Quest For Glory 1 Review

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Point-and-click adventure games were popular in the 1980s and early 90s. The king and I mean the absolute king of them was Sierra who developed and produced the series of Quest for Glory, King’s Quest, Space Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry. In 1989, Sierra released the first installment of Quest For Glory for the MS-DOS. A few years later in 1992 Sierra released an upgraded graphics version titled Quest For Glory: So You Want To Be A Hero. It is this version that I will be reviewing today and what a treat it is. Hut of brown, now sit down and read this Quest For Glory 1 Review.

Quest For Glory 1 Plot:

Quest For Glory is shrouded in German lore and fairy tales. You are an unnamed hero looking to prove yourself. After seeing a flyer advertising for help in the town of Spielburg, the “hero” decides to travel to the small town and see what the fuss is about.

After exploring the town you realize Spielburg is very much in trouble. Three terrible things have befallen in this sleepy town. Ten years prior, the Baron Von Spielburg had attempted to drive out Baba Yaga, an evil ogress who lurks in the forest causing all sorts of trouble. After an unsuccessful attempt, Baba Yaga curses the town and castle. Baron Von Spielburg’s eight-year-old daughter is abducted and disappears. The Baron searches for his daughter, day-after-day with his men for years but returns with fewer and fewer men each time as the surrounding area is full of monster and brigands. Years pass and the Baron’s son sets out for an early morning hunt with his guards. He is separated from the group and never returns, his horse comes back with bear claw marks all over it and everyone assumes the worse. The Baron falls into depression, and Spielburg suffers from it. The town is in need of a real hero!

You enter the town searching for clues on solving a few different quests. Spielburg is full of wonderful characters who have unique personalities. It’s not just humans that call Spielburg home, there are centaurs, mages, goons, and cat-like humanoids called Katta. Everyone plays a role in the story and everyone has a story to tell. It’s a wonderfully crafted town, one I wish I could visit in real life.

Slowly but surely, you start to put together the pieces of what has transpired in this town. The first of the three major quests you need to solve is finding the Baron’s son. Stumbling upon a cave with a bear chained up, you wander deeper in to find a Kobold, which is a strange evil creature that practices magic. Defeat him, and you’ll be able to free the bear who transforms into the Baron’s son.

With his son home, the Baron starts to regain hope that the Hero may still be able to find his daughter and rid the land of Baba Yaga. After a few other quests, you’ll find yourself inside the Brigand fortress. Making your way through their traps the Hero discovers the Brigand leader is none other than Elsa Von Spielburg, the Baron’s daughter! She had been put under a spell from Baba Yaga but with a special potion that the Hero creates before entering the fortress, you break her free of the curse.

Leaving the lair of the brigands, you take a magic mirror. With it, you visit Baba Yaga who is looking to turn you into a frog. Reflecting the spell with the mirror turns her into a frog and sends her brown hut on chicken legs flying away from Spielburg leaving everyone in peace. Our Hero is crowned at the castle and hailed as the Hero of Spielburg!

Quest For Glory 1 Gameplay:

If you aren’t aware of what a point-and-click adventure you are probably a young gamer! This genre of game was made popular on computers with the use of a mouse. There are several cursors at your disposal in Quest For Glory and I used every one of them during the Quest For Glory 1 review. Using the eye cursor and clicking around your environment will give you descriptions of items, characters, the environment and even make you aware of booby-traps. A mouth cursor lets you speak with characters, bringing up dialogue boxes with subjects to ask about. A hand cursor will pick up items or open doors and the character cursor will let walk the Hero in the direction that you click it.

Everything is extremely well written from all the puns, jokes and detailed descriptions of every nook and cranny in the game. Roberta and Ken Williams helped shape the game but Corey and Lori Ann Cole directed the masterpiece. The attention to detail is second-to-none, every screen is filled with colorful items, blades of grass, beautiful melodies and of course secrets galore! I could write Quest For Glory 1 reviews for days with how much I love this game.

Exploring the land of Spielburg is a treat, but when doing so you better be prepared. You’ll face brigands, goblins, and plenty of monsters in battle. When in battle, a separate screen will come up where you can click on a few options to drain the health bar of the opponenet. For example, if you have a sword you can click stab or swing, but your enemy is always moving, ducking behind a shield or swaying back and forth waiting to strike you. You must know when to strike to do damage, and you must not swing wildly or else your stamina will drain. If you tire yourself out, you’ll die from exhaustion. Dying is part of the fun in Quest For Glory. Each death comes with a funny recap of where you went wrong and there are hundreds of ways to die, each one with a scolding or joke. Just make sure you save your game often!

Quest For Glory offers three different hero choices. You can choose to be a “fighter” swinging a sword and ducking behind a shield you fight every monster in your path, fearless as they try and kill you. Perhaps you’d like to be a “thief”, lurking in dark corners, breaking into homes and stealing valuables as you strike your opponents with your dagger. Not into fighting or stealing? You have the option of playing as the “magic-user”, a spellcaster who can shoot flaming darts, float objects to you, and unlock secret compartments.

Each hero has a few different sub-quests that you can play through, making multiple playthroughs a must. You’ll experience different secrets, dialoges, and puzzles to solve.

Memories:
Have I gushed enough about this game? Probably not, it’s one of my favorite all-time games. It’s one of the first games I ever remember playing, and I put hundreds of hours into it as a kid. The puzzles were a bit too advanced for me but it was so fun to watch my hero walk around on the screen and talk to others, battle monsters, and even die. Whenever my Grandpa would come to visit, I’d boot up the computer and show him what I was doing in the game. It’s one of the four core games from my childhood, and I truly love it. After not playing it for almost ten years, I rediscovered it in college and finally beat the game!

Quest For Glory 1 Review Score:

If you want the most complete experience of a point-and-click adventure game that’s the perfect introduction into the genre you must play the first Quest For Glory, but make sure it’s the VGA remake! This is a true masterpiece especially for the time that it came out. If you love adventure, clever puzzles, putting together clues, and battling various monsters than perhaps you too want to take the Quest For Glory. I did, and I couldn’t have enjoyed it anymore. Now that I own the game again, I play it every year. I can beat the game in less than two hours now but it’s still very fun.

An essential game for your computer collection. Does my nostalgia for the game skewer the score a bit? Yes, I’m sure it does and frankly, I don’t care.

Quest For Glory 1: So You Want To Be A Hero scores a perfect 10 out of 10.

If you want to own Quest For Glory, and in fact the whole series which is games 1-5, you can purchase it for $10 on Gog.

What would you write in your Quest For Glory 1 review? Who did you play as? The fighter? The thief? The magician? What was your first Sierra game? Do you still play point-and-click adventure games and if so what one do you recommend for me?