King’s Quest
Many of the game’s puzzles will have alternate solutions, and certain choices you make will influence Graham’s legacy. “Not only do your choices affect the moment-to-moment, like you’d expect in any game that has choice, but they also help shape the legend of King Graham, whether he’s remembered as Graham the Brave or Graham the Wise or Graham the Soft of Heart,” Korba explains. “Of course it’s King’s Quest, and it’s Graham, so you can never be Graham the Violent or Graham the Horrible or Graham the Bad Guy. It’s all still Graham, the events all still happen, you just get to shape how they’ve happened.”
One example involves how you deal with the dragon. “We really wanted the player to be able to craft their own feelings about the dragon, whether you think the dragon is misunderstood, or you think he’s this violent creature, or you’re kind of scared of him, that’s completely up to you. At the end of this section after you’ve escaped with the mirror, you have a choice whether you want to set the dragon free, whether you want to distract the dragon, or whether you want to fight back against the dragon. Either way we’re telling the story of how Graham defeated the dragon, but whether he’s telling the story of how he bravely fought back against this violent creature, or he’s telling a story about how he made a friend in an unexpected place. And there’s no wrong choice.”
The Odd Gentlemen’s mandate may have been to reimagine King’s Quest, but this feels like a natural evolution of how Roberta Williams handled the dragon the first time around, when more noble or clever puzzle solutions yielded more points. “A lot of the stuff that we’re doing, [Sierra] touched on in King’s Quest,” Korba agrees. “They had multiple endings, they had choice. It’s easy to forget and then you go back and play KQI and you realize there’s multiple approaches to all the puzzles.”
After the tutorial set in the dragon’s lair, the episode will go back in time to Graham’s arrival in Daventry. In the original King’s Quest, he was already a knight and we learned how he became king. In the new game we’ll get his origin story. “You can tell Graham’s a little bit frumpy, he’s not quite the hero we even saw [in the tutorial],” Korba comments on young Graham’s scrawny appearance. “He arrives in Daventry because there’s a big tournament going on; the winner of this tournament becomes a knight.”
Daventry’s many bridges have gone missing (an oddity that will be explained later in the episode), so Graham’s running late. After finding an item to act as a wheel on a broken cart, he makes it to the tournament only to find himself stranded on the wrong side of a river with four other knight hopefuls. “We really wanted the puzzles to work with the story, so through these puzzles we want it to feel like the first day of school; you just showed up and people are bullying you a little bit,” Korba explains. Each of the knight hopefuls has a leg up on Graham in some way—one’s stronger than him, another is faster, etc.— but rather than being told all this through narration, you’ll uncover these traits through the puzzle-solving required to get Graham to the opposite riverbank. One of these puzzles requires shooting an arrow in first-person perspective (a skill it turns out young Graham isn’t much good at), but for the most part they seem fairly traditional, with any necessary action such as jumping, climbing, or swimming happening automatically.
“Graham wants really badly to become a knight,” Korba says of young Graham’s motivations. “His father was a knight, his grandfather was a knight. His great-grandfather was a dentist, but his great-great-grandfather was a knight.”
As you puzzle your way across the river and go on to compete in the tournament, Korba says Graham’s failures and eventual success will shed light on the type of hero he is. “Graham’s not the fast knight, he’s not the strong knight, he’s not going to use weapons. He’s going to use creative thinking. And he’s got quite the journey ahead of him. He’s going to have to defeat each of these knight hopefuls and he’s going to have to use his brain, because he’s not going to be able to wrestle with the giant or run faster than the speedy guy.”
How Graham became a knight is only the scope of the first chapter. “We deal with stuff like how he met [his future wife] Valanice and what happened after he met Valanice, and we go farther forward than the [original] games did as well,” Korba says in closing. And like any good King’s Quest game, a villain is lurking in the shadows: “I can’t talk too much about that but it starts to form in this chapter and it develops. It’s one of those things where if you go back and [replay], you’ll see all these clues leading up.” As far as episode length goes, the developers can’t speak to future episodes yet but do expect the first chapter to be “pretty hefty” since it has a lot of story to tell.
By the end of our hour-long demo, I’m convinced: Matt Korba is a huge King’s Quest fan. Of course, with only the first of five chapters in development so far, The Odd Gentlemen still have a ways to go before they’ll complete Graham’s reimagined adventures. But hey, we KQ fans have had a lot of practice in waiting, and judging from this early look it’s a game worth waiting a little longer for. All hail the once and future king!
Read on for a Q&A with The Odd Gentlemen’s resident King’s Quest junkie.
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