King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! (1990)

Preliminary: I will, of course, be playing the original Nov 1990 version, so no "talkie" for me. Excited to see the improvements the series added here. Tho I hope it's not too derivative of the Lucas games, which are great but not as fresh and new for late 1990. Also hoping the usual tedious early adventure game antics don't bog it down. Especially since I read frequent deaths are to be expected... Oh boy. Here goes nothing

Omg the music is so great so far! Thoooo I'm thinking this is the talkie version >.< Well now I have a dilemma, either play the absolute original from 1990 with its tedious copyright protection which will probly cause me to quit the game, or to play this 1992 "talkie" version that got rid of the presumably annoying spell casting copyright protection.

Anyway, even in this version the walking is super slow again. Oh Sierra games... Ok, I'm now on the very original floppy disk version. Here goes nothing for real this time. I hope the copyright protection antics don't ruin it for me, esp since they apparently come in halfway through the game.

Early Game

So beautiful. I'm wandering around and stumbled upon the harp-playing tree heh. And thank goodness for this owl following me around for tips. Tho I have a strong feeling I will be relying on a guide soon enough.

The music and look continue to be stellar. I would be screenshotting more but now that I'm in 90s DOS games, it often is very inconvenient to get rid of my mouse to screenshot etc. Just watch a playthrough I suppose :-p I like that you can right click to switch between the options like Look and Talk. My biggest beef so far is it's a bit clunky to go between screens, and how slow you walk.

Ok I most certainly had to use a map once in the Desert :-p and indeed, now that I know it's an adventure game with a Score system (like the good ol days! I love reaching for maximum score!), I am just going to look to a guide to make sure I get all the points. No shame here :-p

Welp I got to my first copyright protection headache when entering the bandit's camp tent for the staff... I have the manual but still... what a chore. I'd be more okay with it, as a means to copyright protect, if they didn't purposefully have similar looking symbols. Why did they do that so often with copyright protection? Why not just confirm we have the manual, rather than put us through hell?

Cool that there is a Detail setting you can change. And Speed etc. This is so full of modern niceties that sets it apart from its contemporary Lucas game Secret of Monkey Island, let alone the earlier KQs.

Uff as always with early adventure games, the "action" segments are quite obnoxious (hitting the cat with the shoe). Thank goodness for quick saves/loads.

Uggggh I'm really liking this so far but whyyyyy a waiting segment to get the family to leave to leave behind the Tambourinnnne Why were early adventure games so obsessed with waiting and time heh. I prefer puzzles that are constant and just waiting to be figured out, rather than happenstance or RNG-based (and always have with adventure game puzzles). Welp I can't seem to get them to leave so I can get the Tambourine so I will just have to do that later. It looks like the next bit is also RNG-based (chance that the Witch in the Forest will appear), I think it's time to call it for the night

Mid Game

Well I didn't end up stopping lol. I love the music during the Genie/Witch scene. That twang. Ok now that I'm back in the main area and I got the Tambourine, I feel better and can end for the night... But I sure am hooked! This is probly the best of the late 80s/early 90s fantasy adventure games so far! Well, up there with Loom. But it feels so modern! I really really like this though. Anyway, time to call it for the night. I might as well done this as a Day 1, Day 2 type game because I just played for hours straight! Sign of a potential 5 star and even potential Favorite right there!

Yeah some of these deaths/"puzzles" would be very annoying if I had gone much longer without a guide. Glad I accepted that early on. Never a big fan of early adventure games' obsession with death, but luckily I'm gliding along :-p (so far)

Ugh no in the mountains there is the annoying movement issue of many early adventure games where you actually fall off if you get by the edge. Not clear how to climb up this rope tho... Hm.

So many beautiful screens, it's just such a hassle to screenshot. Plus I've been enthralled with the game throughout. I especially liked the camera angle to show Cedric (the owl) locked in the cage while talking to the Ice Queen. but uh, I didn't get a screenshot of that... Instead I got this poorly done screenshot of the next screen lol

I am loving the periodically new tunes (love the Yeti Crystal Cave tune), the overall vibe, the 90s DOS vibe before many of its contemporaries got to it, so much to love. Still many frustrating adventure game tropes, like the frequent deaths, tedious movement/"action" segments, and eye-roll-able tedium like having to use the Hammer on just the right Crystal even tho I Looked at many others and seemed I could get them. Shrug. So it goes.

Beautiful music and Look out on the seas

Ok I swear I will stop after this but wow. Reminds me of upcoming PS1 graphics, let alone all the way back in 1990. Not even the SNES out yet! This reminds me of Legend of Dragoon screens for some reason. And the music continues to change and hit me, that might even get a 9+ Wow. Been a long while since an adventure game hit me like this one.

Oh god no. When I left the program to type the above out, praising the game etc, I must've messed something up. Now it keeps demanding that I change disks, but my disks aren't working. Noooo. I got through all those copyright protection things and now this, even tho I was able to pick up the Fishhook the first time, now whenever I reload my Save State, it doesn't work. And yet again, I was a doofus and didn't proper save. I really need to learn to do that with DOS games... Just cuz I have the power to savestate doesn't mean I should only use it! Smh. Let me try to troubleshoot this. I really thought I would finish this tonight!

Welp it makes absolutely no sense but I'm stuck with it either asking me to put Startup disk in C and then even if I manage to do that, it asks me to put Disk 6 in Z: drive... Z: drive is my virtual hard drive lol it's not a floppy drive.... Makes no sense ugh. So disappointed I was really enjoying this :(

Look: 9/10 Excellent. Really brings forth that 90s DOS Look and even the PS1 Look I am so excited for.

Sound: 9.5/10 Wow. Sure wish I could've heard the ending song

Play: 8.5/10 Many of the usual adventure game frustrations but some great new advancements namely the simplicity of changing what you want to do via right click. I bet if I played this without a guide and map, I'd have a different opinion haha.

Feel: 9/10 Yea

Attachment: 8.5/10 Well, I know I will return to this since I didn't get to see the ending. But need to take a break cuz well, I just played it all in 2 days and then got stuck based on technological nonsense. Gr. I was going to give this a 9 but I suppose that would only be if I did immediately replay it and push through. Surely this will go up when I do eventually return to it to finish it! This likely will warrant being on the Favorites list once I return to it.

Overall: 8.9/10

Completion: Harpy Island, was collecting the items there

Playtime: 3 hours? Not sure, not a program that keeps track

This is the first King's Quest that used the mouse cursor icons (like eye and hand) to simplify the interface from the previous entries which used a text parser. If text parser games seem too antiquated to play, then one might argue this would be the first King's Quest entry to begin with (I would actually hugely recommend the AGDI remakes of the first 3 games that redid the originals in this game's style).

However the game design is anything but modern. The game is full of dead man walking scenarios, RNG to solve puzzles, trial and error, and logical leaps. I can't honestly recommend this game to anyone unless they use a guide heavily as a crutch. At the very least, I'd recommend looking up how to avoid dead man walking scenarios so you're not banging your head against the wall for hours trying to figure out an unsolvable puzzle.

Perhaps this type of game appealed to gamers in the early 90's before there were a plethora of games to experience for a reasonable cost each. If this was going to be your only game that you would play for months and spent $60 of 1991 money on it, then perhaps you'd feel cheated if the game wasn't designed to force you to restart over and over.

The game early on conditions the player to know they can get themselves into unwinnable scenarios by allowing the player to adventure into the forest and not escape without proper items. But here's an example of how the game will further frustrate and deceive the player. Once you get an item that clearly protects from the witch living there, you might incorrectly believe you're now equipped to enter the forest. Once I dispatched the witch and did everything I possibly could in the forest, I was once again stuck. No indication why, but it was because I didn't have honey which wasn't an option for me to have picked up because I hadn't found some other item yet in this dependency chain which seems completely unrelated to the swamp.

So you're forced to continually restart while wondering what order you need to do things in or if you missed an item earlier which you no longer have access to. One thing that makes the entire "I'm not sure if I've found the item I'll need yet" frustrating is that there is an open ended desert on the eastern side of the world. You can really never tell if you've explored the entire thing so in the back of your mind through every illogical puzzle later will be "umm... am I just missing something else from that desert?"

Towards the end of the game came an entirely new unforgivable antipattern of game design. I was exploring a castle and repeatedly dying to a wizard catching me. I'm not exaggerating when I say he caught me 10 times in a row. Giving up and looking in a guide, I learned I had to randomly wander until a blue monster caught me instead of the wizard. There is seriously no way to know that ahead of time to know there are multiple paths determined by RNG, so once again if I hadn't been using a guide I would have thought I missed something earlier in the game and restarted.

There's also a couple puzzles where you need to simply wait unprompted on a specific screen for an event to occur. So add "waiting for several minutes on each screen" to the list of unfair trial and error approaches that need to be used to solve this game.

If the game design wasn't so unforgiving, I would have otherwise said it's a very pleasant adventure in the King's Quest series.