King's Quest - Chapter 1: A Knight to Remember Reviews
At the end of the day, this reminded me a great deal of Telltale's Tales of Monkey Island series of recent years. It's a modern take on a classic genre, heavily capitalising on a famous name and rich in character and humour, but ultimately built on a straightforward foundation short on real innovation or beauty. Still, it's been a while since we've seen a lot of these adventures, and this is the first chapter of five. The main characters are endearing enough that after a couple of chapters they might be able to carry the games more or less on their own merits, but less in the way of un-skippable animations (some of which you'll need to sit through a lot) and mid-game ambling would go a long way toward warming me up when the subsequent chapters arrive.
Ultimately, King's Quest: Chapter 1 - A Knight To Remember is awesome. It's super fun, and light hearted, with little drops of despair amongst the incredible stunning and amazing world. It's a fantastic opening to an episodic saga, and although I prefer my King's Quest adventures to end tied up in a little bow, whilst we, the hero, remains triumphant -- it holds up pretty well.
'A Knight to Remember' is hampered by some significant issues, but shows promise
As someone who never played the original games, the reboot must stand purely on its own merits to win me over
What replay value it has is dampened by how slow-moving Graham is and how cutscenes and bits of dialogue can't be skipped, but King's Quest begins a story anyone who plays it will want to follow through to the end.
Despite plenty of issues, A Knight to Remember isn't a terrible start to the adventure, just a rather unnecessarily tedious one.
The fetch quests and backtracking grate, but A Knight to Remember is still a fairly strong start to King's Quest. Even though it's a self-contained story that leaves few loose threads, I'm keen to return and see Graham grow into the famous Knight he's meant to be. So much has changed in 21 years, but it's good to be back in Daventry.
I have a few quibbles . . . but in general this is a grand start to what I hope is a grand adventure. Long live the King.
Good performances, some very nice animation (albeit embarrassingly similar to Telltale's look), and a couple of passable puzzles, just aren't enough to compete with some astonishingly dreadful design decisions, the monstrously slow pace, agonising traipsing, unskippable repeated dialogue and laborious cutscenes, violently pisspoor platforming and action sequences, complete lack of introduction or explanation of who anyone is for people new to the long-dead series, ghastly controls, cheap and tacky on-screen prompts, obviously designed for tablet interaction, and god-awful instant deaths.
As a result, A Knight To Remember has little identity of its own. If the goal of this first chapter is to act as a bridge between old and new, and the later chapters offer more original themes, storytelling, and puzzles, then we might be looking at a lesser piece of a greater whole. There's reason to believe this might be the case, as the most interesting part of the story, the development of Gwendolyn, takes center stage by the end of the chapter. But right now, this new take on King's Quest is hoping that a fondness for the fairy tales of yesterday will hide that it has nothing new to offer. It doesn't, but at least it has time to find its purpose.
Despite its charm, Sierra's episodic reboot isn't winning any tournaments.
Despite game-breaking bugs, and oddly out of place, poorly rendered textures, I found King's Quest to be an extremely delightful game. The cliffhanger for Chapter One has me in tears, and I'm on pins and needles waiting for Chapter Two to come out… which unfortunately does not have a release date as I write this. To be frank, I would have rather waited longer for a complete game with little to no bugs to come out than wait months on one episode at a time that constantly freezes on me.