King's Quest V:
Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder
Review
Storyline and
Gameplay
King's Quest
V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder was the first adventure game to
be created in the SCI 1 system, making it the first game in the series
with a non-typing interface. This makes it easier for novice players to
play the game. The storyline isn't the best one in the series, but it's
not the worst one either. It feels nice to play as King Graham again, this
time an older and wiser man. The main goal of the game is clear right from
the beginning: To find the evil wizard Mordack and rescue the royal family
and castle from him. The search starts in the land of Serenia, where King
Graham gets help by the wizard Crispin, and his talking owl, Cedric, who
follows Graham around wherever he goes during most of the game. Unfortunately,
Cedric proves to be of little practical use, and becomes more of an annoying
than funny side-kick throughout the game. During the first part of the
game, Graham explores Serenia freely, searching for clues on Mordacks whereabouts
and collecting items necessary for the jorney to his faraway castle. In
the second part, Graham travels to Mordacks castle, encountering many perils
and obstacles on his way. In the end he has to defeat Mordack and save
his family, and the background to the plot in King's Quest VI: Heir
Today, Gone Tomorrow is presented. The story is nice and well told,
but unfortunately the gameplay suffers a bit as there are several things
you have to collect in Serenia without knowing why you need them, only
to find the use for them much later in the game. Therefore, it's easy to
get stuck far into the game just because of something you missed doing
near the beginning of it. The only solution will be to restore to an early
point in the game and replay a bit portion of it. This can be very annoying.
Also, some inventory objects have to be used in very unusual ways that
you may not figure out just because they aren't logical. Many of the puzzles
in the game are much easier than they would have been with a typing interface,
so some of them may not be as challenging as the game designers, not used
to the icon interface, originally intended. Still, this game has a very
likeable touch to it and it kind of resembles the early King's Quest games
in the design of story and puzzles. The icon interface is easy to understand
and handle. The intelligent pathing technique makes it easy to move King
Graham to other spots on the screen, as he finds his way around obstacles
himself. Without this feature, mouse control would have been pretty annoying.
Graphics
Another revolutionary
technique introduced in this game was the use of hand-painted art scanned
in 256 colors and motion-captured actors used to make character animation
more realistic. The improvement in graphic quality is incredible, much
greater than the improvement between King's Quest III and IV through the
use of a doubled resolution. The backgrounds, beautifully painted by proffessional
artists, provide a much more convincing athmosphere than any previous game
in the series. Few games could compete with the looks of this one at the
time of its release, and the graphics still looks good with current standards,
despite the relatively low resolution and color depth. Animated close-ups
of the faces of characters in the game helps to improve the illusion. Judging
by the age of this game, one can only conclude that its graphics is amazing.
Music and Sound
Effects
Graphics wasn't
the only thing improved in this game. This is the first King's Quest game
to feature a full soundtrack. The music in King's Quest IV was mostly short
themes played for a few seconds. In this game, many places have their own
musical theme, played in the background all the time when you're there.
They may not be masterpieces, but they serve their purpose well in enhancing
the athmosphere of the game to a great extent. The music is often funny
and catchy, even featuring a few short digitally recorded pieces with singing
in the multimedia version.
Various digital
sound effects can be heard in the game. Birds sing, water splashes and
things like that. Some sound effects are also made using customized musical
instruments, played in places without music. The multimedia version features
improved sound effects with more digitally recorded samples than the original
version.
The multimedia
version of the game is also the first King's Quest game to feature recorded
voices instead of text. This improves the athmosphere in the game to a
great degree. Proffessional voice actors weren't hired for this production.
Instead, various members of the Sierra On-Line staff were used, including
game designer Roberta Williams herself, as well as Josh Mandel, producer
of the King's Quest I SCI remake, as the voice of King Graham. It can easily
be heard that the voice actors in the game weren't proffesionals at this
job, and much of the dialogue in the game sounds kind of silly due to this.
However, when this game was produced the technical issues of including
digital voices in the game was the big issue. It's a bit unfortunate that
it's not possible to switch between text and voices in the multimedia version
or to have text as subtitles to the voices, but being only the second Sierra
On-Line multimedia game, these features were still not included. Despite
these problems though, playing the multimedia version of the game, with
more music, more digital sound effects and recorded voice acting is the
way to get the most out of it.
Technical Issues
King's Quest
V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder, as all SCI 1 games, suffers from
a lot of compability issues with modern computers, and actually with a
lot of older computers as well. In fact, it's one of the hardest SCI 1
games to get to work properly. The main issue is the music and sound. The
game supports multiple music cards and sound cards, but even a card supposed
to be compatible with one of these may not be able to work properly with
the game due to many factors. The game may assume a different setting of
the card than you have on your computer.
Another common
problem in SCI games, something that can also be responsible for music
and/or sound problems, is that it's not designed to work properly at the
CPU speeds of modern computers. This may result in unsuccessful card detections,
lockups in various parts of the game and time-based actions in the gameplay
that goes way too fast. These problems can often be solved by running a
program to reduce the speed of the computer at the same time.
Memory is
another common problem with SCI 1 games. The game is very hungry for memory,
so unloading certain TSR programs (such as device drivers) may be necessary.
With modern versions of Windows, emulation of old DOS memory layouts may
fix these problems nicely, or make it impossible to play the game at all,
depending on the specific system used.
The Windows
multimedia version of the game is the one most likely to work on a modern
system, but it's necessary to set the screen resolution to 640x480 with
256 colors in order to get the game to work. Also, the digital sound in
the game may be choppy and unsynchronized due to the high speeds of modern
CD-ROM devices.
Getting this
game to work on a modern computer is part lottery, part engineering and
part pure luck. It's unfortunate that this has to be the case, but there's
nothing to do about it. The best option is actually to play the game on
an old computer with the hardware and software that was the most common
in the early 90's.
Final Verdict
King's Quest
V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder is a revolutionary game in terms
of technology and gameplay, but not so much in storyline. It's an important
part in adventure gaming history and should not be missed by any King's
Quest fan. There are a few flaws, and unfortunately it's hard to get the
game to work perfectly on a modern computer, but it's definately worth
playing. The game has a very likeable touch to it and references to other
games in the series in this game and vice versa makes it a very rewarding
game to play for a fan of the series. This may not be one of the best King's
Quest games, but it's one of the most important ones nonetheless.
Golden Moment
Looking into the
crystal ball of the fortune teller.
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