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King's Quest III: Part 3
KING'S QUEST 3: PART 3
When we left our hero last time, he was a pile of dust on the floor of the kitchen, leaving not much room for further exploration. So I've rewound time a bit - let's do this the right way this time.
Wand, cupboard, at the same angle as we found it. (Not really on that last part, mercifully.) I'm surprised but glad that the Sorcery of Old does not describe a "Who's had their hands on this wand since I last touched it" spell.
Okay, the study is all tidied up - in case I didn't make it clear last time, the trapdoor has to be down AND the book has to be moved back to cover the lever, leaving no evidence of you having discovered the lab at all. (Keeping the ingredients is fine. Perhaps Manananan has too many bottles to count, or just doesn't like saffron all that much.)
And with that done, we stuff the rest of our inventory under the bed - and wait for Nmamamam's return.
Here he is!
Without much ceremony, he demands a meal and poofs himself down to the kitchen, starting the next step in the wizard routine cycle. There are four things that are considered meals in the game, and you have to serve him one of them each time he gets to this point (on the half-hour-ish mark). A side effect of this is that if you get to four and a half hours on the game timer without the means to defeat him, it will be impossible to satisfy his appetite and he'll unavoidably kill you. So let's not spend four and a half hours on this game.
For now, we can just hand over one of our food items.
Oh, cripes, no we can't. I never thought of that - when I put my inventory under the bed, the food went there as well. Stay right there, let me go and blow the cobwebs off it.
There it is! Having no idea how much time I was being given to make a meal but assuming it was about three minutes like the chores, treacling my way up and down the awkward stairs was really very tense.
"Serve food" and "give fruit" didn't work, so eventually I hit on this, which is the correct sentence. After doing that, you're frozen in place for a while as Mnannanan munches, then he eventually leaves.
After this you have to stay around the house for a while and not do anything suspicious, as the wizard will appear to check on you regularly, saying nothing before teleporting out again. Once, I got this message as well, although I'm not sure what caused it and nothing else special happened.
Eventually, Manananan announces that he's going to sleep. This is another chance for you to get up to mischief.
Like all wizards, he sleeps fully clothed in his robes on top of the blankets. I had a go at testing the limits of the game and my stupidity...
I don't suppose he'd find the old "shaving foam in the hand then tickle face" trick funny?
Still - with Manamanamanman asleep, we can safely leave the house for a while again. Let's get that recently recompleted magic map out from under the bed and put it to use...
This is something that didn't occur to me when I talked about the use of the map - you can use it to instantly teleport out of the house and into Llewdor, hastening your progress and (arguably more importantly) avoiding the treacherous, tedious journey down the mountain. I'm so delighted that I'll never have to see that screen ever again.
Forgot about the rest of my inventory.
My celebration was a bit premature, anyway - you can't teleport back to the house, clicking on its square only gets you as far as the bottom of the mountain so you have to walk the rest of the way yourself. While I'm talking about the map, why in the world did they choose F6 and F8 as the triggers for that screen? They're far from the most reachable or most reasonable keys to use.
Okay - we've been back to the house and have teleported down again, we're fully tooled up with a hundred thousand items crammed into Gwydion's pockets, and we're ready to go. There's one place where we've already seen a load of items that looked interesting.
With our coin purse that we stole from the bandits (which they in turn stole from other people so that makes it all right) we can buy up some interesting groceries!
"I got it from the GameFAQs boards when Undertale was declared the best game ever. Incidentally I'm going to have to turn you in, since as we all know, playing all other games is now illegal."
You have to specifically COUNT COINS to see how much gold you have left, although the message for LOOK PURSE hints at this. You start off with eight of them, and buying all the items available in the shop leaves you with four.
It turns out you actually need to interact with the dog as well, though in a less violent manner than I attempted to earlier. We grab a tuft of fur from the worn out dog without it just collapsing into a sad heap of fluff, and it's time to move on.
Let's wander round the world for a bit hoovering up some items that we'll possibly need later, and assess how discoverable they would be without the walkthrough.
Great, some mistletoe. Now we can oblige Manannan to kiss us - or perhaps it's used for a spell. As Sierra situations go, this is a pretty fair one - it's not totally clear what the green splodge on that tree is meant to be, but typing LOOK says it outright no matter where you are in the room, and there's no trickery to picking it up.
I don't like the look of this place much, and I don't think there's anything useful here - it's best to move on quickly.
Actually I'm going to have to postpone the item-hoovering journey for now, because with a sudden musical cue that scares the absolute bleeding life out of me, the bandits from earlier suddenly appear on the screen again. As they move much faster than you, you don't really have much of a hope unless you're near the screen border - and I'm not.
Yes, a check of my inventory reveals that they have indeed taken everything - even the wad of damp dog fur and my Rt Hon Tub of Lard MP. Perhaps there's a major black market for both these things in Llewdor.
Fortunately, because this is King's Quest 3 and not King's Quest 1, we don't have to restore, restart or quit now - we can just repeat our earlier route to the treehouse and get our items back, for the cost of just a little time.
I've left out screens of the four or five times that I had to yo-yo up and down the ladder, looking into the treehouse each time to see if the bandit was asleep or not.
Here's another reminder of the sheer amount of stuff I'm carrying with me now - half the lab, most of the shop and a few odds and ends from around the countryside for good measure.
I also have eight gold coins again, because I pinched the purse from the table next to the sleeping bandit while I was in there. Now that I look at it, the game awarded me four points for this despite having done it earlier - I wonder if there's a limit to how many times you can do that, or if it's a bug.
The scenery in Llwedor is really rather nice, especially for being rendered at such a low resolution in sixteen colours. Screens aren't always the same when you enter them - sometimes there will be birds on the trees, or squirrels on the rock here, or an eagle flying overhead. Or as I seem to have captured, flying beak-first into a tree and getting wedged there with a noise like a ruler being twanged off a table.
In case it wasn't clear, I've had no idea what I was doing for about the last five minutes. Consulting the walkthrough again, though, leads us back here, where we are nonchalantly pointed towards the acorns in a phrasing that makes them not seem to matter, while simultaneously screaming that they're very important.
To save me some typing, please look back and forth between these next two screens for a while.
I'm trying my best throughout this playthrough to point out interesting parts of the game instead of just talking about how much I dislike Sierra's early approach to game design, but I absolutely hate how random everything in this game is. In an adventure game, you have to use your wits to work through the puzzles, and it's fair to expect that you'll be given the information needed to solve them, however obtusely. However, in this case, after a random number of tries...
All that happens here is that you might be able to pick up three acorns, or (far more likely) you'll get a message that you don't find any dried ones and there's no indication that the game's state is going to change at any time to provide any. It's just obstructive - there's no way that you would think to keep trying, especially as you have to leave and re-enter the screen each time. The only way that this would have been all right is if you could also dry them out yourself by bringing along Manannan's magic cordless hairdryer.
Sigh. Moving on.
Let's have a change of scenery and wander into the desert that borders the lleft side of Llewdor.
Well, that didn't take long. I don't think I can do much else now.
Like several things from the early King's Quest games - the goat and the bridge, the completely awful Rumpelstiltskin "puzzle", and so on - we can get the solution to this one from fairytales and myths (myth-information).
Instead of walking into the screen, we turn around and stop just after entering it so that we're not turned to stone when the Medusa arrives (unlike other roaming characters, she'll always appear on the left of the screen after a couple of seconds of being in here). If you remember, we picked up a hand mirror several updates ago, and now is the perfect time to use it!
oh god
This didn't work either.
After a couple of tries I hit on this wording, which the game finally accepted but it still wasn't going to go out of its way to reward me for it. You have to let the fast-moving Medusa get uncomfortably close before...
Finally. And I didn't even get a good screenshot, because she was behind the cactus in the foreground when I froze her. Never mind - with another puzzle solved, let's get going.
If you look at the ground, the game tells you that an indeterminate smear on the ground is a dried snakeskin. When you pick it up and look at it, the description tells you that it's delicate and could easily crumble. I'm just going to hope that that doesn't mean it's going to suddenly disappear from my inventory after a set time or if I bump into anything.
This screen is to the north of where we were. Attempting to look at the prominent ex-cattle in the centre of the screen by using "bones" or "skeleton" just brings up the description of the fish bone solution in your inventory, so I tried looking at the ground, but Gwydion was much more interested in the small unremarkable-looking cactus off to the side.
I'll grab it anyway.
To the left of the first column of desert screens, the rooms start to become randomly generated. There's a cactus identical to the one we saw on the last screen here, but this one isn't important. It's time to go back.
Oh... unfortunately the exits and entrances for these screens seem to point to random places as well. After wandering a screen to the left, walking back to the right isn't necessarily going to take you out of the desert. I think I might be lost.
And I think that this might be the last person who got lost here.
What do you think I'm trying to do?!
Things aren't looking good for Gwydion here - you can spend limited time in the desert, and the clock is getting dangerously close to the hour mark when Manannan is going to wake up too. But I'm going to leave this on a cliffhanger - will he get out of the desert alive or will he be mildly inconvenienced into having to reload a previous save? Keep watching to find out...
When we left our hero last time, he was a pile of dust on the floor of the kitchen, leaving not much room for further exploration. So I've rewound time a bit - let's do this the right way this time.
Wand, cupboard, at the same angle as we found it. (Not really on that last part, mercifully.) I'm surprised but glad that the Sorcery of Old does not describe a "Who's had their hands on this wand since I last touched it" spell.
Okay, the study is all tidied up - in case I didn't make it clear last time, the trapdoor has to be down AND the book has to be moved back to cover the lever, leaving no evidence of you having discovered the lab at all. (Keeping the ingredients is fine. Perhaps Manananan has too many bottles to count, or just doesn't like saffron all that much.)
And with that done, we stuff the rest of our inventory under the bed - and wait for Nmamamam's return.
Here he is!
Without much ceremony, he demands a meal and poofs himself down to the kitchen, starting the next step in the wizard routine cycle. There are four things that are considered meals in the game, and you have to serve him one of them each time he gets to this point (on the half-hour-ish mark). A side effect of this is that if you get to four and a half hours on the game timer without the means to defeat him, it will be impossible to satisfy his appetite and he'll unavoidably kill you. So let's not spend four and a half hours on this game.
For now, we can just hand over one of our food items.
Oh, cripes, no we can't. I never thought of that - when I put my inventory under the bed, the food went there as well. Stay right there, let me go and blow the cobwebs off it.
There it is! Having no idea how much time I was being given to make a meal but assuming it was about three minutes like the chores, treacling my way up and down the awkward stairs was really very tense.
"Serve food" and "give fruit" didn't work, so eventually I hit on this, which is the correct sentence. After doing that, you're frozen in place for a while as Mnannanan munches, then he eventually leaves.
After this you have to stay around the house for a while and not do anything suspicious, as the wizard will appear to check on you regularly, saying nothing before teleporting out again. Once, I got this message as well, although I'm not sure what caused it and nothing else special happened.
Eventually, Manananan announces that he's going to sleep. This is another chance for you to get up to mischief.
Like all wizards, he sleeps fully clothed in his robes on top of the blankets. I had a go at testing the limits of the game and my stupidity...
I don't suppose he'd find the old "shaving foam in the hand then tickle face" trick funny?
Still - with Manamanamanman asleep, we can safely leave the house for a while again. Let's get that recently recompleted magic map out from under the bed and put it to use...
This is something that didn't occur to me when I talked about the use of the map - you can use it to instantly teleport out of the house and into Llewdor, hastening your progress and (arguably more importantly) avoiding the treacherous, tedious journey down the mountain. I'm so delighted that I'll never have to see that screen ever again.
Forgot about the rest of my inventory.
My celebration was a bit premature, anyway - you can't teleport back to the house, clicking on its square only gets you as far as the bottom of the mountain so you have to walk the rest of the way yourself. While I'm talking about the map, why in the world did they choose F6 and F8 as the triggers for that screen? They're far from the most reachable or most reasonable keys to use.
Okay - we've been back to the house and have teleported down again, we're fully tooled up with a hundred thousand items crammed into Gwydion's pockets, and we're ready to go. There's one place where we've already seen a load of items that looked interesting.
With our coin purse that we stole from the bandits (which they in turn stole from other people so that makes it all right) we can buy up some interesting groceries!
"I got it from the GameFAQs boards when Undertale was declared the best game ever. Incidentally I'm going to have to turn you in, since as we all know, playing all other games is now illegal."
You have to specifically COUNT COINS to see how much gold you have left, although the message for LOOK PURSE hints at this. You start off with eight of them, and buying all the items available in the shop leaves you with four.
It turns out you actually need to interact with the dog as well, though in a less violent manner than I attempted to earlier. We grab a tuft of fur from the worn out dog without it just collapsing into a sad heap of fluff, and it's time to move on.
Let's wander round the world for a bit hoovering up some items that we'll possibly need later, and assess how discoverable they would be without the walkthrough.
Great, some mistletoe. Now we can oblige Manannan to kiss us - or perhaps it's used for a spell. As Sierra situations go, this is a pretty fair one - it's not totally clear what the green splodge on that tree is meant to be, but typing LOOK says it outright no matter where you are in the room, and there's no trickery to picking it up.
I don't like the look of this place much, and I don't think there's anything useful here - it's best to move on quickly.
Actually I'm going to have to postpone the item-hoovering journey for now, because with a sudden musical cue that scares the absolute bleeding life out of me, the bandits from earlier suddenly appear on the screen again. As they move much faster than you, you don't really have much of a hope unless you're near the screen border - and I'm not.
Yes, a check of my inventory reveals that they have indeed taken everything - even the wad of damp dog fur and my Rt Hon Tub of Lard MP. Perhaps there's a major black market for both these things in Llewdor.
Fortunately, because this is King's Quest 3 and not King's Quest 1, we don't have to restore, restart or quit now - we can just repeat our earlier route to the treehouse and get our items back, for the cost of just a little time.
I've left out screens of the four or five times that I had to yo-yo up and down the ladder, looking into the treehouse each time to see if the bandit was asleep or not.
Here's another reminder of the sheer amount of stuff I'm carrying with me now - half the lab, most of the shop and a few odds and ends from around the countryside for good measure.
I also have eight gold coins again, because I pinched the purse from the table next to the sleeping bandit while I was in there. Now that I look at it, the game awarded me four points for this despite having done it earlier - I wonder if there's a limit to how many times you can do that, or if it's a bug.
The scenery in Llwedor is really rather nice, especially for being rendered at such a low resolution in sixteen colours. Screens aren't always the same when you enter them - sometimes there will be birds on the trees, or squirrels on the rock here, or an eagle flying overhead. Or as I seem to have captured, flying beak-first into a tree and getting wedged there with a noise like a ruler being twanged off a table.
In case it wasn't clear, I've had no idea what I was doing for about the last five minutes. Consulting the walkthrough again, though, leads us back here, where we are nonchalantly pointed towards the acorns in a phrasing that makes them not seem to matter, while simultaneously screaming that they're very important.
To save me some typing, please look back and forth between these next two screens for a while.
I'm trying my best throughout this playthrough to point out interesting parts of the game instead of just talking about how much I dislike Sierra's early approach to game design, but I absolutely hate how random everything in this game is. In an adventure game, you have to use your wits to work through the puzzles, and it's fair to expect that you'll be given the information needed to solve them, however obtusely. However, in this case, after a random number of tries...
All that happens here is that you might be able to pick up three acorns, or (far more likely) you'll get a message that you don't find any dried ones and there's no indication that the game's state is going to change at any time to provide any. It's just obstructive - there's no way that you would think to keep trying, especially as you have to leave and re-enter the screen each time. The only way that this would have been all right is if you could also dry them out yourself by bringing along Manannan's magic cordless hairdryer.
Sigh. Moving on.
Let's have a change of scenery and wander into the desert that borders the lleft side of Llewdor.
Well, that didn't take long. I don't think I can do much else now.
Like several things from the early King's Quest games - the goat and the bridge, the completely awful Rumpelstiltskin "puzzle", and so on - we can get the solution to this one from fairytales and myths (myth-information).
Instead of walking into the screen, we turn around and stop just after entering it so that we're not turned to stone when the Medusa arrives (unlike other roaming characters, she'll always appear on the left of the screen after a couple of seconds of being in here). If you remember, we picked up a hand mirror several updates ago, and now is the perfect time to use it!
oh god
This didn't work either.
After a couple of tries I hit on this wording, which the game finally accepted but it still wasn't going to go out of its way to reward me for it. You have to let the fast-moving Medusa get uncomfortably close before...
Finally. And I didn't even get a good screenshot, because she was behind the cactus in the foreground when I froze her. Never mind - with another puzzle solved, let's get going.
If you look at the ground, the game tells you that an indeterminate smear on the ground is a dried snakeskin. When you pick it up and look at it, the description tells you that it's delicate and could easily crumble. I'm just going to hope that that doesn't mean it's going to suddenly disappear from my inventory after a set time or if I bump into anything.
This screen is to the north of where we were. Attempting to look at the prominent ex-cattle in the centre of the screen by using "bones" or "skeleton" just brings up the description of the fish bone solution in your inventory, so I tried looking at the ground, but Gwydion was much more interested in the small unremarkable-looking cactus off to the side.
I'll grab it anyway.
To the left of the first column of desert screens, the rooms start to become randomly generated. There's a cactus identical to the one we saw on the last screen here, but this one isn't important. It's time to go back.
Oh... unfortunately the exits and entrances for these screens seem to point to random places as well. After wandering a screen to the left, walking back to the right isn't necessarily going to take you out of the desert. I think I might be lost.
And I think that this might be the last person who got lost here.
What do you think I'm trying to do?!
Things aren't looking good for Gwydion here - you can spend limited time in the desert, and the clock is getting dangerously close to the hour mark when Manannan is going to wake up too. But I'm going to leave this on a cliffhanger - will he get out of the desert alive or will he be mildly inconvenienced into having to reload a previous save? Keep watching to find out...
no subject
This strikes me as the sort of game that would be downright incredible with one of those fan-made VGA remakes that do away with the "you forgot the thing two chapters ago so you're stuck now" unwinnable states and the so on. There are so many instances of effective mood-setting, good graphics, and other such gems all buried beneath the outer shell of someone inexplicably thinking "make the player keep trying something that usually fails until a low random chance it works actually happens, with no indication that they're on the right track until then" is acceptable puzzle design.
no subject
“Ahhh… *F7* Push Wizard. No, he doesn't—doesn't seem to care. … uh, I can't think of any—I, um—can I use—inventory? Circle of Winds… no, I don't think you use them from here.”