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Baron_Blubba - 07 May 2021 03:04 PM

Just started playing a classic game that I missed as a youth: The Legend of Kyrandia.
I fumbled around a little bit with this series as a teen, but never gave it more than an hour or so of play time. So far, so good!

I do hope you’ll do the whole trilogy, and give us your extensive opinions on all of them. It’s a series which, while I wouldn’t call underrated, could definitely be talked about some more in depth - something which increasingly seems to be a talent of yours   Laughing

     
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Luhr28 - 08 May 2021 03:07 AM
Baron_Blubba - 07 May 2021 03:04 PM

Just started playing a classic game that I missed as a youth: The Legend of Kyrandia.
I fumbled around a little bit with this series as a teen, but never gave it more than an hour or so of play time. So far, so good!

I do hope you’ll do the whole trilogy, and give us your extensive opinions on all of them. It’s a series which, while I wouldn’t call underrated, could definitely be talked about some more in depth - something which increasingly seems to be a talent of yours   Laughing

Thank you! I think I just *really* like playing and talking about adventure games. If I ever figure out how to get the emerald out of the statue, I will surely go on to play the rest of the series and type up a lengthy post or two about each game.

     

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Luhr28 - 08 May 2021 03:07 AM
Baron_Blubba - 07 May 2021 03:04 PM

Just started playing a classic game that I missed as a youth: The Legend of Kyrandia.
I fumbled around a little bit with this series as a teen, but never gave it more than an hour or so of play time. So far, so good!

I do hope you’ll do the whole trilogy, and give us your extensive opinions on all of them. It’s a series which, while I wouldn’t call underrated, could definitely be talked about some more in depth - something which increasingly seems to be a talent of yours   Laughing

Yes, please! These games are perfect for Baron_Blubba’s unique style of appraisal.

To add some of my own (also kind of unique, less fun though): the first game has a magical quality. I’d attribute this to use of colour, some great animations and most of all: the soundtrack by Frank Klepacki. The gameplay is a bit derivative and sometimes perplexing. It’s like they played King’s Quest and beautifully copied but only barely grasped the basic structure of it’s AG mechanics.

One tip, I won’t even put it behind a spoiler tag, though any moderator can adjust this if they like:

There is a room in a maze that is harder to find than to overlook. You can find the exit without ever passing through (or even getting near) that particular place. If you don’t find it, you’ll get stuck near the end of the game with no option to return.. or even a hint at what you did wrong. Come to think of it, that does sound a bit like the structure of KQ5.

 

     
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Thanks for the maze tip, VP! That’s exactly the type of hint I like.

Your summation very much mirrors my thoughts so far: It’s got that special old adventure game magic, but there’s something very ‘non-Sierra/LA’ about it. Like Westwood understood the esoteric elements of those company’s games, but not the structural elements.

     

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Yes, please! These games are perfect for Baron_Blubba’s unique style of appraisal.

I second that.

Heart

     

I enjoy playing adventure games on my Alienware M17 r4 and my Nintendo Switch OLED.

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Okay, everyone can stop pitying me now. I’ve discovered that the emerald in the statue is not one of the required birthstones. What a green herring! I hope that later in the game you need to coat it with sticky oil and throw it at a yeti who falls into a magic wand charging machine so you can use the wand to fetch an inflatable rubber ducky inner tube which is needed as a substitute for an apron while you bake cookies to distract a goat with so you can grab the invisible bridle he is guarding, which is needed to throw at a cat chasing a mouse, which you will coat with left over green paint from your tentacle costume, so you can put it in your mouth and spit out in order to win a contest, in order to receive the grand prize, which is the official Sierra hint book for Mixed Up Mother Goose Deluxe, enabling you to *finally* solve that game with maximum points. Then you go back in time because you realize that you forgot to fix the belt on your fogger before setting out on this epic quest, and that is obviously a higher priority than bringing Miss Muffet back her tuffet…but only if you remembered to write down the code that was on the display when you first hijacked the time machine, and only if your computer doesn’t crash when you’re doing it.

     

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Laughing

And yes, that puzzle is definitely one of the baffling elements of Kyrandia. I seem to remember even more stones not being part of that puzzle. A couple of them have a different use, but some are just.. pretty?

     
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Vegetable Party - 08 May 2021 12:58 PM

Laughing

And yes, that puzzle is definitely one of the baffling elements of Kyrandia. I seem to remember even more stones not being part of that puzzle. A couple of them have a different use, but some are just.. pretty?

Yeah, not only that, but is there a way to figure out the necessary stones and their order without brute forcing it? I just reloaded over and over until I got the five of them correctly. I figured that 2 of them must be there, since they were gained through puzzling, but had no idea of the order.
At first I was plopping each stone down according their order on the birthstone chart. Then I used the Sunstone in place of the Emerald, because Sunstone is not a birthstone…and that caused one of the gems on the altar to activate rather than immolate, so I started over and fudged my way through it.
Is there a brainer way to do this, or is it just nonsense?

By the way, I think the wizard tells you to put them in ‘according to the seasons’. But you need to place five stones. I feel like Vivaldi’s magnum opus should be renamed ‘Four Out Of The Five Seasons’.

     

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Honestly.. I think there’s no logic, not even of the moon variety. It might even be random.

<this is what an adventure game puzzle looks like, right? You point and click things on things and then you get a thing!>

Still warms my heart thinking about it, though.

     
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Baron_Blubba - 08 May 2021 01:01 PM

By the way, I think the wizard tells you to put them in ‘according to the seasons’. But you need to place five stones. I feel like Vivaldi’s magnum opus should be renamed ‘Four Out Of The Five Seasons’.

Grin

     
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Vegetable Party - 08 May 2021 11:38 AM

There is a room in a maze that is harder to find than to overlook. You can find the exit without ever passing through (or even getting near) that particular place. If you don’t find it, you’ll get stuck near the end of the game with no option to return.. or even a hint at what you did wrong. Come to think of it, that does sound a bit like the structure of KQ5.

Thank goodness a lifetime of playing these crazy games has caused me to develop a keenly honed sense of foreseeing and distinguishing the difference between a puzzle where perseverance will eventually be paid off by the satisfaction of solving it and feeling like a genius, and puzzles where perseverance will make me feel like an idiot for wasting my time, even after I solve it.
The cave maze in Kyrandia is definitely the latter type of puzzle, which is why I’m happy I have the aforementioned seventh sense, so I knew after five minutes of fooling around in there to go look at a walkthrough.
It’s possible that if I was eight years old and had paid $40-50 for the game, I’d feel differently. So this might be the only time I will ever say ‘thank goodness I am not eight years old anymore’, and thank goodness I paid around a buck fifty for the game on GOG.
Also, the fact that you can go in there holding crucial items, and have to drop them in order to pick up other crucial items, really makes this an old fashioned chokey of a puzzle.
But it raises an interesting point about viewing a game as one holistic puzzle, as opposed to a collection of completely individual puzzles taking place within the same game. If a game is one holistic puzzle, then there isn’t really such a thing as a ‘choke point’: You just failed to solve the puzzle this time around; now go back in there with the knowledge you gained and try again, better equipped thanks to said knowledge. Rinse and repeat until you finally finish the game/complete the puzzle.

     

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Baron_Blubba - 08 May 2021 05:02 PM

But it raises an interesting point about viewing a game as one holistic puzzle, as opposed to a collection of completely individual puzzles taking place within the same game. If a game is one holistic puzzle, then there isn’t really such a thing as a ‘choke point’: You just failed to solve the puzzle this time around; now go back in there with the knowledge you gained and try again, better equipped thanks to said knowledge. Rinse and repeat until you finally finish the game/complete the puzzle.

You just Spider-and-Webbed Kyrandia, and in the process; wrinkled my brain.

     
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Are you trying to seduce me into playing Spider and Web?
I actually had this thought during my most recent play through of KQ 6. Normally I tear through that game no problem, but I ran into so many choke points this time around and had to load from pretty far back at least three times (did the lamp trade too early, didn’t bring the brick into the labyrinth, and didn’t get the key from the gatekeeper, Mister Next). Maybe the desire to not have my fond memories and precious opinions shattered was the necessity that lead to the invention of the idea.

Edit: I’m sure I’m not the one who ‘invented’ the idea.

     

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Update on my Kyrandian adventures: My most recent save game is called “Wandering.”

Looking for a way to get the magic water from the fountain back. I’m currently going around collecting water. I have fresh water, mineral water, and one other type of water. I don’t think this is the solution, but we shall see.

     

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Baron_Blubba - 07 May 2021 04:31 PM
Wormwood_Studios - 01 May 2021 02:16 AM

The latter part of the game is a little more rigorous in its logic, though it has the single puzzle that most often causes players to get stuck.

 

It’s the kiosk bread-crumb trail to find Memento Moribuilt.

There’s nothing you can do to help the sad robot; it’s meant as a cautionary tale of passivity in the face of problems.

     

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