Rating of
2/5
Inglorious
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 10/16/17
As a youth growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I loved the idea of the Adventure genre. I would sit for hours, staring at the boxes for games like the ‘King’s Quest’ series and ‘Quest for Glory’ series, imagining the incredible stories contained within. Imagining, because none of these damned PC exclusive titles would ever run properly for me. The closest I ever got to experiencing these ‘classics’ of the Golden Age of Adventure games was a brief window of time in which I was able to complete “King’s Quest 3” on my late Father’s old Tandy, and another brief window of time in which I was able to play a little bit of “King’s Quest 6” at Chris’ house in high school, because for whatever arbitrary reason, his Packard Bell would run it, despite having overall lower specifications than the custom-built IBM PC I had at the time. These difficulties of early PC gaming are why I said I loved the idea of Adventure games: I rarely actually got to play any of them.
Because I never got to play very many of these PC exclusive Adventures back in the day, my perception of them is rather warped. I loved the NES Adventure games I actually did get to play – “Shadowgate,” “Uninvited,” “Déjà Vu,” and “Maniac Mansion” – so I always assumed that ‘King’s Quest’ and ‘Quest for Glory’ would be even better, despite only experiencing a tiny snippet of those franchises and not actually being all that impressed by them. I fantasized about the unlimited possibilities offered by the text parser interface of early ‘King’s Quest’ titles, only vaguely remembering how poorly that mechanic worked in practice when I played “King’s Quest 3.” Being denied the actual experience of these games allowed my young mind to inflate them to legendary status, implanting false memories that are still with me today.
It is because of these false memories of Adventure game greatness that I re-purchased all of the ‘King’s Quest’ and ‘Quest for Glory’ titles on GOG when they were added. I now officially own three copies of every ‘King’s Quest’ except for the 7th and 8th ones and two copies of every ‘Quest for Glory’ game. However, I have pushed them onto my back-burner, as, in the intervening years since I first gained those false memories of these Sierra Games Adventures being unassailably perfect, I have rather fallen out of love with the Adventure genre.
On the other hand, I was rather intrigued by a 2012 Kickstarter campaign for a spiritual successor to the ‘Quest for Glory’ series being put together by a mostly-British Indie development outfit going by the name of Infamous Quests (IQ). The game in question, “Quest for Infamy” (“QFI”), promised to revive the Adventure genre for a new era. I snagged it (on sale, of course) from GOG (so it would be in the same bucket as all of my old Adventure games) sometime after its 2014 release… then sat on it until this year, when I decided it was high time to clear a bunch of Adventure titles out of my backlog. Sadly, in playing “QFI,” I found the experience less than impressive and only marginally engaging; unsurprisingly, standards have changed a LOT since Roberta Williams sat on the Adventure Game Throne at Sierra.
Presentation
Normally I’d start out talking about graphics, but “QFI” has some idiosyncratic technical issues that lie at the forefront of its presentational woes. Upon downloading and installing the game with GOG Galaxy (The Optional Client®), I clicked the green ‘Play’ button, only to be greeted by a black screen. No keys or mouse-clicks seemed to do anything, and even trying to Alt+Tab out of the program was dicey and nearly caused a full system lock. Running the game in Compatibility Mode for Windows 7 somehow fixed the black screen issue, but then I ran into the fact that the game only wanted to display in a tiny box in the middle of a mostly-black screen. “QFI” doesn’t have ANY game options available from the title screen, so it took some digging through the game’s digital manual and the installation directory before I figured out that it comes with not one but TWO extra helper programs that do nothing but setup the graphical features. These two helper programs tend to overwrite each other, and, mysteriously, the game doesn’t actually support 1080p, one of the most common resolutions during the time of its development and release, in favor of crummy low resolutions and the Neckbeard resolution 1440p. After going through these unnecessary extra steps, I still found myself completely stymied by the fact that “QFI” is impossible to play in any aspect ratio that isn’t 4:3, with gigantic black letterboxes on each side of the screen.
I don’t really understand the obsession with locking the player to 4:3 aspect, as the visuals in “QFI” aren’t particularly impressive, and definitely not to the point where a bit of stretching would compromise some great artistic vision. See, the problem with “QFI’s” visuals is that they are decidedly lacking in vision. Instead of bravely striking out with their own bold visual style or invoking the past with clean, beautiful pixel art, “QFI” looks… very much like a muddy, blurry, early VGA game. Environments are merely passable, whereas character ‘models’ (and I use the term very loosely) look like piles of chunky pixels. There’s something pleasant about a well-designed 8-bit sprite, and 16-bit 2D visuals still hold up completely, decades later, but the art style “QFI” is aping wasn’t really a ‘style’ so much as it was very early experimentation with limited technology that was rapidly developing into bigger and better things.
The one semi-strong aspect of “QFI’s” visuals is the character portraits that illustrate every in-game conversation. These are reasonably well-done, though they still have that same jagged-edged look as the digital photos in my late-‘90s high school yearbooks. Some of the character portraits are based on the staff at IQ, whereas others are based on the likeness of Kickstarter backers from the higher support tiers. Some of these characters are even dead ringers for celebrities, with the main character bearing a striking resemblance to Viggo Mortensen’s Aragorn and the main villain looking exactly like a young Gary Busey. Regardless of the quality of these illustrations, they are painfully static, with only poorly-animated mouth movements (no mouth movement would have been better, I think), with only one often-tortured pose for every emotional state a character might have. Japanese Visual Novels has taught us that it isn’t that much extra work to create a handful of ‘mood’ faces for characters if all you’re doing is using mostly-static portraits anyway.
The sound in “QFI” is a rather mixed bad. While the soundtrack ranges from pleasantly innocuous to rather good, the voiceacting is mostly quite terrible. “QFI,” unlike most of the Sierra Adventure games it’s copying – unless they were released on CD-ROM – is fully voiced. Some of these performances are well done, but most of the supporting cast and background characters are just awful. Not only are the performances as bad as if the folks at IQ just grabbed people off the street, but the recording quality is ridiculously inconsistent – even for some of the characters whose performances are up to par. And when I say that “QFI” is ‘fully-voiced,’ I do indeed mean FULLY. Every single bit of text not spoken by an non-player character is read aloud by a very bored-sounding, very British-sounding Narrator.
Aside from the technical faults with the visuals, setup, and Compatibility Mode I started out with, “QFI” has a slew of other problems. First it has no controller support, but as a simple point-and-click game it doesn’t really need it. Of course, the keyboard hotkey layout is one of the most horrendous I’ve ever come across, with a modifier key (Ctrl) needed to trigger most actions. And, of course, none of these can be remapped because the game’s ‘Options’ are limited to combat difficulty and volume.
Story
“QFI” follows some of the exploits of one William Roehm (sounds like ‘roam’), a wandering ne’er-do-well and serial womanizer who finds himself on the run from an angry nobleman after bedding said nobleman’s daughter. Roehm finds himself in the Krasna Valley, just outside the small town of Volksville, where he learns that the bridge to the North is currently out and the port in the capitol city, Tyr, to the South is currently closed. Stuck in the valley for the time being, Roehm decides to partake in a bit of petty villainy to kill time, all while avoiding the long arm of Volksville’s overzealous sheriff, Rayford.
Before long, however, Roehm finds himself embroiled in the dark doings of a mysterious cult in search of a mysterious gemstone, which is part of a mysterious prophecy. Of course, Roehm, being as petty and small-time as he is, just wants to snag the thing from the cult so he can sell it.
“QFI” plays out over a prologue and three acts. The prologue simply serves as a bit of introduction and allows the player the opportunity to choose one of three specializations. These specializations change a handful of the quests and options Roehm has throughout the game, but none of these changes are actually meaningful or interesting in the long run. The rest of the game takes place almost entirely in Act 1. Obviously, “QFI” has some major pacing issues, as Act 1 drags on and on and on for hours, whereas Act 2 is a quick finish, and Act 3 is more like an epilogue. Indeed, the pacing of “QFI” reminds me of nothing more than sledding as a child: The long, tiresome, annoying walk up a snow-packed, icy slope; then the brief thrill of the ride down, the excitement of which wears off far too quickly.
Overall, for a first-time playthrough (subsequent plays will be shorter once the player knows how to solve the puzzles and trigger progress), “QFI” takes somewhere between 10 and 12 hours. For what it contains, however, I estimate that to be about 8 hours too many. Perhaps the worst part of this whole ordeal, however, is the fact that “QFI” is obviously designed to be part of a trilogy, as the main story revolves around three magical McGuffins and the game even saves a Clear Game file, presumably for import into a sequel that still doesn’t exist and hasn’t been announced nearly 4 years after the release of the first part.
Gameplay
“QFI” takes nearly all of its inspiration from the ‘Quest for Glory’ series, which was once known as “Hero’s Quest,” until Milton Bradley released the “HeroQuest” board game (in collaboration with Games Workshop) and ruined everything. The ‘Quest for Glory’ series, as I understand it, blended 90% Adventure game point-and-click puzzle solving mechanics with an incredibly light sheen of RPG Elements to determine a character’s prowess at combat, thieving, and magic. “QFI” does basically the same thing… but there’s a reason these late ‘80s/early ‘90s mechanics fell out of favor.
The player can choose one of three specializations for Roehm, which will largely determine how he deals with enemies and to a lesser extent puzzles. These specializations are the combat-centric Brigand, the stealth-centric Rogue, and the magic-centric Magician. Depending on Roehm’s class, some of his stats will have different caps (typically the base cap for all stats is 50, while the improved cap for a class that specializes in that skill is 100).
As a 90% Adventure game, the vast majority of gameplay in “QFI” revolves around moving from screen to screen, looking at things, determining which of the things are interactive, interacting with the things, and moving on to the next screen, oftentimes bringing a thing from a different screen to solve a problem on the current screen. “QFI” has a LOT of screens… unfortunately most of them are empty. See, “QFI” also takes some inspiration from modern open world Sandbox games, fashioning itself in a rather non-linear manner. Roehm only has to solve a handful of puzzles in Act 1, but he can do so in any order he wants… for the most part. Because it’s a big, open game, most screens are just there for the sake of being there, with nothing to interact with, except for the ever-present possibility of a random combat encounter, but playing as a Rogue, I mostly just ran past enemies instead of trying to fight them.
The combat system in “QFI” is fairly bare-bones and not terribly interesting. Every combat is a 1-on-1 affair, with Roehm on the left and the enemy on the right. Roehm has four combat options available (stab, slash, bash, and guard), plus the Rogue gets a Batman-style bladerang. Healing potions and smoke bombs can be used in combat as well, provided the player has found or purchased some. Every round, the player has 3 seconds to click one of the combat options before the enemy gets a free shot at Roehm. Whichever side depletes the other’s hit points wins. Roehm’s proficiency with the three types of attack plus his general hit percentage increase as he uses them.
Roehm’s thieving skills also increase as he uses them, which led me to some very uninteresting hours of gameplay repeatedly climbing over a fence to improve Roehm’s climbing skills and repeatedly trying to pick an unpickable lock on a mausoleum to improve Roehm’s lock-picking skills. Getting these boring training activities out of the way is important, however, as nothing kills the game’s already dubious pacing quicker than needing to perform an activity, knowing exactly where to click in order to perform it, but not having the stats to actually DO it.
Overall
I have recently played two spiritual successors to old Adventure games: GrahfMetal’s “Infested,” which is an homage to “Shadowgate;” and Infamous Quests’ “Quest for Infamy,” which is an homage to “Quest for Glory.” I feel that both of these games are very faithful to their source material, but only one of them is worth playing… and it’s not “Quest for Infamy.” This game is ugly, cumbersome, annoying, and bland in equal measure, like a nauseating flashback to the DOS era that spawned its archetype.
Presentation: 2/5
Story: 3/5
Gameplay: 2/5
Overall (not an average): 2/5
