Space Quest II: Chapter II - Vohaul's Revenge

aka: SQ2, Space Quest 2, Space Quest: Chapter Two - Vohaul's Revenge
Moby ID: 128
DOS Specs

Description official descriptions

The ace janitor Roger Wilco thought he'd seen the last of Sludge Vohaul. However, like every evil scientist is supposed to, Vohaul returns with an even meaner scheme. This time he intends to infest the planet Xenon with thousands of genetically engineered door-to-door life insurance salesmen. The last thing he wants is Roger messing things up, and so the brave janitor is captured and brought to the planet Labion to spend the rest of his days working in Vohaul's mines. Fortunately, the shuttle that takes him to the mines crashes, and Roger is the only survivor. He will have to survive the dangers of the jungle planet Labion, and eventually stop Vohaul from executing his mad plan.

Vohaul's Revenge is the sequel to The Sarien Encounter, and the second game in Sierra's humorous Space Quest series of adventure games. The player navigates Roger Wilco around with arrow keys, and interacts with the world by typing commands. Like in the previous game, there are many ways for the player character to die. Much of the gameplay is dedicated to avoiding the many traps and hazards Roger will meet on his way. Some actions must be performed quickly in order to prevent Roger from getting killed.

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Credits (DOS version)

6 People

Game by
  • Two Guys From Andromeda
Design
Programming
Graphics
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Reviews

Critics

Average score: 69% (based on 15 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.7 out of 5 (based on 106 ratings with 8 reviews)

15 hilarious ways to die

The Good
Um, replace that one-line summary with a quote from a song you (or anybody else in the world) actually KNOW. I'm just trying to get the concept across here - there's nothing else to this game than dying. You get a funny comment every time you do so, and every time you do so you will also gain the knowledge of how NOT to die. Which is the purpose of the game in fact, so it's kinda self-defeating since you essentially have to solve a game by methodically taking all the steps which are antithetical to its basic premise. If that sounded too pretentious to you, then basically the only way to solve most of this game's puzzles is by dying repeatedly and thus becoming aware of how to stay alive. That's learning how to survive the hard way, eh? For example, in one screen you have a very vaguely drawn rectangle on the ground - when you step on it, you fall inside a trap and you die. When you reload the game, and type "look at trap" in the parser, the game responds "What trap? I don't see any trap! Hey guys, do you see any trap here? Nope, no trap here!" It IS funny, yes, but it's kinda sad that the only means for these folk to do something creative and involving in this game was by thinking up of funny, unexpected ways to die and then writing humorous little good-bye messages (many of which, btw, were quite surprisingly derisive towards the player - not that I was offended, which I easily could've been, I'm just wondering whether that sort of slipped by the Sierra Quality Assurance there a bit).

Aside from that, this is just average Sierra adventure fare. Most probably one of the other guys who reviewed the game was right, it was probably a bit of a cash-in for Sierra, slapped together with no idea or original conception. I remember enjoying the first game in the series (some years ago), but this one just seems so dull, so totally regressive - even in the intro, it just states, "well, in the first game you became a hero, but now you're back to being a janitor". This is already well past the line dividing irony from total cynicism, in the wrong direction. I didn't get very far in the game (I stopped in the maze with the ladders), so maybe I missed out on something, but I doubt it: a bunch of screens thrown together with the usual suspects of man-eating mushrooms, hostile swamp creatures, goons, people with clubs and little innocent creatures you have to "help" does not give much promise for any later sections. The puzzles sucked, stunningly being incredibly obvious and mind-bogglingly illogical at the same time - like a dead tree just by the side of a canyon I have no way of crossing. No no, you don't have to PUSH it, or kick it or shove it. You have to CLIMB it. A dead tree, obviously liable to break at any moment, precariously positioned right beside a bottom-less pit. Climb it. What were you expecting to do at the top of it, TAKE IN THE SIGHTS?

And what about other characters, or an interesting setting, or a plot, or - hey, an explanation for there being an underwater cavern beneath the swamp in the middle of nowhere with a glowing gem in it. Nah, don't bother. Space Quest 2: the pinnacle of that philosophy of "ironic" game design where the game being crap was in fact considered to be the most sophisticated of all jokes.

The Bad
Er, was that the "good" section? Sorry.

The Bottom Line
imitates staring morosely and dull-ly at a computer screen, only to be distracted by a passing fly or a speck of dust falling from the ceiling, or ANY INCREDIBLY UNINTERESTING THING AT ALL

(Explanatory note to Moby readers who have never written a review here: this section is currently being hyped to me as my answer to the question, "How would you describe this game to others?", despite the fact that it appears under a different heading currently as you read it. Therefore the seeming discrepancy between what you expected to read and what I in fact have written there. Much like, to get back slightly to the original topic, this very game: you expect to find something entertaining, but instead you get something which was originally, in some bizarre historical context, supposed to be "hip" and "with it", and, not coincidentally, totally fails to be entertaining.)

DOS · by Alex Man (31) · 2003

The game that introduced me to my favorite villain of the series

The Good
Everybody loved the original Space Quest. It was original and humorous, and it contained lots of exploration and adventuring. Sales of 200,000 copies were enough to convince Sierra to release a sequel to the game. I got Space Quest II right after I completed the fourth game in the series, and I have to admit it was one of the favorite SQs, right up there with number five.

The game comes with a small comic which I enjoyed reading. It chronicles the events after the original game and, although I lost the comic ages ago, I think it also introduces Vohaul, the antagonist of the game and tells the story of Roger being interviewed on Letterdroid, which you get to watch in the remake of the game. People illegally downloading this game won't have the pleasure of reading it.

SQ2 follows on from the original game. Roger Wilco managed to steal the Star Generator back from the Sariens who were planning to use it for evil purposes. Here, we get to meet the mastermind behind the plan. As revenge, he plans to unleash deadly life insurance salesman onto Xenon and, to make sure that his plan proceeds, dumps Roger on Labion where he is doomed to spend an eternity working in the mines.

The game is slightly better than the original Space Quest, because it ups the ante a bit. What I mean by that that you have to perform unexpected things you never did in an adventure game before. For instance, right from the start - when Roger is on-board the XOS4 - the way you can make Roger walk sideways on the wall and upside down is a stroke of genius.

The majority of the game takes place on the planet of Labion. It is a jungle planet, which makes it all the more exciting. When I first played this game, I was always curious to see what is on the next screen I have to go to. SQ2 has a few puzzles here and there, but they are quite easy to work out. I think the most challenging one would be navigating through the vine monster without touching any part of it.

You can die many times in this game, and I enjoy doing so in this game just to see how Roger dies. The root monster in the aforementioned paragraph will devour Roger if he touches any part of its vines. There is probably a clip on YouTube that shows all of Roger's death, so if you are a fan of adventure game deaths, you should take a look.

Since the game is made in the mid-Eighties, Sierra still used their old AGI engine which displays graphics in a 160x200 resolution. Also, sound only comes through the PC Speaker and there is no mouse control, meaning that you have to type commands at a parser. You may think that this is crap today, but back then it was all we had. When it comes to graphics, I often ignore its chunkiness and just focus on what objects are on the screen, and its shape and color. I liked what Vohaul's asteroid looks like. It kinds of reminds me of that planetoid in Universe, with the lights coming out of it.

The sound comes through the PC Speaker only as soundcards weren't invented back then. It is improved if you own a Tandy Computer; you will be able to hear three voices instead of just one. Actions are performed by entering commands at the parser. This is great because you can experiment with different commands, and quite often the game will generate a funny response.

Finally, there are multiple solutions to some puzzles, meaning that SQ2 can be played again, allowing you to take a different path to what you took before. The only one I can think of has to do with the Labion Terror beast that you have to get past.


The Bad
Space Quest II can be quite short, depending on how well you go at the game. If you know what you're doing, it will take you well under three hours to complete. Also, I don't like the way that the cover reads "Space Quest II" in the usual SQ font, yet it reads "Chapter II" right underneath. So calling this game "Space Quest II: Chapter II - Vohaul's Revenge" is downright pathetic.

The Bottom Line
Space Quest II is the sequel to the original game, starring one of my favorite villains from the SQ universe, Sludge Vohaul, who dumps Roger on the planet of Labion while he plans to infest his home planet with life insurance salesman. The game may be short, but there are enough puzzles in the game to keep you occupied, and Labion itself also provides plenty of exploration. Why didn't I talk about the game's humor? Because there isn't any at all.

DOS · by Katakis | カタキス (43092) · 2012

Suspense and adventuring in a concise form

The Good
Following the footsteps of its seminal predecessor, Space Quest II borrows its template for a linear, yet dynamic and energy-loaded adventure. It multiplies the hazards and increases the danger, resulting in an interesting example of an adventure game that comes very close to conveying the emotional tension of an action title.

The gameplay of Space Quest II is fluent, uncomplicated, and just right in terms of difficulty and pacing. Some of the puzzles in the game are, in fact, quite imaginative and elegant. They mostly serve as elementary protections against death. For example, you enter a swamp and get eaten by a monster; so you have to figure out how to avoid this. Some puzzles still belong to the good old epoch of text input, and would be hard to recreate in games with modern interfaces. Such puzzles are simple, but not always obvious to figure out, and require real imagination instead of mad clicking on everything you see. I remember how I was constantly dying while attempting to dive and didn't think of a simple solution: what people usually do just before they dive?.. Such realistic, extremely simple, yet interesting and even (in their own way) challenging puzzles ceased to exist after text interface was replaced by point-and-click.

Space Quest II is built like one big trip through a hostile environment, sustaining the feeling of danger from the beginning to the end. There's little in games that can be compared to the feeling of being lost and trapped among hostile creatures and other hazards. There's hardly anything that stimulates the player more to keep playing. Every time Roger dies you are interested to discover what could have prevented his death and what other terrible encounters will happen. The nerve-tickling, tension-loaded atmosphere of the game curiously reminded me of a later masterpiece that is not exactly dissimilar to it.

Yes, you die too much in this game, but this creates tension that contributes to the realism of being unwelcome in a strange, alien world. In fact, dying is the whole point of the game, which is about surviving. And what could have suited the game's plot and setting better than the constant mortal risk? The whole story of the game deals with Roger's attempts to escape from Vohaul and his henchmen. He is in an unknown, possibly dangerous world, where death lurks at every corner. I find it fascinating how the game always requires you to be careful, using this to immerse you into its world.

All this makes Space Quest II the most intense, atmospheric experience within the series. When you are always near death, you start paying attention to everything - every stone, every tree might contain possible danger. You walk around carefully, trying not to step on suspiciously looking plants or come too close to dangerously looking bizarre alien organisms. The game has two main locations (planet surface and Vohaul's asteroid), both very detailed, both full of traps and hazards, and both menacing in a strange, alien way, perfectly fitting the sci-fi setting of the game.

The Bad
Space Quest II can be an exciting game, but it doesn't feel like an exciting Space Quest. The first game wasn't exactly a hilarious comedy, but it did have Ulence Flats. This is just the kind of thing missing in the sequel: a nice little area with funny establishments and creatures. Otherwise, the game is very similar in structure to its predecessor (up to the division into planet-exploring and enemy base-infiltrating parts), but it lacks the one relaxing, humorous segment needed to make up for all those dangers.

This is manifested in the gameplay as well: there are no friendly areas in the game, no "civilized" locations at all; it's either hostile wilderness or equally hostile enemy base. Even the latter is underpopulated compared to the Sarien dreadnought of the first title. Though the Labion-exploring part is reasonably large, it occupies more than half of the game; the somewhat underwhelming asteroid section follows right away, concluding the game. Space Quest II is actually smaller and shorter than the first episode, which is not a good thing to say about sequels.

You also die a bit too much here, and much of the gameplay is based on dying. When you perish, you usually receive messages such as: "You are beaten again to a bloody pulp. Will you never learn? Come on, other people are looking at you and seeing what a bad player you are". I know it was supposed to be funny, and it really was the first couple of times, but since you die so many times in this game and receive similar messages every time you do that, it can get on your nerves.

The Bottom Line
Space Quest II is certainly not as charming and humorous as the other games in the series; combined with short length, this makes it the generally least beloved installment of the floor-mopping, planet-hopping tale. That said, its suspense, atmosphere, interesting puzzles, and a genuine feeling of adventuring do a good job compensating for its flaws.

DOS · by Unicorn Lynx (181780) · 2014

[ View all 8 player reviews ]

Trivia

Astrochicken

The back of the (original release) box said that Vohaul is "...madder than a drenched Astrochicken". An intriguing phrase to use, as Astro Chicken hadn’t yet been seen in either of the games - it would make it's debut appearance in Space Quest III.

Buckazoids

Space Quest II is the only Space Quest where you do not use Buckazoids (the Space Quest intergalactic currency).

Character name change

For some unexplained reason, Sludge Vohaul's name has mysteriously changed from Slash Vohaul in the first game. (It's not really known why - maybe Sierra thought "Slash" could be taken to sound a little rude for a family game?) Either way, it would remain as Sludge Vohaul for the rest of the series.

Extras

The box included a comic book named "Space Piston" to acquaint newcomers to Roger Wilco, the ex-janitor which became a hero in Space Quest. In the comic book, Roger Wilco is shown as having blond hair, however in the game he has brown hair. Budget re-releases of the game had a copy of the in-box comic in black and white instead of the colour original (well, it was a *budget* re-release!).

Graphics

While it is mentioned on the box that VGA and MCGA are "supported" (they were introduced the same year as this game), they are not "used". The game still used AGI's 16 color low-res mode.

Hidden message

When you select About SQ2 from the Sierra menu after you die, you'll get a message that says We hope you're not looking for someone to blame just because you died rather than the usual message.

References

  • The game contains allusions to the Larry series. When Roger is caught outside the swamp and thrown into a cage during his unconsciousness he dreams about being a character named Larry and having some incidents with women.
  • Sludge Vohual is of course a spoof of Darth Vader from Star Wars, and the monkey guards are a spoof of Planet of the Apes.
  • When you're inside Vohaul's asteroid, go to the bathroom on the 4th floor and enter the booth that isn't occupied. Close the door and type:

READ WRITINGS

Among the responses (just repeat the command a couple of times to read them all) the game gives you there's this one referring to the hero from King's Quest:

"Sir Graham Cross Dresses!"

Another one is:

"Ken was here! (So was Al, but we had to repaint afterward.)"

Ken & Al are of course Sierra developers Ken Williams & Al Lowe. * In the decontamination area (this is where you change your clothes at the start of the game) open your locker. In your locker there are two objects you can take but there's also this joke. Type:

GET CONDOM

The game will respond with:

Sorry. The used Nancy Reagan autographed "Just Say No" condom had to be removed for the shipping version.

Information also contributed by Gothicgene, Jayson Firestorm, *Katakis*, Ricky Derocher, and Roedie

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Related Sites +

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    Figuring out how to convince the parser that you wanted to hold the glowing orium gem in your mouth was the hard part! Now enjoy the fruits of your labours as Roger kicks in with psychedelically-illuminated wanderings (and a relevant, toggleable MIDI soundtrack) through Labion's caves (including squid!) on your desktop to save your monitor from the anachronistic plague of burn-in. From Chris Geroux, as "ScumSoft".
  • Hints for SQ2
    These questions and answers will help you solve the game without spoiling it for you.
  • ScummVM
    supports the DOS, Macintosh, Amiga and Apple IIgs versions of Space Quest II: Chapter II - Vohaul's Revenge under Windown Linux, Macintosh and other platforms.
  • SpaceQuest.Net - Space Quest 2
    Extremely comprehensive site about Space Quest 2: Basic game information, hints, documentation, downloads and behind the scenes stuff, for example a downloadable PDF manual, scans of the official hint book, easter eggs, fun facts, cancelled stuff etc. etc. etc.

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  • MobyGames ID: 128
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Olivier Masse.

Amiga added by POMAH. Macintosh, Apple II added by Terok Nor. Apple IIgs added by Scaryfun. Atari ST added by Belboz.

Additional contributors: Roedie, Jeanne, Jayson Firestorm, tarmo888, Alaka, Pseudo_Intellectual, General Error, formercontrib, Macs Black, mailmanppa.

Game added May 22, 1999. Last modified January 20, 2024.