King’s Quest VI: Final Rating

So let’s get to it. On with the PISSED rating…

Puzzles and Solvability

The puzzles in King’s Quest VI are pretty good and have sensible solutions.

I just gave a milk bottle I took from a bottlebrush bush to a baby’s tear to make the other baby’s tears cry harder so I can collect their tears and use them to cast a spell that requires salt water – like I said, perfectly sensible solutions!

My biggest gripe about King’s Quest V’s puzzles was that by and large they can’t be reasoned through. There’s a little of that randomness here but there were many puzzles I was actively looking to solutions for – this was a big part of my motivation for putting the Predictions section at the end of my post – I had thoughts as to what puzzles I’d need to solve and how, and wanted to know if I was right.

An example would be the ‘Sense Gnome’ puzzle. It’s a simple puzzle in five stages that became easy to predict after the first one or two. Knowing that I’ll need to trick them with something to see, hear, smell, taste and touch quickly gets my brain working on the five items I’ll need. It’s actually a very easy puzzle if you already have the items needed or even if you just know where they are (the nightingale toy being the example of this) so even if you didn’t have the required item, when you found, for example, the stinky flower, you’d know it would be used for this puzzle. Nice work, game!

I also wish to commend the multiple endings. I did three endings, but only two of them were distinctly different – the best ending was just the downstairs ending without me missing the jester. While not nearly as diverse as Fate of Atlantis’ three paths, and one of the paths was clearly the ‘complete’ path, with the other one (serving girl disguise) mostly just skipping a significant section of the game. Even so, the extra puzzles in the upstairs area of the castle during the sub-optimal ending was something I liked.

I did have issues with the easy way to dead-end myself from getting the best ending without realising I’d done so, and also with the obscure clues to the treasure room’s passphrase. And if that was the only way to win the game it would have negatively impacted this score by a noticeable amount. As it was only an option I’m willing to accept (though not prefer) the obscurity.

The game could have gone from good to excellent here if the Cliffs of Logic lived up to their name. I was expecting to solve multiple puzzles using logic and clues here and really taxing my brain, and was disappointed when it turned out to be just be a rather long in-game copy protection system. I was hoping for a puzzle sequence a la Le Serpent Rouge from Gabriel Knight 3 (which may be better in my memory than it actually is – it’s been a while since I played.)

There is no way to solve any of these puzzles with logic – a missed opportunity indeed

When I consider my trilogy of hated puzzles in games, let’s see how this game goes:

1. Mazes – There was only the labyrinth as far as mazes go in this game. I got through most of it without having to map it – though I did have to come back and make a map in order to find the skull required for the best ending, despite finding other skulls in easier to reach areas that Alexander refused to take. The labyrinth had a useful story reason for being there and wasn’t difficult or too long, which makes it, in my mind, an acceptable maze.
2. Dead-ends – There were quite a few dead-ends. A few of them were easily worked out as I went into the castle without the toy nightingale but found out quickly that a nightingale would be useful. If I hadn’t found the peppermint while attempting the alternate ending, I’d have been stuck near the end with no way of knowing how to defeat or avoid the genie. The game could have given me the option to leave and re-enter the castle through some kind of secret door or something to avoid these dead-ends and all others I can think of could also have been avoided by providing options to re-enter areas or not leave them at all until a required item is taken.
3. Complicated or pointless mini-games – I can’t think of any mini-games at all in this game, so no problems there.

So there weren’t any bad or tedious puzzles – the negative of this category only being the numerous dead-ends. There also weren’t any puzzles that gave me an eureka moment after thinking about them for a while. All puzzles were quite simple and straightforward as long as I had or knew of the necessary inventory item – I again mention the missed opportunity for the Cliffs of Logic to increase this score. In all though, a decent but unspectacular effort improved by the variety of alternate endings.

Final score: 6

Interface and Inventory

The interface and inventory are your standard Sierra interface – as usual with King’s Quest there’s no special flavour icons such as taste or smell. It does its job well enough. I could ‘LOOK’ at an item in my inventory for a more detailed description of it, which was sometimes useful.

There was at least one time I had to use the inventory items from the inventory screen rather than on an item in the environment – I had to ‘USE’ Cassima’s ribbon in order to discover it contained a strand of pure maiden hair.

Apart from the standard interface there’s also the simple alphabetic keyboard that appears twice, allowing me to type in an answer. It was nice not to have the answer available automatically to force me to have worked it out myself. I’m still not impressed with the Ali Zebu passphrase though.

Like King’s Quest V, there’s no tooltips or ‘What is?’ ability, so the only way to see if something’s part of the background or an actionable icon is to attempt to interact with various parts of the scenery. This is why I didn’t find the peppermint bush until my third or fourth visit to the area and why I didn’t have it with me when I first entered the castle in my serving girl disguise. I can easily see someone missing that cave completely because the graphics look like the cave could easily just be part of the background.

Without tooltips, or making the hole big enough that it looks like Alexander can actually can fit inside it, it’s easy to miss the cave next to the nightshade bush.

Final score: 7

The entire visitable area of the Isle of the Beast – it had four screens, and four puzzles to solve!

Final score: 6

I can still hum some of the music from King’s Quest V and remember associated puzzles. Just a week or so after finishing playing King’s Quest VI, I can’t remember any of the music apart from the ‘Girl in the Tower’ song that the game refused to play for me when it was supposed to. The music is in the game, and when I hear it again I remember it, and there were specific tunes associated with many screens so it’s not an issue of lack of effort – it clearly just didn’t click with me. But seeing as that’s just my subjective opinion I don’t plan to punish the game for me not liking/noticing the music too much. It does its job so I’m fine with it. 

I went back to some of my saved games so I could check out and compare some on the environmental sounds of both games and found there seems to be more in the older game. The nightingale tweets and a few other screens have things going on but there’s not enough to really improve on or add to the world.

Final Rating

So all these scores give us a Final Rating of 6+7+6+8+5+5/.6, which equals… … …

A very good score. It would have hit the top 10 not too long ago, but for now it has to sit as the 14th best game we’ve seen. It’s easily the highest rated King’s Quest game, with the previous high being King’s Quest V’s 56.

Tornado, ShaddamIVth and kind of but not really Joe Pranevich guessed correctly! So they’ll all get some CAPs. The average score guess was 65.6 and ranged from 58 to 75

And now it’s time for me to think about how much fun I had with the game. I give the game an Overall Fun Factor of 7 out of 10 – I enjoyed it a little bit more than the PISSED rating gives it, so the PISSEDOFF rating would be  6+7+6+8+5+5+7+7+7/.9… … … 64!

CAP Distribution

I’ve given a ridiculous amount of awards away this time – but by the time I realised I really should have calmed down and consolidated some of the awards I was too tired and thought – what the hell. The CAPs don’t come out of my pocket anyway. Enjoy!