Hero's Quest
aka
Quest For Glory 1: So You Want To Be A Hero?
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1992 Sierra On-Line
Excellent point and click RPG from adventure game masters Sierra. The entire Quest for Glory series has gained cult status and is considered among the best adventure games of this type ever created. This series was originally titled "Hero's Quest," then was later renamed "Quest For Glory" due to copyright restrictions. Thus original copies with "Hero's Quest" printed on the box could be worth a little bit of moolah to Sierra collectors.
The story goes as you (the unnamed hero) are a graduate of the Famous Adventurer's Correspondence school, and you've come to the besieged country of Spielburg in search of adventure and glory. By the end you will destroy an evil witch, scatter a vicious brigand, and save the daughter of a local baron. Inbetween all this lies a lot of stats building, along with the occasional game of darts or afternoon of cleaning stables.
At the beginning you can choose from three character classes, Fighter, Thief, or Wizard. Your character graphics do not change depending on which class you choose, however each class has specific abilities not granted to others (most notable being the Wizard as the only class that can use magic.) The Fighter comes armed with a sword and is the best choice for beginners. The Wizard and Thief get a petty little dagger and for the most part have to run away from battles. Each character solves puzzles in different ways and each can access specific areas the others can't, mostly (more on that later.)
Control is somewhat primitive for a game like this. This was before the genre moved towards one handed mouse control for all actions. You still have to use the keyboard's arrow buttons to move. Plus the game also relies on text parsing for commands. This of course leads to problems; if the game doesn't recognize the particular word you choose for an object it will respond with a "I know nothing about that" response, then you think the object isn't something you can use in the game (for instance, you type "get bottle" and it doesn't work, but "get vase" does.) For the most part there aren't many problems when it comes to this, just try several different synonyms for various objects before giving up.
Combat in the game is handled in a behind the character view where you use the arrow buttons to dodge, strike, and deflect blows. Combat is pretty simple, and most fights with low level monsters can be won just by thrusting repeatedly over and over. Some of the larger monsters (such as the trolls and dragons) will make mincemeat out of an underdeveloped character and are pretty much undefeatable without the Fighter. These fight scenes are pretty simple and don't require very much arcade skill (i.e. Your grandmother could probably do it.)
The game also features a day/night cycle. The only difference seems to be that more monsters come out at night, although there are a few areas where things happen depending on the time of day.
Inbetween the usual adventure game quests and puzzles you spend a lot of time building stats. However fighting and killing monsters isn't the only way to do this; Practically every action you do contributes to your stats in some way. Playing a game of darts will increase throwing skill, cleaning a stable increases your strength, practicing throwing daggers will increase that skill, etc. Part of what makes games like these so appealing is to see how much stuff you can do with your character, and all of it contributes to the game in some way.
However all is not well in Spielburg. First off the game moves incredibly slowly. You tend to wander around the various screens, looking for what to do next. As this is a Sierra game you can and will die often. Sometimes these deaths are a little unfair though. You get killed a lot by trying different things (such as trying to cast a Calm spell in the middle of a battle, whereupon the monster "just calmly eats you.") Another cheap death is when you try to go to sleep outside of the town, whereupon something called a "Night Gaunt" comes long in the middle of the night and eats you (No one knows what a Night Gaunt looks like because they only eat people sleeping outside.) Thing is the town doors close after a certain hour so if you're stuck outside too bad for you. Cheap.
There's a part I distinctly remember where there's this house that's up on chicken legs and it comes down when you say these magic words. First time I did it my character was standing too close and the house came down and squashed me. I mean come on man, there could have been a "You're too close" message, some programmer left that out on purpose just to be a dick.
Some of the monsters are just too damn hard. The trolls, ogres, and dragons will kill you, repeatedly, forever. The only way I was able to beat the troll was to engage, stab him a few times, then run away before he could attack, then repeat until the stupid thing was dead. In another area there's this knobold that teleports around this cave and pelts you with fireballs, the only way to kill the stupid thing without the wizard is to buy many, many, many throwing daggers and attempt to nail it inbetween teleports, which is for all intents and purposes fucking impossible. I was able to kill it with the wizard by casting multiple fireballs. But still all three characters should at least be able to kill all of the stupid monsters in some way.
Speaking of the three character thing there isn't much difference between them. There is one task that the wizard gets to do that the other's can't (which is play this board game with the wizard Erasmus.) All of the other areas are accessible to all three characters. For instance there's a dark alley with a glowing thing, and if you try to pick it up a couple of robbers appear and mug you. The idea was for the thief to show a special "thief sign' and thus be introduced to the thieves' guild and for other characters to just get robbed. However all three characters can show the thief sign and proceed along this story path, including breaking into houses and stealing stuff to get money, i.e. stuff only the thief is supposed to do. A simple oversight that does a lot to destroy the premise of the game.
Screenshot from the VGA remake
Despite the cheap monsters and unfair deaths the game does a great job of creating a "world" and never takes itself too seriously.
Graphics: Good at the time but extremely dated now. There was a remake with updated VGA graphics and that featured Claymation characters during the fight scenes.
Sound: Your PC speaker never sounded better. Later additions actually had real sound effects.
Gameplay: Lots of wandering around killing things but the payoff in the "aha!" moments is totally worth it.
