abandoned library and discovers a journal kept by one of Manannan’s prior servants. It recounts his attempts to flee, only for one escape to be thwarted by the bandits in the forest, and his discovery of the wizard’s laboratory where he finds a scrap of paper on the floor:“I picked it up and beheld my doom. Written over and over down one side was a list of names. My name. Each dated eighteen years apart. I have little time.”

The journal ends with:“Today is this Gwydion’s eighteenth birthday. I can only hope the next will have a better one.” It’s all horribly sad, but also touching in a way, that some of the clues that Gwydion leaves behind assists our protagonist in his own escape. For example, you have to find this journal in order to access the trapdoor to the laboratory, and one of the pages in The Sorcery of Old has been torn in half – the all-important How to Turn a Person Into a Cat spell.

The other half of the page has been secreted in a hole in a rock, encased within a glass bottle, placed there by the former Gwydion whose scribbled note on the back reveals that he’s desperately searching for a mandrake root to use in the spell. In this way, our Gwydion gains the tools he needs from those that have come before.

(In fact, the game does a great job of establishing that our Gwydion is just one in a long line of Gwydions. On finding his immediate predecessor’s journal, the game tells us: “You feel strange knowing your predecessor left this, and that later Gwydions might find it.” After Manannan’s defeat, he also remarks upon the fact that they have all finally been avenged).

The nature of the gameplay means that Gwydion cannot cast this spell until after he’s visited the oracle in her cave, for its there that the mandrake root grows. This grants the story an interesting retextualization, for though it’s possible in the original game to meet the oracle before Manannan is dispatched (or to even learn the truth about his identity from the birds and the beasts in the forest once you have the “talking to animals” dough in your ears) this game opts to make his defeat very personal.

More time is spent talking to the oracle on exposition about here Gwydion comes from, his true name, the identity of his parents, and the danger that his sister and homeland is in. Although things like Morgeilen’s curse and his black cloak are mentioned by the oracle, they’re also dismissed as something “beyond what is yours to reckon with.”

There’s also a lovely visual in which the stark cave is filled with moss and greenery while the oracle speaks – not to the mention the appearance of the all-important mandrake root. It deepens and enriches the context of Gwydion’s story, and naturally gives it more poignancy and resonance.

Of course, it’s not perfect. For some reason the giant spider is now tiny, and I’ve no idea why they changed Kenny the dog’s name to Hank (perhaps an inside joke?) And the voice actor playing Gwydion is clearly trying to channel Robbie Benson (who voices the character in Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow) but just comes across as monotonic.

Still, perhaps the most important element to come out of this game from a storytelling standpoint was the introduction of Princess Rosella, whose appearance in the final act foreshadowed her role as the protagonist of the next game. Here she’s just a stereotypical damsel in distress, tied to a stake and sacrificed to a dragon. In The Perils of Rosella, she gets to be the hero...