Conquests of Camelot: The Search for the Grail

The Good
I always loved Arthurian themes and this game was a great discovery, everything is very accurate and remains very faithful to the Arthurian myth. The use of Olde-English in the dialogues is also a great point. The fact of having to achieve certain actions and good deeds to obtain the Holy Grail was also very interesting to me. The graphics were real good for being only 16, i liked a lot the maps of Europe and Britannia and some of the backgrounds.

The Bad
Maybe there were too much dead-ends like in a lot of Sierra adventures, the copy protection puzzles were a bit annoying (i hope we see an amateur-remake in VGA someday and this could be removed and changed to some similar puzzles)

The Bottom Line
If you are an adventure game enthusiast and enjoy reading King Arthur adventures this is definitely your game.

The Good
The feature that most distinguishes Conquests of Camelot from other Sierra games of the period is that you (via King Arthur, your in-game cypher) are required to partake in many more challenges than simply solving item-manipulation puzzles. At one point you must slay wild boar; at another, you're dueling with a saracen; at still another, you're jousting. This, coupled with a fairly logical puzzle system, makes Conquests of Camelot a gem worth seeking out if you can configure your system to support it.

The Bad
The one feature that is guaranteed to irritate a fair number of gamers are the riddles. At one point, Arthur must solve a number of riddles to advance. If you cannot answer even one, you're stuck. Luckily, the riddles themselves rotate, so if you're stuck on one, leave the screen and return to get a new, possibly easier one.

The Bottom Line
King Arthur must venture out to recover the Holy Grail. Along the way, he undergoes a variety of challenges, physical, mental and spiritual, that make up the core of the gameplay. Imagine King's Quest with combat and a semi-historical flavoring and you've got the core of Conquests of Camelot.

The Good
Everything from the music to the graphics (though limited to 16 colors, the game had real artistic talent behind the sprites and the animations) was fantastic.

The game features a lovely mix of action and adventure. The action elements aren't a main focus in the game and aren't too involved (think Space Quest), so people who love adventure games shouldn't be turned off.

The puzzles in the game can be challenging but I managed to get through the whole game without being really stuck more than once. The only time I got stuck was a part that involved yelling, which was an action you didn't have to do at any other point in the game.

The game also has multiple endings based on some of the decisions you make, just like with Conquest of the Longbow (another exquisite adventure game).

Someone mentioned the riddles in the game as a bad part. For me, they were some of the most interesting puzzles in the game. The riddles are masterfully written in a way that anyone should be able to solve them given enough time and thought. I first played the game when I was 13 and managed to solve every riddle I encountered, and I played the riddles section multiple times to see every riddle. Anyway, some people might be turned off and may want to immediately progress to the next section. For those people, the riddles might have been pretty frustrating.

The Bad
I didn't like the part in the game where I got stuck. Like I mentioned earlier, it involved yelling which was something you didn't have to do throughout the whole game up until then, so I never even thought to try it. I imagine lots of people got stuck on the same part for the same reason.

Every single puzzle is still very logical. Unlike too many games, there's no brute force strategy to figuring out what to do where you run into parts where you have to just try every single action you can think of with no sense of direction. Looking around each environment gives clues as to what you do, and just about everything should be obvious. If not, you'll probably hit yourself on the head when you figure it out because the game really does a great job of filling you in.

The copy protection puzzles are probably the most annoying thing. I didn't even think to look in the manual when I first played the game with the riddle of the flowers.

The Bottom Line
I would say this is one of the greatest adventure games ever made, not just for aesthetic reasons (though it certainly is among the best in this department as well), but for the straight-forward adventure gameplay with some entertaining action moments.

To me, Quest for Glory, Conquest of Camelot, and Conquest of the Longbow offer the best Sierra has to offer when it comes to the adventure department because they offer some of the most straight-forward (but not necessarily easy) puzzles, often with multiple approaches.