Top 20 Adventure Games of All-Time!!1!

#4: King’s Quest VIII: Mask of Eternity

Sierra – 1998

With each installment of Sierra’s venerable King’s Quest series, the company has striven to grow and improve on its previous efforts utilizing new technologies as they became available. Their efforts finally culminated in Mask of Eternity, clearly the best game in the series.

I write this review with a tinge of sadness as I realize that no more games will be officially released in the series. Yes, it finished on a high note to end all high notes, and I can only hope that the fans behind the forthcoming King’s Quest IX will take this superb game into account and continue the trends set forth in it.

For it was with King’s Quest VIII that Sierra streamlined the series down to its most basic elements, removing all the fluff about “storylines” and “characterizations” and “puzzles” that had so annoyingly marred the game in previous iterations. No, King’s Quest has been about one thing and one thing only…

Monsters.

Oh come on. You know it’s true. What do you remember about King’s Quest I? The dragon. The witch. The sorcerer. King’s Quest III? The…other dragon. King’s Quest V? The yeti. King’s Quest VI? The minotaur.

Butbutbutbutbut…there was always a problem. The indirectness of the implementation. The inability of the technology to give *direct* *meaningful* solutions to the problems presented by these vile creatures. Players were forced to fiddle with text parsers and later visual mouse-driven puzzles to do stupid things like redirect attacks, fool their enemies, or solve stupid puzzles to get rid of them.

With Mask of Eternity, Sierra utilized the wonders of 3D graphics to allow players to finally do what they *truly* wanted in a King’s Quest game. Slashing those hideous beasts to tiny, tiny little bloody rivets with the pain and the hacking and the…

Ahem, excuse me.

But you see what I mean, don’t you? The genius of it? The incredible design that whittled down King’s Quest to its *essence*?! Can’t you see it?! The wonderful flowing blood? And the hacking! And the climbing puzzles! And the jumping! Yes! Yes! More! More!

Uh, so yeah. That’s what it’s great. It’s the monsters. And the hacking. Duh.

Doom.

(D.R.)