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

Where to Find It

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16 Responses to Screw the Internet

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    God damn, Scout, I’d never heard of this Lanier fellow, but that’s pretty profound.

    Information is not a manufacturable item… as you said, we are making less and less. This is either indicative of a larger-scale societal transformation, or a bad thing. I’m afraid I’m inclined to assumed the latter.

    Thanks!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Steerpike, that was exactly the argument Lanier was having with callers on the BBC. Lanier was all fatalistic about society’s drop in real productivity while his opponents claimed that this was a huge transformation and that he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all. If you notice, the web address of that first Lanier link is well.com. I mean, that is old! The Well?

    Lanier’s thoughts were pretty much echoed by David Simon, one of the creators of The Wire. Here he speaks with Bill Moyers about the fate of paid journalism in the face of the web.

  • Spike

    I’ve read many criticisms of Facebook et. al.  I’ve also read contradictions of those criticisms, namely, that social sites are making people more connected than ever.  I think that that connectedness is an illusion.

    For several months at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 my daughter badgered me to join FB.  I could connect with her and some of her friends that I know as well as renew old acquaintances with some of her friend’s mothers.  I finally signed up so she’d quit the badgering. I used to check in every day to see what daughter and friends were saying because if I didn’t she’d ask if I saw her post, or a friend’s post. 

    What I’ve learned is this:

    1.  “Karen Likes John’s photo (or post)” IS NOT communication.

    2.  The reason I lost contact with some of these “friends” in the first place is that we no longer had anything in common.

    3.  I am bombarded with so many ads in so many places that I can do without more.  My policy is to never click on ads on FB or on many other sites. 

    4.  While FB’s original mission was connectedness/communication, I think it has become “Let’s make as much money from these fools as we can.”  “Wanna have gobs of fun playing a free game on FB?”  That game is gonna cost ya big, folks. 

    5.  Social sites are just more places where your personal info can be stolen.  There’s enough risk out there as it is.  Additional risk is not providing any valuable payoff for me.

    6.  Why do I want to “friend” a certain handbag manufacturer?  Why do I want to take a quiz that tells me what my personality is?  FB content providers tell you up front that if you click the link to take their quiz (goes for other types of content as well) you are giving them permission to access your profile info.  That’s ok.  I’ll also give you my SSN, bank account number and the key to my front door.  Not.

    7.  Don’t even get me started on the number of people who start an account in a pet’s name, and even have the pets making friends and posting.

    “…he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all.”

    No, it’s just that most of us get to the age when we demand a bit of wheat with our chaff.

    At 38 my daughter is older than the average demographic of social sites although I know that that demographic is skewing up.  She seems to be cooling on FB.  Some of her 221 friends are as well.  Many of them do want some wheat.  When more cooling has taken place I will unjoin.

    I wonder, though, what new fad will come along when FB, Twitter and others run their course?  MySpace, anyone?

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    My favorite line from the BBC interview was when Lanier was comparing MySpace and Facebook. He admitted that MySpace had some eye gougingly bad pages but said that he liked the “strangeness” of personalities that you get with it. With Facebook, he claimed that it was like looking at a tax form. A boring, watered down, bland presentation of people.

    I joined Facebook almost exactly a year ago. Apart from sparking up a new friendship with a very dear buddy, I’ve gotten about zero back from it. I sort of read with bemusement the activities of people I hardly know and could care less about. And when you consider how much information the devs harvest there…it’s scary. Lanier claims that the information is so far worthless to the investors and that the whole thing has become a sort useless ritual serving no purpose. He claimed that Google’s ads on the other hand will probably turn out to be the greatest advertising model ever created. He also thinks Google should stop before it’s too late but says they probably won’t. Just a glance at the side bar reveals about 4 ads for advertising agencies. Heh.

  • lokimotive

    Has anybody read Anti-Oedipus? I’m slogging my way through it (the third attempt I believe), and Deleuze and Gauttari’s ideas seem relevant to this in a way that I’m not sure I can articulate. This probably has something to do with a conversation I was eavesdropping on that, coincidentally, mentioned a lot of Deleuze and Gauttari’s theories. Someone was talking about another theorist (whose name I didn’t catch) who was defending “Generation Y” essentially. The argument went that Generation Y is an example of a “de-Oedipalized” cultural group (that’s Anti-Oedipus jargon, just stay with me). Apparently this meant that they made connections in a different manner than other generations, the idea of bricollage was brought up and things were generally mired in a lot of reasons why I don’t have my Masters in English. What I got from it was this Generation Y shoots out connections everywhere and attempts to make up a whole idea with them as opposed to relying on predefined pathways. In Deleuze and Guattari’s language: the schizo as opposed to Oedipus. In language that probably makes sense: Peer to Peer as opposed to client-server.

    So, of course, no one’s really right. I’m skeptical of the idea that Generation Y (full disclosure: I’m 29 so I’m part of that group) has enacted some sort of paradigm shift in how to operate in social systems, but facebook has changed how I connect with people. Then again, it’s not like I don’t value face to face communication.

    The future is somewhere in between. I’m really not cynical enough to believe that we are at the end times of civilized society because of Web 2.0. Instead society will change and stay the same because that’s what it does. Facebook is not the future; it’s probably a rung up the ladder though.

  • kaythomas

    To me, Facebook and Twitter are 0’s. They are not worth my time.  I do not care what someone I know or don’t know did a half hour ago or will do next.  I have met up with people on facebook I had lost contact with.  But, in truth, the reason I had lost contact was I was not that interested in staying in contact.

    I think for many people the Facebook/Twitter world is great.  For me it has nothing to offer. 
    kay

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Tap has an automated device that twits… tweets… whatever whenever someone posts a new article. Just in case it draws some visitors.

    To be honest, though, I’m on Kay’s side of the fence, I don’t understand Twitter and I don’t understand why it’s so popular. I barely care what I’m doing from moment to moment, why should anyone else?

    I don’t get Facebook either, though I’m a member to keep track of all the girls who wouldn’t give me the time of day in high school.

  • Lewis B

    Tweets are great for giving me snippets of news.  If I like what I’ve read in the short paragraph tweets give, then I will visit the main page for that tweet. (Very good for following world news, favourite columnists, etc.)

    However, reading tweets from people such as “Just woke up, Madonna is giving me a massage while I shave my nuts” is not my idea of a good read.

  • Toger

    I use tweets the same way Lewis does. Of the people/things I follow, if the tweet is interesting I’ll follow the link to read the entire article. I follow fairly intelligent people, so I’m not subjected to the idiocy of “Just brushed my teeth while sitting on toilet”.

  • Gregg B

    @loki: I’m afraid I’ve not heard of them. I’m a couple of years below you so that puts me in the same Generation Y as well. I read through a few of those links Scout posted as well as a few more on Lanier’s new book “You Are Not a Gadget” and it took me a fair while to get to the crux of what he is saying and he has a lot to say, most of which I find very confusing.

    As a graphic designer the whole “everything is becoming advertising” thing has been bothering me for years. The incessant barrage of advertising is like fingernails on the chalkboard of my soul, which sort of makes me a hypocrite. After all the years of tuning my art and design skillz my creative abilities have amounted to nothing more than crafting pretty ads that sell things. Non of it speaks any truth or has any sort of ‘beauty’; it’s just stone cold mechanical capitalism. Granted there are ads out there that are beautiful, clever and visionary but the front line stuff is as dull as it gets. I’m sure this isn’t strictly what he’s getting at but it’s definitely something that irks me in relation to Scout’s last remark.

    Anyway, I remember Twitter just exploding in what seemed like the space of a week and I still can’t fathom the allure of it aside from providing a direct stream of consciousness from famous folk to their ravenous fans. I wish I’d thought of it to be honest. I can see the creators sitting around a table staring at Facebook and then saying “I know! We make a website that’s just about status updates! You can even update them with your mobile phone!”.

    With regards to Twitter news snippets, unless it’s for a phone, I don’t see the point because RSS feeds do a great job. At present too great; I simply can’t keep up with my subscriptions. There’s too much information on this super highway.

  • Jen

    Twitter is officially the dumbest thing ever.

    That said, it looks like I will have to be the official “tweeter” for my day job before too long. I can’t wait! (roll eyes)

  • xtal

    I’m with everyone else here. I’m glad to say I’ve never signed up for Facebook; I fear that if I ever had I would have long ago died from loss of brain cells due to reading moronic status updates. It’s as Kay said: ninety-five per cent of people with whom you lose contact are probably no longer in your life because you have nothing left in common. And echoing Steerpike’s comment, me eating toast and jam on a Sunday morning watching Fawlty Towers is not interesting, not to me. Why the hell would anyone else give a shit?

    Twitter I signed up for about a year ago, not really understanding what it was. I now understand it…but don’t care to use it often. I have made 58 tweets over that year. I suspect for some that is a daily or weekly average. It’s just Facebook status updates without all the drunken photographs. I admit it can be mildly useful for following, say, a news site. Usually when I hop on my twitter (once every two weeks??) it reminds me that I should read The Onion more often. That’s about it.

    Let’s see… looking at the actual humans I follow, um… Wil Wheaton is happy that the LA Kings have won 9 games in a row, my sister-in-law thought our dinner tonight was “delicious,” and Kevin Smith’s batteries are recharged … or something.

    Wow, my life is already getting better!

    p.s.  <—– Gen Y'er (can we call ourselves that?) and proud that when I Google my own name a real estate company pops up.

  • Fraser

    Twitter is exactly as useless as the person who’s writing it. If someone is telling you boring shit over Twitter, it’s the person wasting your time, not the delivery channel.

    MySpace is the same, but it seems more intrinsically garbage because for some reason almost everyone who used it was an intellectual embryo with a fetish for unreadable hyperneon text on top of garish uninteresting photos. Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.

    That’s the argument against the whole of this post: the internet isn’t evil, but the people who use it might be. It’s people who make business models successful; people who make money flow to advertisers instead of artists, by buying into the advertising.

    This has been a pretty didactic post, so let me compensate by saying VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOOO!!!

  • Gregg B

    Good point about not blaming the delivery channel Fraser. I seem to recall Lanier saying that he preferred the personality that MySpace has over Facebook despite its Craptastic Pages of Illegibility. I’m trying to think of something intelligent to follow that up with but my brain is failing me at the moment, so…

    VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOO!!!

  • Jason Venter

    Fraser, I really loved your following comment:

    “Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.”

    I think that may just be one of the most hilariously true comments I’ve read in a comments area on any video game web site ever.  That sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I actually mean it.  Kudos to you!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Yeah but don’t you miss all the ugliness of MySpace? All those hideous pages at least had personality or what Lanier called the “strangeness of the person” to them.

    I actually don’t agree with a lot of what Lanier says esp “the hive mind must die” stuff. But I do think he is right about the spirit shriveling blandness of Facebook.

    I also suspect that Twitter is going to be around for a while. It will be more and more influential. People are simply not as willing to ingest huge amounts of information in the form of pages of text anymore. The delivery systems that succeed will be those that can communicate a lot of information in a short amount of time. Most days we want “glimpses” or “snapshots” not total immersion. Lewis, Toger and Fraser are correct in that you get out of it what you decide to follow.

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