I managed to make my way through two of Westwood Studios's comedic fantasy games last year, but didn't quite have enough time to complete the set. Taking elements of Sierra's King Quest and LucasArts's Secret of Monkey Island franchises but mechanically distinct from either, The Legend of Kyrandia games were difficult graphic adventure games to break into due to some odd decisions they - and they alone, from what I've been able to determine playing many Indies since - took with regards to inventory management and puzzles: the two aspects of adventure games that encompass most of the "game" part of their composition. Instead of picking up everything in sight, the Kyrandia games enforce a strict inventory limit of around ten to twelve items: instead, you can leave things scattered around with a more than decent chance that they'll still be where you left them. This also means that you can use up or toss away items, and expect them to respawn elsewhere in the world just in case you really did need them. This, coupled with a lot of magic potion creation puzzles that had you chasing ingredients halfway across the eponymous land, made the games a hard sell from a purely gameplay-respective stance.
However, the Kyrandia games have some wonderful pixel-artwork in their corner - as is typical for Westwood, creators of the intricate (if silly) Command & Conquer RTS war simulators and the Eye of the Beholder first-person dungeon-crawlers - and tend to be very well-written in a sort of Discworld self-referential fantasy world sense. Malcolm's Revenge in particular seems to be keen to mine that comedic vein, repurposing the mad jester villain of the first game and turning him into a mischievous anti-hero with an ironically minuscule amount of patience for fools. His sarcastic quips, penchant for low-key cruelty, and unorthodox approach to puzzles makes him a more compelling protagonist than the first Kyrandia's milquetoast protagonist (and now King) Brandon, at least, as does the game's story in which he tries to clear his name for the more outright evil crimes he was accused of - namely, the regicide of King Brandon's royal parents before the first game began - and then locate a way to permanently depart the kingdom that fears and hates him.
We'll be getting to some more Book 3 impressions in jester moment, but first - screenshots!
"Book 3: Malcolm's Revenge," a.k.a. "Revenge, Uh, Finds a Way"
Welcome to The Legend of Kyrandia: Book Three! To recap, we've gone from Brandon (Book One), to Zanthia (Book Two) and now Malcolm (Book Three). Huh, and here I thought Malcolm would be in the middle.The game's introduction, which follows Malcolm as a jerk toddler up to a jerk middle-aged man, uses a lot of early polygonal work. It doesn't look all that great, frankly. Fortunately, the game itself is still mostly pixel work with a few pre-rendered backgrounds.At any rate, the introduction catches up to the thrilling cliffhanger of the previous game, which saw Malcolm be free of the petrification spell that foiled his schemes from the first game.It's a little surreal that you're suddenly playing the series antagonist with little reason to expect that he's rehabilitated at all. I mean, he's just woken up after getting this close to taking over Kyrandia.And then there's this guy. Your conscience, split into a "bad" half and a "good" half as is often the way in cartoons, is a constant companion on your journey. He only shows up to make fun of you, though he's also the game's best source of hints (and warnings).Being a rock for a few years has stripped Malcolm of his once-formidable magic skills, for what are probably obvious reasons if he's going to be the playable character. I don't even get an abilitease period. Well, I don't need magic to give this squirrel a hard time...wait whatwhat waitAll right, fine, so Malcolm's a little weaker than we thought. First things first: we need to find our old stuff. It won't be here though, in King Wiener's castle.Naturally, I can't help but aggravate a mime that happens to be in the way. Remember when every cartoon had mime jokes? And how weirdly disproportionate it was to how often you saw mimes in real life?Oh right, this is a magic world.Sensing a pattern here. Good thing this "second chance" button basically undoes any death - no reloading from an hours-old save like the old Sierra games.Some more of those pre-rendered backgrounds I was talking about. Honestly, most of these screens just have weird polygonal business and very little other purpose. I recall this being part of the reason adventure games were starting to fall out of fashion: too much focus on visuals, not enough on content.See above, really. I do like crowd scenes like this in adventure games, but I can't actually interact with any of these people. They all collectively comprise a single hotspot of "throng of people Malcolm wants to clear out so he can eat some damn fish ice cream".And then there's this little weirdo, who follows you around and speaks a crazy language you can't understand (it's actually reversed in the audio, but the text gives you no hints).I should make it clear this early on that the game gives you absolutely no direction, save for what you can pick up from interacting with the environment. Goal One is to return to Malcolm's old apartment back before he was the court jester. Goal Two seems to be convincing Queen Katherine that Malcolm wasn't who killed her. Before that, though, we need to figure out how to talk to her: a nearby ghost suggests laying a couple of flowers on her grave, but these yellow ones keep running away (fantasy world, don't forget).Exploring the rest of the accessible screens, and I bump into a familiar face. Unfortunately, as the last game established, Zanthia is perhaps the only person in Kyrandia with any sense. We're not going to get past her easily.
I'm just going to pause the screenshots here to explain how the dialogue system in this game works. Malcolm has three conversational "modes": Normal, which is sarcastic and mean-spirited; Nice, which has Malcolm struggling to be polite and attentive; and Lying, which is like Nice but with more obvious falsehoods. NPCs react differently to each mode, with some only dispensing hints or advice with the right tone. It's the sort of feature I'm usually ambivalent about: on the one hand, it can be funny to have the opportunity to say shitty things to people; on the other, it means having to exhaust three dialogue trees per person instead of one, with very little difference in the responses you get. Take Zanthia, above: she responds the exact same way to Normal and Lying, but tells you about a "Circus Boat" you could use to escape Kyrandia if being Nice.
The Circus Boat. Unfortunately, "McGruff Trade" the flamboyant sailor dog won't let me on without proof I work for this particular circus. Apparently, walking around in a clown costume isn't enough.I finally solve an inventory puzzle after a few screens of wandering, using a rusty nail I found to break into this hideous smiling building. Talking of hideous: that Rolling Stones cover art reject over there is a teleporter, one that moves you a handful of screens away and takes so long to animate that you'd be better off walking.Oh great, so in addition to treason and murder Malcolm is apparently also a workplace sex criminal. This dilapidated toy factory is his old haunt: his apartment is just beyond, behind that door.First though, I can create as many of these little toy soldiers as I want with a pile of infinite firewood just outside of town. Not that I have any idea what they do, or how many I might need. I love adventure games.Malcolm's apartment has seen better days, though I'm tempted to believe that it always looked like this. Bachelors, am I right?In the middle of the room is Malcolm's old family album which, if nothing else, helps establish who all the royals are and how they're related to Malcolm - Malcolm does, technically, have a right to the throne. Also, tell me about it, Gunther.You can also take a nice nap here. Not that it does much, but I feel it's earned.Anyway, the real reason the game tells us to return to Malcolm's home is to reclaim his Jester Wand. It's not the source of his magic, but it can be used to entertain people with jesterly tomfoolery. I dunno, it'll probably prove to be useful.Wandering back to the dump at the start of the game to interfere with that squirrel some more, I'm suddenly jumped by King Brandon's goons and sent to jail. What did I do? ...Oh, right.Whether you put anything in the box or no, it's all still here after you escape. However, you can pick up an inventory item and leave it as your cursor, and this acts as "palming" the object and sneaking it through to prison.The Legend of Kyrandia has some things to say about the unfair practices of penal labor, most notably how Big Doily gets most of its workforce from enslaved convicts. As true now as it was then.I had the foresight to sneak in my bent nail, which I suppose is going to be a lockpick from here on out.There's no locked doors between me and the exit, just that guard in the other room and a long fall past the prison bars, but at least I get to see what's inside this box. It's, uh, this guy.You can poke him with the dull scissors for some "meanness points", but I couldn't see what else to do with this man in a box.You have to complete ten doilies before they let you leave prison, and you'll get thrown back in if you wander back near the castle after a certain amount of time is passed. It's irritating, but I don't think I need to go back there anyway. Instead, I'm using the doily scissors I stole to grab some of these cowardly flowers.Which allows me to finally converse with Queen Katherine. As before, with Zanthia, you only get flies with honey here: by taking a Nice tone, she tells me that I should convince the King of my innocence, but can only do so with a "royal seance". No idea how I'd go about setting one of those up, but this is progress of a sort.
I'm going to stop here, mostly because I have no idea what to do or where to go next. Adventure games are hard to summarize like that: the last thing anyone wants to read is dozens of screenshots of hint-filled dialogue and me trying every object on every other object, but that is invariably what every adventure game playthrough turns into.
Still, it's evident that Westwood were trying a few new ideas with this last Kyrandia outing. The points system, while hardly new to adventure games as a whole, is integrated into the Kyrandia series for the first time here to - I suspect - encourage experimentation with Malcolm's various conversational tones and buffoonery. You get points for entertaining people, but also for pranking and hurting them, so even if you're not moving the game's story forward by being a dick to some random NPC, you are at least getting rewarded for some cheap laughs at their expense. It feels like the designers put this points system in so you don't accidentally miss any of their mean jokes by constantly taking the Nice route as the most likely means of making progress.
I also wish there more dumb NPCs to play the foil with: Wimpy King Brandon and his grandfather Kallak don't hang around long enough for insults, Zanthia's too sharp, the mime doesn't talk, and the weird alien kid only speaks in tongues. Seems like if you were going to hang a game on the hook that is a surly and sardonic protagonist everyone loves to hate, you'd give them more people to irritate from the start.
All the same, I was already two games into this three game series when I started this year's May Maturity season, so I'm not dropping out yet. It does feel a little more difficult than either of its forebears, largely due to a general lack of direction and some annoying quirks, so I'm intending to at least get past what I hope is an early hump before the rest of the game shows up. Keep an eye out for the Outro later this week, for a clearer picture of where this game goes.
