Sunday, September 28, 2008

Legend of Kyrandia

(Warning: spoilers!)

Wow.

Wow, wow, wow.

What an unbelievably awful game.

I had thought the Kyrandia series was well-regarded and well-loved by adventure gamers; after all, it made it into ScummVM, right?

Wrong.

When the main character, Brandon, isn't being as incoherent as a Markov chain generator, literally every single thing he says that is obviously intended as a "quip" makes me want to slap either him or whoever wrote this drivel:
"When I find a merchant... I'll buy a new pair of socks!"
Yes, he actually says that. Out of the blue. Fortunately, he's hit on the head by a branch right after. The only moment in the game I genuinely enjoyed.

Objects drop randomly in the game world. There's an inventory limit. There's no indication of which items are and aren't important, or when they will be. You can destroy objects you'll need later permanently and will have to re-find them (I think you can; or maybe the game is unwinnable). There are endless fetch-quests taking you, of course, across the entire world to get item A for person B. Oh, and also get item C. And item D. No, I couldn't have told you that the first time, why do you ask?

There's a maze. It's not just a maze, though: you need to light it up. There are bushes with berries that provide light. Except, each time you change the screen, they grow one step darker, until they go out entirely in the fourth. Of course, if you drop them on the floor, they provide light eternally. This is not just aggravating but also nonsensical. Even with a walkthrough this maze takes forever. And, of course, you have to traverse it multiple times. 

There's a bit where you have to make potions. You need two ingredients for each potion, and of course they come from entirely different parts of the game world. There's a number of basic potions you can make, and then you need to combine two basic potions to make more powerful potions. You don't know which does which, and you don't know which you'll need, or how many of them. Gathering the items required to make them takes forever, and even foreverer thanks to the inventory limit. Oh, and of course the place where you mix the basic potions and the place where you turn them into the potions you actually need are not the same location.

Oh, and of course Brandon is actually a prince. Then the king.

Were gamers this much more patient? Am I misguided in thinking that people liked this game? Is it impossible to microwave floppy disks? Because a good microwaving is what this game deserves.

I talked about finishing this to a friend. "F**k that game forever," he said. 

I agree.

No comments: