Order of the Thorne: The King's Challenge

This developer always delivers a great love letter to games of 90s SIERRA. That being said it is a very short letter. Probably shorter than the 1st Quest For Glory. Aside from length, the game had many fun puzzles, and a setting that felt genuine to the Genre, but despite the typical "small open world feel" (Similar to QFG 1 or KQ1) the puzzle felt very linear. There was very few needs for exploration. I always had an idea of the singular puzzle I was working on. As where most games of this type has about 4-5 puzzles you can solve at any given times. This game I felt the puzzles were stacked. Where you had to complete one to complete the next one and so on. Worse than that, some times progress involves discovering trigger events which require you to walk the entire map every time you solve a new puzzle and hope that some shenanigans are going on with the other characters that you stumble upon. On the plus, the devleoper did include a "skip walking" right click feature that is quite the blessing. However, what this game does it does well. It delivers a great look back into the heart of 90s adventure games. It even has an amusing soudtrack that is very reminscent of the Rankin Bass medival Fantasy movies of my childhood. Very cool.

Order of the Thorne -- King's Challenge is short and sweet, and creates that cozy atmosphere of an old Star Trek TNG episode, where at the end of the day all is well and people are in fact kind and get along. It's supremely family-friendly and somewhat linear, in the sense that there isn't much you can do wrong. It even won't let you pick up useless stuff, in fact 97% of the time your inventory consists of a max five-six items. Easy enough for kids to figure out and fun enough for an adult who just wants to point and click in a mostly harmless world, without needing to read the manual to get the secret alphabet or esoteric hints. Don't get me wrong, those are awesome, but this is lovely just the way it is.

Story: 3/5 Worldbuilding: 3/5 Art Design: 5/5 Graphics: 4/5 Sound: 4/5 Gameplay: 3/5

A nice surprise for showing to younger players the magic of the old games. The story is nice and mystical, the tasks are logical, the characters have nice language and teach a code of honour

If you have kids this is a much better game for them than Kings Quest. It fairly easy and logical. It is short but I can imagine it will take double the time for a child to finish than for someone who is good at these types of games. I like that it is overall lighthearted and there are basically no dark elements to it.