Summary
Much longer than the two first games, and the first game to use a timer
The Good
King's Quest III's quality can be traced back to the first two games, except that it is much longer and you do not play Graham anymore. Instead, you play his son, Alexander, who was taken from his crib as a baby and taken to the land of Llewdor. There, he is called Gwydion, and he lives with the evil wizard Manannan, who orders the poor boy about, and threatens to kill him when he turns an adult since Manannan fears that he will fool around with his magic spells and use them against him.
Alexander is assigned chores every now and then, and if you fail to do these chores, Manannan will punish him. I always find it funny the types of punishment that Manannan gives him, which ranges from hanging upside-down in the kitchen or being turned into a snail and slugging it around the house.
Early in the game, Manannan will often teleport himself to the room that you are in, and he does that to give you further orders. But sometimes, he will appear just to scare you and teleport back out. Whether he appears at certain points depends on the timer. For example, he tells you that he is going on a journey about five minutes into the game, and you have 30 minutes to do all you shit before he returns. Playing KQ3 for the first time was scary for me, as I really had no idea when he is going to appear, But playing this game and paying attention to the timer gave me a good idea how long I had to complete certain tasks.
You have two objectives throughout the game. Your first objective is to find a way out of Llewdor, but in order to do this, you have to deal with Manannan first, which is done by learning how to prepare and casts spells and use them against him. This is rather difficult because being caught carrying around ingredients for a spell, or something that will act as an ingredient, would result in your death. You have to be sneaky about it, and put the ingredients under something just before you are caught, and get them back out when the coast is clear.
Your second objective is explained to you later on. When you get back to Daventry, you must destroy a three-headed dragon who has destroyed the beauty of Daventry, and taken your sister as a sacrifice. Again, defeating it requires a spell to be cast. Speaking of spells, you must know what each of the spells do, and when you are faced with a situation that cannot be done by hand, which spells to cast at the right time. You can get yourself killed if you cast the wrong spell in a situation that requires some other spell. If you have met the first objective, then the timer throughout the rest of the game becomes irrelevant.
As I said, you have a certain time limit to accomplish certain tasks, so it is best not to waste time. If you feel that you haven't got time, your best bet is to use a magic map, but even that is forbidden to carry, and it only works if you have already visit locations in the game. You might as well use the in-built cheat to avoid time loss.
In terms of graphics, KQ3 does not offer much improvement over the first two games. Players will have to put up with their blocky 16-color feel. As for the sound, PC Speaker is only used, but as I said in my KQ1 and KQ2 reviews, people who have a Tandy machine will notice the wonderful, simultaneous sounds that their speaker uses. “Greensleeves” is no longer used for the theme song, but there are plenty of songs in KQ3, a lot more than they are in the first two games. And these sound awesome with the Tandy.
KQ3 is also long. The game cannot be completed within a day, unless you are prepared to stay up in the wee hours of the morning and play it non-stop.
The Bad
Spell preparation requires you to not make any mistakes and do exactly what the spell book tells you, and this goes for the incarnation. Doing typos mean that the spell will backfire on you. (On the plus side, it is fun to see what the end result is.) Furthermore, you must prepare quickly or you waste more time.
All this spell preparation is there as a form of copy protection, so pirates would have made a big mistake when they copied the game and distribute them illegally, but they would have just gotten away with using a walkthrough that included the necessary information.
The Bottom Line
Some users have complained that KQ3 has nothing to do with the royal family. When I watched the game's introduction, I thought that Sierra pulled out “Gwydion” and “Llewdor” from nowhere. What users did not realize was that they only needed to complete the game to find out the real story, and save themselves the time that it took to complain about it.
In KQ3, you have two objectives: escape the wizard, and save Daventry from the dragon. Although the graphics and sound in the game have the same quality as the first two games, it is rather long and there are more tasks to complete, but most of them rely on a timer, which becomes irrelevant in later scenes.
