King's Quest III: To Heir is Human

The Good
First off, I love the way you start out as this little servant boy who is bossed around by a mean wizard... it keeps you on the edge of your seat as you run and take and hide items while you dodge the wizard's random visits. The best word that I can think of to describe this game is suspenseful.

You constantly have to be aware of how much time you have spend and how much you have left before the wizard comes back... it adds a very tricky factor to the game and prevents anyone from just rushing through it. I can recall feeling anxiety from being in the wizards basement trying to create a spell correctly and get out of there before the wizard catches me and kills me...

The game is also nice in the fact that it doesn't overwhelm you with a extremely non-linear game path. The game is basically divided in to 3 or 4 main areas and you can't proceed to the next without completing the current one. Mainly until you kill the Wizard, you are stuck most of the time inside the house (except for a few times), then you move on to explore the wilderness below, then move on to the ship and island. Keeps you on track.

I basically enjoyed everything about this game

The Bad
Sometimes walking on the paths could be a bit tricky, especially using the joysticks of the time.

The font in the spell book that came with the manual of the game was sometimes hard to read because it was done in a cursive font. This isn't a problem now but when I first played this game when I was in the 4th grade, it was kind of difficult to understand.

The Bottom Line
Another great game from Roberta Williams, if you liked any other King's Quests, this one is sure not to let you down!

The Good
Step from KQ1/2 regarding technical execution is significant. You play as a boy who want to escape his master-tyrant, wizard Manannan, who keeps him as his personal slave. The world is much bigger, there's clock running in the game and Manannan follows his schedule (and you must time your actions to fit into this schedule), writing is better than KQ1/2, story is more mature compared to predecessors, and there's even some magic doing.

The Bad
So why just 3*, when the game is technically better at almost everything?

Answer is: difficulty. No, puzzles are not just "challenging". I beat Gabriel Knight trilogy, I beat Indy Jones 4, Monkey Island or Day of the Tentacle. So no, I'm not particularly pampered regarding adventure games. But KQ3 is VEEERY difficult, unforgiving, and it takes probably weeks, maybe months to beat it without walkthrough.

What's worse, there are lot of dull points. You have to walk lot of times long walks up and down the hill, and you have to do it, because of this time scheduling already mentioned. One walk is like 5 minutes or so of dull walking, and you'll have to repeat it several times. And if you DARE to beat the game without walkthrough, it's guaranteed that you will have to restart game (or return to very early save points) maybe dozen of times, so in the end this dull walking can stretch to hours of net time.

I can't imagine someone spending that amount of time and energy today on 1986 adventure game. Most of positive reviews here are nostalgia-driven. In those times when good games were scarce, you didn't mind playing one title for weeks or months, talk with your friends about progress in school or work, exchange ideas, and then move a bit forward if you learned something new. Such nostalgia is understandable. But if you look at the game from the point of view of 2023 gamer, who wants to play KQ3 for the first time, you're just not going to enjoy it so much because it's frustrating. I beat and enjoyed KQ1 and KQ2 in "modern times" for the first time, because difficulty was ok, and I not spoiled those games for me by always looking into walkthrough. But KQ3, I just gave up, I finished the game with walkthrough help, just to have it finished. Even when playing with walkthrough I was still amazed by difficulty of those puzzles and I knew that this is just way too much. So in the end, my memories for KQ1/2 remained way more positive than for KQ3.

The Bottom Line
You can play KQ1/2 and enjoy them and beat them even today with none or just few looks into walkthrough. This can't be said for KQ3. The game is technically excellent, but exorbitant difficulty just doesn't allow me to give it higher score.

The Good
The game has some technical improvements from the first two in the series. The music is much better. The graphics are still very pixelated but are well drawn & pleasant. The plot is interesting: Gwydion is a slave to an evil wizard & must escape by collecting items & casting spells. After that you must save the kingdom from a dragon. A three headed dragon no less.

The Bad
Too many bad game design decisions haunt this one. First there is a time limit until the wizard kills you. The wizard will leave you alone for a few times so you can wander around doing things to escape. Second the game likes to instant kill you with gotchas. Step off the path by a pixel? Instant kill. Climb one pixel to the left or right wrong? Instant kill. Cast a spell but screw up one letter of said spell? You better believe that's an instant kill. Combine instant kills everywhere with the time limit & you have summoned up one frustrating game experience. But wait there's more! The spells themselves are basically copy protection so you have to type out the steps for preparing the spell & the actual spell lines without error or you fail. So it's like data entry, just copy a text into the game box. You have to do this 7 times for 7 spells. It gets tedious. Finally there are some parts where you just have to wait in real time for an event to happen. This can be boring if you have done everything you can in an area & are just waiting. These flaws put this game below King's Quest 1 & 2 even though it has better plot, graphics & music.

The Bottom Line
If you enjoy data entry, copy protection & instant death then this is the game for you!