King's Quest VII: The Princeless Bride (1994)

I've been spending my Covid quarantine playing through the King's Quest series. I was excited to finally get to KQ6 which I had played through many, many years ago and still the game held up for me. I felt like the series had finally matured enough where guides were no longer a necessity to puzzle out the solutions. I was interested in seeing what KQ7 was like, I had never played it or heard anything about it.

One interesting thing is that there is no longer the ability to save in multiple slots. You get a single "bookmark" which you can save and load from. The plus side of this is that Sierra finally learned that dead man walking scenarios are just no fun so there aren't any, and hence no need to provide multiple save slots. There are still deaths, but the game just loads you right before the death despite the last time you saved your bookmark.

King's Quest 7 looks very different from 5 and 6. It looks like an old Disney movie, like Cinderella. There is a singing princess intro and cute cartoony graphics! My daughter was super excited to start playing this with me.

Unfortunately the game got a bit too scary in the middle section for my child. There's an undead land with lots of monsters and ghosts. I wished that Sierra since Sierra made the choice to go with the cutesy look, they would have followed through until the end. Who is the audience if you make Disney graphics and then mature, scary stuff later?

The puzzles and characters are interesting. I think this makes a good King's Quest game and recommend it if you liked KQ6, but I didn't think it was as good. I needed a few hints at the very end, mainly because there's a puzzle with a very short time window to solve, the solution really doesn't make a lot of sense, and if you fail you have to sit through a long cutscene every attempt.