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Zork: Grand Inquisitor

“Curfew will begin in one second… CURFEW!!!”

Definitely the great game everyone says it is.  The engine and graphics were very similar to Nemesis.  Although this game was made infinitely more enjoyable with the inclusion of the witty sidekick Dalboz.  He actually reminded me a lot of Arthur from Buried in Time.  So much so that I wonder if the Activision developers were inspired by him (Buried in Time was released 2 years earlier).  Even Michael McKean’s performance kind of sounds like Matt Weinhold’s Arthur voice.  I’ve heard people compare the biochips from The Journeyman Project to basically a spell system, and I’d say that’s pretty apt.  It was funny to see very recognizable actors like Erick Avari and even “Face” from The A-Team have major roles in this game.

This game is packed so full of jokes, I feel like I must have missed a bunch of them.  I definitely appreciate puzzles that involve finding uses for apparently hilariously useless items (e.g. a spell that turns purple things invisible, etc.).

I finished King’s Quest 6 a few days ago,one a the few classics that I hadn’t played before.

I must say, I didn’t like it very much.
It’s very well written, as are all the Sierra games I’ve played, but the story is kind of meh (but I guess King’s Quest story always are) and the gameplay is just horrendous and raises all the red flags :
- Far too many deaths. Sure, other Sierra games have those too, but here it’s just too unforgiving. I mean, falling to your death after clicking a pixel too high while climbing the cliffs ? Come on, where’s the fun in that ? And the same goes with most of the other gratuitous and often unpredictable deaths. Space Quest 5, which I replayed this week, has much less deaths and as a result is that much more fun.
- So many dead ends it’s ridiculous. Fail to do one action at the beginning and bam, stuck hours later, without the game making any effort to point it out.
For example : not speaking to the guy in the library or taking the wrong lamp
- A maze
- Consequence to the dead ends : overly difficult

I finished the short path easily enough, albeit with a lot of frustrating reloading of saved games, but had to use hints for the long path and in the end got stuck in the castle because I had missed one small interaction near the beginning (see spoiler above). At this point I just threw in the towel.

Also, as with most Sierra games, it’s not very pretty compared to the Lucas Arts, Westwood, or the Adventure Soft games.

I must say, I love the voice acting, the music, the backgrounds, the animations of KQVI more than any other King’s Quest.  But I’m not sure I’ve ever finished it more than once because it is rather hard with many ways to die, some difficult timed events, and ways you can get stuck if you didn’t bring the right items.  Last time I played it I think I got stuck at one of those dead ends (I arrived in the castle without the right items?) and I simply quit because I couldn’t figure out how far back I had to load to make the game solvable again…

Lady Kestrel - 10 June 2018 11:19 AM

ZGI is a wonderfully funny game. It encouraged me to try really dumb things, like jumping into the bottomless pit

I have to admit, the death screen for that was probably the funniest part of the whole game.  Very clever.

I’ve just finished The Lots Chronicles of Zerzura. I found it quite enjoyable, despite the rather dull characters and the unnecessary amount of cleavage one of them shows, with beautiful backgrounds complemented by charming sketch-style cutscenes. Puzzles are mostly logical, on the easy side yet narrowlingly escaping being bland thanks to their inventor-approach common theme. Potential deaths are scarce and easily avoidable, and they all make sense, so I have no complaint about them.

I’ve also finished The Darkside Detective. I liked it a lot, even though it was pretty short. The addition of a seventh, Christmas-themed case was welcome. I didn’t mind the highly-pixelated graphics, but an option to play the game in windowed mode would have made sense. I chuckled out loud a few times, which is more than I can say about most comedy games, even amongst my favourite ones. I hope more extra-cases are released, or that a sequel is underway.

NickyLarson - 16 June 2018 06:36 PM

I’ve just finished The Lots Chronicles of Zerzura. I found it quite enjoyable, despite the rather dull characters and the unnecessary amount of cleavage one of them shows, with beautiful backgrounds complemented by charming sketch-style cutscenes. Puzzles are mostly logical, on the easy side yet narrowlingly escaping being bland thanks to their inventor-approach common theme. Potential deaths are scarce and easily avoidable, and they all make sense, so I have no complaint about them.

I thought the first part with the inventors was the most interesting and found the pace slowed down quite a bit after that. One thing I thought was strange was that the camels they bought from a Bedouin tribe were Bactrians and not Dromedaries. Arabs were great traders so I could see an occasional Bactrian in the marketplace but not a tribe breeding them!

furgotten - 17 June 2018 12:53 PM

One thing I thought was strange was that the camels they bought from a Bedouin tribe were Bactrians and not Dromedaries. Arabs were great traders so I could see an occasional Bactrian in the marketplace but not a tribe breeding them!

Ha, that’s a funny thing I hadn’t noticed, as I have absolutely no knowledge in this field! The game took several liberties with historical accuracy anyway, but I guess the writers were aiming to make the story and atmosphere more exciting rather than believable.

Phantasmagoria

Plays very similar to Gabriel Knight 2 since that game was made in the same style.  The scope is smaller though because the game takes place exclusively in one big house and the tiny town nearby.  The story is a lot simpler than GK2 too.  Basically woman moves into haunted house… gets raped by her demon-possessed husband.  Much controversy has been made over the rape scene in this game, but honestly (although I hate to admit it) I just found myself laughing during it due to the sheer lunacy of the B-movie acting.  On the other hand, the special effects for the extremely violent deaths were quite disturbing.  Besides that everything people said about this game is true.  There are very few puzzles and they are very easy.  Plus there is a rudimentary hint system to boot.  Nowadays people complain about walking simulators, but this is more like a “do nothing simulator.”  You spend most of your time sitting on couches, fixing your hair in mirrors, and using the toilet.  Like GK2 the gameplay is most walking back and forth through the entire game world trying to find the right person to have a conversation with to advance the story.  At least the atmosphere was suitably spooky and slowly built up tension well.  Although several of the spooky things were never explained.  What was the mysterious spatial distortion hovering over the baby crib?

I also dislike the inability to create manual save files.  Once you reach chapter 7, is there any way to go back to the previous chapters without starting a new game?