The Legend of Kyrandia

Thoughts by Mr Creosote (09 Mar 2001) – PC (DOS)

The evil jester Malcolm has escaped from his prison. Now he’s draining all the magical energy of the realm. None of the court magicians can withstand his powers. As a sign of extreme evil, he has turned Kallak (one of the elders or something) into stone.

That’s where Brandon (the player) enters the scene. Being Kallak’s grandson (at least everyone thinks he is…), he’s of course a bit sad about his old man being so stone cold to him. When he has finally come to accept it, a talking tree (which hosts his house btw) approaches him and gives him the mission to stop Malcolm. The humans don’t seem to be that concerned. After all, it doesn’t matter for most ‘normal’ people whether a grumpy old king or a mad jester rules them! But Malcolm is committing some kind of genocide to the plants, so they chose their champion: Brandon.

Not even thinking about the possibility of a bad joke (his fellow college students played a lot of evil tricks on him already – will he ever learn?), Brandon starts searching his own one-room house and finds….tata….a blank piece of paper! This great discovery washes away his last piece of doubt of course.

As you might have noticed, I can’t really think of anything positive in this story. And it remains the same during the whole game! And don’t tell me Brandon’s true personality is a twist because it isn’t. Oops, did I just spoil anything? Too bad. You won’t miss anything not playing this game anyway. I’ll tell you why.

Westwood is known for simplifying genres. So they also tried that for Adventures. The controls are as simple as it gets: point&click using just one button. Going, taking, talking, using,…. everthing’s done with a simple click. Oh, great! How simple and genious! And how does this affect the puzzles? With such ‘flattened’ controls, they can only be the same: flat. Boring. Extremely easy. Just click everywhere, the game automatically chooses the correct command. What is the player here for anyway? Certainly not for much interaction with the game…

To prevent the player from ‘solving’ the game in some minutes, Westwood implemented some nasty ‘features’ to live with. First of all, the inventory is limited to ten objects. That means you have to drop stuff all the time only to find out that you need it half an hour later. When the cursor moves around the screen, there’s also no sign when it touches an object. So all you can do is click everywhere wildly until you hit something the programmers found important. Happy pixel hunting! The locations have the tendency to be maze-like.

And then there are a lot of dead ends and ways to die! For example if you click on a tree to get a ruby you need, you’re bitten by a snake and some seconds later you’re dead. Ok, there was a ‘Danger’ sign there, but does it have to be that fierce? The lack of an undo option makes you pray you saved not so long ago! But I could even forgive that flaw if there weren’t those dead ends you’re not told about! That’s right: some actions make the game unsolvable, but the player isn’t notified of that. So you play on and some hours later you’ll maybe ask yourself why you don’t make any progress anymore. An example of this from the very beginning: you have found this seemingly blank piece of paper and you need to find a way to make the writing visible again. Thinking it might be written with some magic ink which only shows up when it’s hot, I wanted to hold it near an open fire. Click on the paper, click on the fire. It burned! The interface which doesn’t let you specify what you want to do exactly also played a questionable role here. But the main point is that I had to start again because there was no way of getting the paper back!

As I pointed out, this engine is a piece of crap! But still it’s interesting from the historical point of view. The Kyrandia series did pretty well in the stores (why? Why? WHY?), and many others companies adopted the controls scheme (one allround click). So The Legend Of Kyrandia was a very influential game. But it was a bad influence…