Posted on: February 9, 2012
nitrogenfingers
Verified ownerGames: 330 Reviews: 48
A pioneer of the adventure genre that falls flat on all aspects
I've always been curious about the early parser based Sierra adventures, and why they never achieved the popularity of the LucasArts games. Now I know the reason: from a modern perspective the original Space Quest trilogy is probably one of the worst suite of games I've ever played. Not because of the crude graphics or I didn't "get" the parser- this game makes so many poor design decisions it often felt as though it was punishing me for even attempting to play it. You'll begin your idiotic journey aboard the Arcada, which will provide you with the first taste of things to come. Death will come quickly from armed soldiers patrolling the corridors, killing all without the foresight to save quickly and often. You'll wrestle with the parser attempting to describe various environmental objects, and the vague descriptions they give you will serve only to frustrate. Objects around the ship are also painfully non-interactive, frequently having precisely one use; the cart retriever had the opportunity to make for an interesting puzzle of information retrieval but instead it just begins what will become a series of irritating puzzles as the game goes on. Attempting to use this machine will also, without warning, kill the player for no reason. Yes, you'll be dying a lot in Space Quest so you'd best get used to it- the many varied and frequently unfair deaths Wilco will suffer on his arduous journey provide the game with what little humor it has, endlessly describing the horrible ways you have killed the protagonist. Some of these are quite funny, but they'll go stale long before the game ends. You will die for failing to notice certain things on the screen, for not moving fast enough, and often for merely being curious about the environment; touching, examining and in one infuriating case merely "looking at" something in the world will often bring the game to an untimely end. It seems this was intentional- often the only way to know how to avoid death is to die at least once to see what happens, bringing the "trial and error" methodology of Limbo to mind- but where Limbo had the sense to make deaths quick and not break flow, Space Quest revels in them, taking several seconds for them to complete before you can restore a save game. Things only get worse from here. Inventory puzzles make up the mainstay of the "text" portion of the adventure but they're often extremely hard to find as there are never adequete textual descriptions of areas, so knowing what is and is not interactive in any given place is a slowly acquired skill. Some puzzles are quite good and do require some logic but many are completely unintuitive relying on very specific solutions, and not just logically but syntactically- you'll find yourself wresting with the parser from start to finish. The worst part of these puzzles is many rely on items gathered throughout the game, but it will never alert you if you missed them- this can lead to points where you have neglected to take an item along only to find an impassable puzzle hours down the track, bringing you adventure to a grinding halt. The text part of the adventure makes up just half of Wilco's adventure, the other half done with a series of graphical puzzles and minigames, these being by far the worst part of the experience. They're nicely varied from playing the slots in a cantina, exploring a labyrinth of ladders and tunnels that you can't see clearly, moving through a maze where touching the walls will kill you, swinging a rope to reach a ledge, the list goes on. Every one of them is boring at best and outright infuriating at worst, requiring frequent saves just to get through. The skimmer section on Kerona was the absolute low point of the experience- it reminded me of early 2600 games, with terrible controls and unfair gameplay. The sections are not fun and add nothing- they merely pad an already thin experience. It's hard for me to name one thing I enjoyed about Space Quest. I stopped playing near the end of the second game, with an event that poignently summarized my experience with the trilogy. A mildly amusing event had occured some time prior- referencing the Aliens films a giant black alien came up and kissed me. Thinking nothing of it I kept playing until a good 15 minutes later Wilco suddenly died from a green creature bursting from his chest. I was gobsmacked- if you didn't know the film you'd have no idea what had happened or why, and even being familiar with the films the event didn't make sense to the canon. The game had killed me, 15 minutes later forcing me to retrace my progress. It wasn't funny. It wasn't clever. It left me angry, irritated, and discouraged from playing any further. And that's why Space Quest fails as a gaming experience; It will have you backtracking constantly searching for items you've missed, arguing with the parser and battling with bad controls. This experience will be broken up only with frequent, meaningless deaths for even the most minor of deviations from Space Quests rigid logic. I can't imagine fans being nostalgic for this thoroughly punishing experience, but if you've never played before then you'd be well advised to think twice before buying.
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