The Legend of Kyrandia: Book One Review

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            The Legend of Kyrandia: Book One

Review by ScoutJune 2004

Imagine, if you will, it’s the early nineties. You and your partner own a growing game development company based in Las Vegas called Westwood Associates. Your name is Brett Sperry or Louis Castle, and you have this new adventure game called The Legend of Kyrandia.  The two of you are trying to convince one of the big dogs of gaming development, Ken Williams of Sierra Online, to publish it for Westwood. Never mind the concept. It’s your basic thinly plotted fantasy wrapped around a modest bit of puzzling, some colorful graphics and some nice music. That’s not the point. The point is you’ve created a new interface especially for this game, an interface you’re sure is going to get you noticed. No more typing text messages like in that game you just finished for Infocom, Circuit’s Edge. Parsers are dead. This new interface is better. You use a mouse, see. That’s right. A mouse, and you run your cursor directly over a character or item and click to interact with it. You’ve never seen this before, and most people who try it rave about it once they get past the offputting novelty of using a mouse-driven interface in a computer game.

You deliver your pitch, your excitement rising, and then you give the demo to Williams. He plays it. You wait for his reaction, certain he’ll be impressed. Instead, he asks if you would like to see something.  Sure, you say. After all, this is Ken Williams here. He takes you into a room, sits you down in front of his company’s newest project and shows you how it works. It’s this thinly plotted fantasy wrapped around some pretty decent puzzling, some very gorgeous, hand-painted graphics and nice music, but it’s got this new interface. No more typing words. All you do is use a mouse to run a cursor around the screen … As you pick yourself up off the floor, you hear yourself ask the name of the game.

“King’s Quest V,” says Williams.

Then he drops the bomb. He asks if you would consider selling Westwood.

What do you do?

You sell, right? You realize that what you thought was your ticket to ride has already been bought and punched and the train has left the station. What else to do but take the money and run, maybe open that bar in Mexico you’ve always dreamed about.

Right?

Wrong.

If you are Brett Sperry or Louis Castle, you go back to Las Vegas and you and the 30 people at your company finish the game and publish it through Virgin. You follow up with two more installments. You go on to make the bestselling Command and Conquer RTS franchise, the Dune series, Blade Runner, the Lands of Lore series and Nox 1 and 2. Along the way you merge with Virgin, later get sold to Electronic Arts for $122.5 million and only in 2002 do the last vestiges of your company finally dissolve into the ever-transmorgifying corporate landscape.

So Kyrandia, had it been finished twelve or even six months earlier, might have secured a place in adventure game history. Instead, it has more or less been eclipsed by, among others, the King’s Quest series. This is no surprise because, in many ways, the above anecdote is the most interesting thing about this game. Still, for the patient gamer willing to tolerate some glaring flaws, this game has some modest rewards.

I recommend that you read the manual before you begin to play, specifically the segment starting on the second page titled “The History of Kyrandia.” I advise this because you’re not going to find much lucid backstory in the actual game. The abrupt manner in which the various characters are introduced and the often enigmatic comments of the main character suggest the developers expect you to do your homework. If you can’t be bothered with all those words, here’s a quick synopsis.

King William the First, king of Kyrandia, calls a meeting with the forces of Nature and they cut a deal. Mutual care and protection all around. As a token of its appreciation, Nature creates a Volkswagen-sized gem right where King William stood, and this gem is called … wait for it … the Kyragem. It’s Nature’s gift to Kyrandia and the royal family’s eternal responsibility. It acts to focus and concentrate magic power and in doing so makes Kyrandia the Magic Capital of the Universe.

The king, being a practical guy, builds a castle around the stone and names it Castle Kyrandia. Things are good and then not so good.  War then peace, the invention of trousers, and then one fateful day, for reasons unexplained, Malcolm the court jester kills the king and queen. Kallak, the chief of the royal mystics who care for the Kyragem, casts a spell to lock Malcolm in the castle and then takes the king and queen’s only child, Brandon, away into the forest. As the game begins, Malcolm has just broken Kallak’s spell and escaped the castle and is merrily wreaking vengeance up on the land and its inhabitants, especially targeting the loathed royal mystics. Brandon is a young man now and Kyrandia’s only hope. Will he defeat Malcolm? Can he restore harmony to the kingdom of Kyrandia?  Will he discover the secret of his birthright? At the end of the game, will we even care?

As you may have deduced by now, The Legend of Kyrandia: Book One has a rudimentary point-and-click control system. The upper three-fourths of the screen contain the viewing area. Here, you navigate by running your cursor to one edge of the screen. If you can advance, you get a clickable arrow. If not, you see the universal “no” icon of a slash through a circle. The bottom fourth of the screen is reserved for housekeeping chores. There is a very limited inventory of only 10 spaces, an options button to take you to the save and load functions, a long, thin, horizontal text message box (holy vestigial holdover, Batman!) and a lozenge-shaped amulet with four darkened, dead gems. These gems light up one by one as you progress through the game and achieve your goals. Each gem represents a power that, once obtained, is available to you for the remainder of the game.

Gems, by the way, are a running theme in this game. As well as the mystical Kyragem and the four gems in the above-mentioned amulet, there are myriad other gems scattered around Kyrandia, blue gems, red gems, gems growing on trees, yellow gems, hidden gems, gems in plain sight … so many gems, in fact, that after a while playing Kyrandia begins to feel a bit like a medieval Easter egg hunt for the Faberge set.

You aren’t far into the game before you begin to see the exposed roots of text adventures peeking through. At times Kyrandia felt like little more than a glorified text adventure with the “rooms” transposed directly to the screen. In fact, in a 2002 interview on Adventure Gamers, Rick Gush, the game’s designer, claims Kyrandia was loosely based on a multi-user text adventure game of the same name hosted by the Galacticomm Bulletin Board in the late eighties. According to Gush, the game’s creators, Brett Sperry and Michael Legg, had been playing the original text adventure and subsequently purchased the rights to use for Westwood’s first graphical adventure. While I haven’t seen the original game, a quick scan of a walkthrough references, among other things, the Kyragem.  Indeed, the paradigms of text adventuring have such a strong hold over this game that a few hours into it I had reverted to mapping the different areas using the time-tested standard of labeled squares connected by lines.

The text adventure “feel” wasn’t the only reason I turned to mapping. It’s not because the game world is overly large or complex (other than the infamous fire berry maze, which I’ll get to soon enough) but simply that everything looks the same. There is a reason for this: several of the screens were reused multiple times in multiple areas. Occasionally the artists went to the trouble of modifying the screen somewhat, closing up a cave entrance, removing or adding a foreground branch, or reversing the image, but just as often they didn’t. A few times the same screen is used next to itself, making it appear as if the player character “pops” from one side to the other, when in fact he has moved over a screen. This becomes especially annoying in the forest regions, where you really need some decent visual cues. Because of this ill-considered production shortcut, the different areas in Kyrandia have a bland, homogenous look. As much of the puzzling entails trudging back and forth to these areas in search of inventory items, mapping as you go helps lower the frustration level a few notches.

This incessant recycling carries over to the music, which often plays in tight, repeating loops, loops that sometimes don’t change for several screens. The tone seemed off as well, sounding awfully light and happy for what is essentially a dark, cautionary tale.  In researching this review, I came upon a website that contained .mp3 files of the original MT-32 midi tunes, and I finally got to hear what I was missing. Quite a bit, it turned out. The composer, Frank Klepacki, created a lushly evocative, multilayered score for this game, but because the files require the true LA Synth playback that only an LAPC-1 sound card or an MT-32 midi module can reproduce, few modern-day gamers will ever get to hear it as they play the game.

Though I played the CD-ROM version with voice acting, the original release was diskette only with no voices. As with King’s Quest V, the developers were quick to exploit the huge data capacity of the newly emerging CD-ROM technology to add spoken voices. The results were a mixed bag but on the whole very serviceable. While a few voices were sort of leaden, most of the actors did a decent enough job of it, especially Gloria Hoffman as Brandywine the dragon and Gimalyn Torrecilla as Zanthia, one of the royal mystics. Gary Hyatt, the actor playing Malcolm, was by far the standout. Sadly, as is often the case, the main character’s voice left a lot to be desired. It was thin. It was whiny. It was a spoiled little boy’s voice. And to be fair, it was probably written that way. Checking my notes, I find scrawled, in capital letters this note to myself: “Brandon. Most annoying player character ever? No. But close.”  Upon reflection, I think that’s a bit of an overstatement, but the general sentiment holds.

My main complaint, though, and what finally brought this game down, was the puzzles. They were simply poorly designed, often coming off as little more than exercises in trial and error. More than once I was reduced to guessing at the solutions, trying this, then that, until finally randomly stumbling across the answer. Thinking I had missed some vital clue or overlooked a crucial inventory item, I would retrace my steps, revisiting each location. I think I spent as much time searching for nonexistent clues than actually working on the puzzles. I even made a point of watching for hints during the second play through, to no avail. To me, one of the pleasures of a well-made adventure game is discovering the clues scattered about the game world. This gives me reason to pay attention, to note the significant detail, to become immersed in the game. Good puzzle design should reinforce the story instead detract from it.  Good puzzle design should exercise lateral thinking, rewarding both leaps of intuition and logical deduction. There’s not a lot of this in Kyrandia.

And then, finally, there is the maze.

Where to start? First, a confession. I’m one of those people who actually enjoys mazes. Yes, it’s true. Maybe it’s because I have an inborn sense of direction or maybe because something went wrong at birth, but when first encountering a maze I’m as likely to rub my hands in anticipation as wring them in despair. I enjoy mapping strange, convoluted worlds and trying to make sense of them. It’s exploration in one of its purest forms. I loved the sewers in Traitors Gate, reveled in taming the beast that was the maze in The Black Dahlia. I even occasionally found myself humming as I explored the vast, convoluted nightmare better known as a Daggerfall dungeon. So what did I think of the maze in Kyrandia?

It was like Zork with pictures.

You remember Zork. You made your way though a vast underground labyrinth full of snarling grues who feared only one thing. Light.  As long as you had lanterns and flashlights, the grues stayed away.  When the light went out, the devouring began. In Kyrandia’s maze, you have the same basic model. You require light to navigate the maze. The only source of light (at the beginning) exists in the maze. This source is fragile and wears out easily. You must find more light or suffer the consequences. This light is readily available to you but usually at the price of repeated dying. In a way, this maze is simultaneously the most elegantly designed puzzle in the game and the most unfair.

It’s obvious that some amount of thought and care went into its design. In fact, a very, very lucky gamer might conceivably stumble through the whole thing and survive. It can be done; in fact, logic dictates that it has to be possible for the maze to actually work.  Still, it felt unfair in that it’s nigh on impossible to map the maze without dying repeatedly. As the chances are excellent you are going to have to traverse the entire maze at least one more time (I can just hear the groans), you pretty much have to map it, and to make the needed map, you must die.

Also, there is at least one place, near the three-quarters mark, where you can easily find yourself at a dead end. Luckily, it doesn’t take long to figure out that something is wrong and reload. Still, I hate dead ends in graphical adventure games. For some reason I can abide them in text games, where they seem more organic somehow.

The game ran like a dream in DOS with not a bump, shudder or crash.  I installed it to my hard drive, booted to DOS and played from there.  There is also an option to install a semi-Windows version via a wininst.exe command that then lets you click on a KYRACD.BAT file from Windows Explorer. I didn’t try it, but at least it is an option.

There is some confusion about the name of this game. It appears that this game, indeed all three Kyrandia games, have two separate titles … sort of. Originally the first game was released as Fables and Fiends: The Legend of Kyrandia: Book One. Later, the three games were packaged as a boxed set titled The Legend of Kyrandia: The Series. In this set the first game was entitled Book One: Fables and Fiends, the second Book Two: The Hand of Fate and the third Book Three: Malcolm’s Revenge.  Open the box, though, and the jewel case inserts all show the original titles, each with The Legend of Kyrandia intact.

Alas, in the end, The Legend of Kyrandia, whatever its official title, didn’t do much for me. All of the parts were there, the story, the puzzles, the exploration, but they never really gelled into any kind of satisfying experience, any sort of real payoff. It’s always a balancing act to weigh an older game’s worth to the modern gamer while still trying to imagine its impact back in the day.  While there are games that are still as entertaining today as they were 15 years ago, Kyrandia isn’t one of them. It’s more “important” than it is “fun,” offering up some tidbits of historic interest but not really delivering any sustained entertainment value. And in a game where the whole point is to find the magic again, that’s just a little sad. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Westwood Publisher: Virgin Release Date: 1992

Available for: DOS

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System Requirements

286 DOS 4.0 or higher 2 MB RAM VGA graphics Sound card Mouse

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14 Responses to Fear Factor

  • Fear Factor | Tap-Repeatedly.com | Reality Topics Blog

    […] nobody@flickr.com (graftedno1) wrote a very interesting post today.   Here’s a quick excerpt:My greatest fear is to be trapped alone in a confined space with a blind human, in total darkness. They have a heightened sense of smell and hearing, and. […]

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Lewis, you made me think of the scariest moments I’ve experienced in gaming, and we’re very similar people.

    Bioshock had two moments – the dentist and the flooded room filled with mannequins.

    Thief had Return to the Cathedral, which was terrifying to me. Thief 3 had Shalebridge Cradle, which is so scary it ought to be fined.

    System Shock 2 kept me on the edge of my seat, but it was more lonely panic than true fear.

    Korsakovia was so scary that I uninstalled it.

    And STALKER. Oh, god, the haunted labs in STALKER. The latter two games don’t have scares like that. Few games do.

    It’s especially rare for a game to have more than mere “moments” – for a game to be scary from beginning to end, that’s a triumph.

    Wonderful article. As if Gregg’s review wasn’t enough to convince me that Penumbra is not something I have the courage to play!

  • DPenn

    I’m with you Lewis … I’m a bit of a puss. I just have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea of dread as entertainment.

    Still, I’m drawn to dark stories when they have something interesting to say, whether it’s a game like Thief or a film like, say, Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible. So I’ll push through, sometimes peering through my fingers.

    The trouble with games, though, is that if you look through your fingers, you’re probably just going to have to play through the scenario again. :~)

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    I wanted to play this game. I downloaded the demo but the controls were just too wonky for me to get my head around. I liked the atmospheric vibe a lot. I think I’m a bit desensitized from an overdose of horror movies in my youth so I don’t so much get the dread thing from these games as a nice creepy vibration. If only the controls were better…

  • Lewis B

    @ Mike, what’s wrong with the controls bud? As someone who despises poor control schemes, Penumbra’s is just like any other FPS, except to examine things you right click on them.  To use things you left click.  I’m not sure that can be considered difficult 🙂

  • Gregg B

    @Steerpike: Yeah my greatest shit-scared moments were with those games too. A few spoilers below people, so beware.

    Bioshock – Haha, I remember the dentist. I didn’t really find the game that scary overall but the bit where you go into the wine cellar and notice a mannequin facing the wall and after upgrading your weapon it’s stood directly behind you motionless and quiet just for a moment before attacking you. I shat a brick. I also missed that bit originally until Lew told me about it.

    System Shock 2 – same as you really, more unremitting tension all the way through rather than specific terrifying moments. Oh actually, theres a bit where you call a lift and it breaks then you realise a service droid is coming to fix it… I do remember having sleep issues after my first encounter with the cyborg ninjas though.

    Thief: The Dark Project – The Sword and Return to the Cathedral and Down in the Bonehoard and well, loads of them. The Sword made me break out into goosebumps though because there was a bit where you could hear this creepy giggling which seemed like it was following me about then it suddenly changed to this horrible throaty noise. What made matters worse was that the EAX (bless you Creative) made my foot steps sound like somebody else was there with me. That level was incredible, a bit too incredible as it seems I missed great chunks of it because I was so eager to leave.

    Thief II: The Metal Age – Trail of Blood where you end up in that opening with those damn tree beasts. God the first time I saw one of those hurtling towards me I actually died shortly afterward. Do you remember that Mechanist child walking around on one of the levels? That was a little creepy.

    Then there’s Penumbra: Overture – quite a few bits but I’m not mentioning them here.

    Oh and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – The brain scorcher lab just because it was so damn quiet. My imagination seriously got the better of me there. Those stuffed animals and heads I’d seen in various buildings led me to believe that those creatures were lurking somewhere in the Zone, specifically that lab.

    @Mike: My control setup was perfect after some tweaking (as well as the simple weapon swing fix). If you ever fancy giving it another go, give me a shout and I’ll let you know my setup.

  • Lewis B

    I’m not sure why guys, but one of my starting paragraphs had gone missing, even though I copied it straight from the original source, and It was fine earlier. 

    Incase you missed it due to some technical issue you might want to re-read just after “Well no she wouldn’t in truth, but in Penumbra: Overture you don’t want to move anyway.” at the very start for those who’ve already read the article. Apologies 🙂

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Lewis, it was the weapon swing. It had this terrible, unresponsive feel to it, like trying to hit through molasses. I couldn’t stand using it. I tried the .ini fix as mentioned in the review but it didn’t seem to help. Of course this was the demo…but that shouldn’t have made any difference. I might try the second game instead as I guess they did away with the weapons thing.

    I’m see your first paragraph just fine. It’s the dialogue, right?

  • jdeuel

    I like the argument that weapons can remove fear, but even loaded to the teeth with ammo in AVP’99 the Marine missions were frightful because the enemy was anywhere at any time.

    As for Penumbra Overture, if the controls are anything like the original Penumbra they need to hack in some Wii-Remote 3d controls. I did not like using my mouse for 3d movements.

  • Gregg B

    @Mike: I’ve read that many people avoided conflict altogether in Overture which incidentally is something forced upon you in Black Plague. As somebody who has been renovating a house over the last 6 months with no DIY experience I can safely say that swinging a hammer is significantly easier in real life than it is in Overture without the fix. The fix balanced that for me.

    I’d highly recommend completing the first Penumbra because it’s one big build up to Black Plague which spoils the ending to Overture in the intro. And it’s a great ending too. Just so you know!

  • Lewis B

    @ Steerpike, those moments you mention are all my worst too!!  Do you remember the Robot labs in SS2? Absolutely terrifying, waiting for robots to burst out on you! 🙁 oh and have you ever player Condemned?

    @ Mike, The use of weapons in Penumbra is different to say HL2, where the player is physically holding the weapon, as in Penumbra it floats slightly infront of you.  However, if you change the control method to normal weapon swing, it’s no different!  Speak to Greggi and he’ll tell you what to do 🙂

    @ jdeuel, AVP the original and its sequal were scary however what type of fear do you think it is? I don’t think it’s anything more than sheer tension.  Having a Smart Gun makes you feel incredibly powerful.  I can honestly say in Penumbra the fear is sheer unrivalled terror, where you actually have to force yourself to play on.  It genuinly is that scary! 🙂

  • Jason Dobry

    It’s so true, an arsenal of weapons and ammo rapidly deflates any sense of horror or uneasiness in any game for reasons you already mentioned. Sakey, I thought Bioshock was more “lonely panic,” while I was pretty much always terrified in System Shock 2. I really, really, REALLY did not want to enter The Many’s nursery, and my weapons were so unreliable and ammo so scarce that I never felt safe.

    Silent Hill was terrifying for the same reasons. Ammo was rare and I frequently had to rely on my pipe for self-defense.  Even when I had ammo, the game mechanics prevented my character from being anything other than marginal with any firearm.

    Fear had one moment for me: I was climbing up a ladder, and as I reached the upper platform, my guy briefly looked down as he climbed off. As my perspective looked up again, that Ring-esque little girl was RIGHT THERE, reaching for me. I screamed and she was gone.

    What else…the original Aliens vs. Predator sent me into a locker room and I could only hear the facehuggers scurrying about somewhere within. I had to go in there. I advanced about three steps before the damn thing screamed and filled up my screen with its repulsive underside as it implanted me with its spawn. My roommate made fun of me for weeks for screaming like a girl child.

    Korsakovia–meh.  I was too annoyed and frustrated by the box rearrangement/jumping puzzles to be scared. I uninstalled it after an hour of play, I think. Maybe the scary parts were later, but I doubt it.

    As for Penumbra, I did play through about half of it before other games distracted me. I remember unease and creepiness, but no sweaty fear. I think I’m to blame here, or, more precisely, my daughter, who was still an infant at the time and generally allowed me only to play during the day for 45 minutes at a time. I was denied total immersion and the fear effect suffered. Maybe I should give it another go after I finish Call of Pripyat since she sleeps through the night now. With any luck, Penumbra will keep me from doing the same.

  • Gregg B

    I played the demo of F.E.A.R. but that ladder scare is the only bit I remember. Christ, that made me jump. I’m not too good with cat scares.

    Also I felt exactly the same about Korsakovia. It was creepy at first but then it began to irritate me far too much and it just soured the experience. I stopped playing as a result. Not to mention, when I realised I could bash those smoke-things with my crowbar they didn’t bother me nearly as much.

  • Online Up

    Great article. I look forward to reading more in the future.

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