Offensive, Lackluster, and an Embarrassment to Games, Developers, and Gamers Everywhere
Very few games I play are ever offensively bad. Most are, at worst, mediocre yawn fests with elements that just don't work. Some are broken, some are ill-conceived, some are meant for a different audience. Only a tiny fraction of the games I've played have truly have earned that one star rating. Of those, I'd be hard pressed to tell you if I've ever played a game more offensively juvenile than Quest for INfamy.
From head to toe, this is a knockoff of the far, far superious Quest for Glory games, one of my most beloved (if seriously flawed) series and the grandfather of the Elder Scrolls series. It's styled after the point-and-click versions of those games, particularly the remastered VGA version of Quest for Glory 1. The gameplay is similar too, at least in appearances. It's a point-and-click adventure game melded with some light action sequences. And again, like Quest for Glory, you take on the role of a magician, warrior, or a thief. Sounds pretty great so far, right? That illusion is shattered within minutes of playing Quest for Infamy.
After a remarkably bad introductory sequence (possibly the lightest offense of the entire game, but one that should have given me pause enough to stop this garbage before it really got started), the player is introduced to a town eerily similar to that of the one in Quest for Glory. Again, not a bad thing, as this is supposed to be a spiritual successor. But after switching to the eyeball cursor nad looking at a few of the NPCs right off hand, I was immediately less than impressed. The first NPC you meet is called a sissy by the braying, annoying narrator. One of the next few NPCs you meet is declared derisively as fat.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg of this game's glaringly stupid take on "humor." The hero hounds after women with breasts falling out of their clothes. The player will hear plenty about poop and bodily wastes, and do plenty with both. Plenty of useless objects are scattered about everywhere, and the derisive narration about said objects falls as flat as a corpse.
Most of the rest of the game is a mess, too. While the backgrounds are surprisingly well done, the animations feel clipped and undercooked. Puzzles are by and large either too simple or too obtuse, with no common ground or fun to be had with any of them. Combat is a loose paper/rock/scissors affair, mercifully mediocre at best and often bafflingly difficult at its worst. The NPCs are largely caricatures of the prejudices and biases of the creators, and boy howdy, they have a lot of them.
The music is largely forgettable. The voice actors approach their shit roles with all the aplomb of a junior high production of Big River, or whatever the fuck play they do in junior high. It's obvious they didn't have a decent sound studio on an indie budget, so faulting them on the quality of the sound is somewhat harsh, but some effort could have been made towards equalizing the sound so that I'm not being bombarded by the loud bellows of the innkeeper whenever I ask about his daughter.
I'm going to put this as bluntly as I can. Buying this and supporting these developers is a gaming crime, one I'm sadly guilty of. It's all the more depressing, because with the right kind of spirit, a Quest for Glory spiritual successor could be an amazing thing. Instead, we have this insult to garbage games everywhere sitting on Steam, waiting for some dumb nostalgic sap like me to pick it up on a sale price.
Do not buy this game. Don't bother looking it up. After you've read this review, forget it even exists. It doesn't deserve an ounce of an accolade, let alone your gaming dollar. Walk away, Sierra fans. Walk away.