King’s Quest! A series that lasted thirty years, inspired countless adventure games and is still quoted today! It’s time to look back through history, right up until the present, and see just why this series deserves its place in history. This week: it’s off to The Land of the Green Isles to make friends with a talking tomato in King’s Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow!

Can we take a moment to talk about the titles of the King’s Quest games? This one is called Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow. King’s Quest V was Absence Makes The Heart Go Yonder. It’s a giant train ride of puns, this series. You only have to read the title to know exactly what you’re in for. A bunch of in-your-face wordplay that you have to laugh at, almost in spite of yourself. It’s just kind of… happy. There’s dark humour in the deaths, of course, but it’s packed with so much silly humour that the deaths take a back seat in the end. Apart from that scream in King’s Quest V.

King’s Quest VI has pushed the silliness to maximum levels. If Sierra had a knob labelled ‘Silly’, it would’ve snapped off by this point. Don’t get me wrong, King’s Quest V was silly, I mean it had a talking owl in a vest for crying out loud, but King’s Quest VI completely detaches itself from reality. It’s a world of drunken genies, sentient chess pieces, angry pieces of wood and, lest we forget, the underworld. Its magic is in seeing where it can take you next. The world feels bigger than before but with far fewer useless screens, so the adventure is kept nice and tight. The downsides? Well the twin annoyances of copy protection and climbing sections make a reappearance and some new irritations have begun to creep in due to limitations.

But let’s start with the usual trundling through the plot. King’s Quest VI picks up roughly where King’s Quest V left off. Graham’s family is rescued, along with the young girl Cassima, from the evil wizard Mordak. Even though they’ve only met for about three seconds, Graham’s son Alexander falls in love with Cassima and promises to visit her in her home, The Land of the Green Isles. A cutscene that is so nineties it hurts, with everyone’s face resembling a lump of playdough, sets all this up and shows us Alexander’s ill-fated voyage across the sea. He crash lands on the island and is quickly told to bugger off by the local vizier.

As buyers might be irritated by a ten minute long game, Alexander decides not to bugger off and instead begins to explore the isles. Splitting the world map up into these separate islands was a great idea. It means we can have visually distinct areas to visit but without the humdrum of constantly having to trudge through redundant screens to get there. We can just whisk out our map and teleport over there. Though this comes with a definite downside. For whatever reason, the map only works when you’re standing near water. Isn’t magic tricky? Coupled with this, you also have to select it from your inventory and wait for the little animation to play before you can get anywhere. Sounds minor but it considering how often you have to teleport around, it really started to grate.

Still, sticking with the magic theme is a good idea. It further highlights the fact that everyone in Graham’s family is a massive badass. Graham himself has… well, what hasn’t that guy done? Rosella basically walked through a horde of undead unscathed, while Alexander originally managed to outwit a powerful wizard. Now he himself seems to be intent of becoming a wizard, seeing as how he gets his hand on another spellbook. He still suffers from a similar deficit of personality to Graham, he slips into the archetypal sweet hero a lot, but he does have a few lines here and there that show him to have a sense of humour. After a living chess piece (don’t ask) gives him a spoiled egg as a reward, he responds with a well voiced ‘uhhhh… uhhh… thanks.” It was an amusing realistic touch in a crazy world.

On that note, I just love how insane the world of King’s Quest VI can be. Most of the islands are relatively grounded. The isle of the Beast is essentially just Beauty and the Beast, the Isle of the Crown is where Cassima lives (and is guarded by walking, talking guard dogs), the Isle of Mists is full of druids and the Isle of the Sacred Mountain is full of winged jerks. It’s the Isle of Wonders that’s the interesting one. I mean, as soon as you arrive you get accosted by a bunch of dwarves, each with a massively exaggerated sensory apparatus. Then you get to the rotten tomato that shouts at you and you begin to wonder if the pawn shop owner slipped you some hallucigenics while you weren’t looking.

This craziness is one of the reasons why King’s Quest VI is likely going to take the position of my favourite King’s Quest game. Partly that’s down to how otherworldly it is, while still grounding itself in old school fairy tales, but also because it’s the most interesting to play. You visit so many different places and the story that unfolds throughout is an interesting one, if still a little basic. But it feels like a bigger story than just Alexander’s now. You’ve even got a choice of endings. Basically, if you want to save the whole kingdom then you’re in for the long haul. I’d recommend that because you get to go to one of more interesting places in the whole series: Hell. It comes complete with dancing skeletons.

It’s also one of my favourites because it pulls less bullshit. Most choices you have to make are fairly sensible within the ingame logic and even when they aren’t, I found it slightly more forgiving than previous games. It even warned me when I went strolling into the ocean. Shortly before it swept me away but hey, it’s pretty much my fault at that point. The only real nonsense it pulls is in the copyright protection. It’s entirely confined to the Isle of the Sacred Mountain, where you have to solve a bunch of riddles and climb up the side of the mountain. They aren’t hard, it’s basically just a test of whether you can read or not, but they go on too long and you can only climb one step at a time. It’s a huge leap up from the beanstalk but still an unnecessary irritation.

Still, King’s Quest VI gives an opportunity to look back over the series and see how far it’s come. From the frankly barbaric days of King’s Quest I, where we were just wandering around aimlessly and getting annoyed at woodcutters, we’ve come to our own epic story of love and madness. We have voice acting, cutscenes and no more text based interface. It’s shaping up into a series that deserves its legacy. Yes, the usual Sierra difficulty is here and I likely would not get through it without a walkthrough.  Yes, we can still bugger ourselves over if we waste spell ingredients but it is definitely being a bit more gentle with us now.

King’s Quest VI is also a good example of how the series has managed to find its own personality over the years. After mindlessly aping fairy tales for the first few games, it has developed into its own story, with unique characters and settings. We still do run into fairy tale characters, like Beauty and the Beast, but they seem small and insignificant when paired against a stick and a log throwing swamp ooze at each other. It’s also very much aware of itself, filling the back of the pawn shop with references to the worst parts of its predescessors. It seems we’ve hit that point. King’s Quest is ready to stand on its own two feet now.