It’s been well over a year since I last delved into the King’s Quest series, the computer games that defined a healthy portion of my childhood – but now it’s time to return to the land of Daventry and the adventures of King Graham, now in middle-age and with two grown children of his own.
As I’ve mentioned in the past, these games may very well be the source of my love for fantasy, mythology and fairy tales, as I really can’t understate how much I lived in these games as a little girl. Distributed by Sierra Entertainment and designed by Roberta Williams, I’ve already covered the first four in the series here. The first two feature Sir (then King) Graham as their protagonist, who wins a throne in Quest for the Crown, and then finds a wife in Romancing the Throne.
The next two games went in a markedly different direction, leaping forward eighteen years and featuring two new characters as protagonists: first Gwydion in To Heir is Human, the slave of an evil wizard who manages to escape captivity before discovering he’s actually the long-lost son of Graham and Valanice, and then Rosella in The Perils of Rosella, Gwydion’s twin sister, in an adventure that picks up only seconds after the conclusion of the third game.
So, now we reach King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder, and it soon becomes very clear we’re no longer dealing with standalone stories, but the interconnected saga of a single royal family. As Graham discovers over the course of his adventure, the actions Gwydion took in King’s Quest III directly shape the narrative of this game – specifically, that in escaping the evil wizard Manannan, Gwydion (or Alexander, as he’s now known) used a magic spell to transform his cruel master into a cat. Now Manannan’s brother Mordack is seeking revenge, transporting Castle Daventry and its inhabitants to his island fortress in order to extort Alexander into transforming Manannan back into human form.
For this reason, KQV feels like a turning point in the series – though not just narratively, but technologically as well. At the time of its release in 1990, there was simply nothing else like it on the market. The immersive graphics, the point-and-click interface, the story cutscenes, the voice acting – all of this was the first of its kind, and it ended up selling half-a-million copies, making it the best-selling PC game between 1990 and 1994.
