For the few of you who, like me, do not visit the General Forums and may have missed it, a freeware indie game that would be best described as a spiritual sequel to Quest For Glory was released a couple days ago, titled Heroine's Quest - The Herald Of Ragnarok.

Just how much of a spiritual sequel is it? Well, as if there weren't enough graphical nods to the first Quest For Glory game found in the pre-release screenshots or its title which instantly brings to mind Quest For Glory's original title, Heroine's Quest has graphics reminiscent of those found in Quest For Glory IV, King's Quest V and other Sierra games from that era, as for the gameplay we're talking about a mix of point and click adventure game, with items to pick up, puzzle to solve, people to talk to, and roleplaying game elements like baddies to fight, spells to cast, skills to train and multiple customizable character classes (a warrior, a sorceress and a rogue), each with their own play style, solutions to puzzles and quests.

So, if you always dreamed to play a brand new game that played and felt exactly like the good old Quest For Glory games you grew up with, look no further!

Official site with info and download link:
http://crystalshard.net/hq.htm

IndieDB page with extra screenshots and trailers if you need extra convincing:
http://www.indiedb.com/games/heroines-quest

Heroine's Quest thread on GOG's General Forums:
http://www.gog.com/forum/general/heroines_quest_the_herald_of_ragnarok_out_now_free_highly_quest_for_glory_like_game/page1

Looks sweet!

Downloading this now. I really liked the QFG games, so I'm looking forward to see how this fares.

Heroine's Quest is really fantastic. Incredibly good quality, especially for a free indie game. I like the combat better htan any QFG game. It's a heck of an achievement.

This game is AMAZING!!! If you are a HUGE Quest for Glory fan like I am, then you'll love this game. There's a perfect blend between adventuring and fighting enemies. The quests are straight forward and there's a side quest for each of the characters to give you a fuller experience. The puzzles are easier to solve than Quest for Glory, but there are a few difficult tasks that take time to figure. There are also no dead ends in the game, but there are still several ways to die (some very humorous). I would highly recommend this game to anyone and it's FREE.

Game is just as good if not better than qfg series.
10/10 would play again.

This must be awesome if it made it's way to steam.

Downloaded it :D

Okay, this game is if Quest for Glory and Skyrim had a baby who grew up to beat up Chuck Norris.

I'm enjoying this game so far. On the other hand, I'm also having a lot of difficulty with it because if you are outside for more than 5 minutes you freeze to death, even with the magic scarf that is supposed to keep you warm and even after drinking mead, which is supposed to keep you warm but doesn't seem to.

The scarf *helps* keep you warm, but it can't keep out the cold forever - and it's not magic, the dialogue plainly states that the wizard is making it up and gets called out on it by the Heroine.

And if you buy mead from the tavern owner, she says that mead only makes you *feel* warm, due to being an alcoholic drink.

I finally beat the game. I took me a long time because I got stuck on a couple of parts, and I didn't beat everything (I finished with 400 points out of 500), but I did beat it. .It's got a great story line, great characters. Voice acting is very good. Music is very good, graphics are very good. It's a little cruel because food is hard to come by and many monsters don't have money. The worst part about the game is the freezing to death possibility. It tremendously hinders exploring, and it limits the amount of time you can grind, for much needed skills and money. I think an adventure game should not so severely hinder exploring and grinding like this. I get that the winter thing is part of the plot, but the hero of Gloriana went to Spielburg and Mordavia without any partciularly warm clothing and he never froze to death. But all in all, it's a very good game. If you are reading this, I highly recommend you get this game. You got nothing to lose: it's free!.I don't know that I agree with this. At least, the whole freezing to death thing was far tougher for me to deal with than anything I ever found in "Quest For Glory."

Just played this recently too. I'd say the voice acting was kind of a mixed bag. A few characters sounded like they weren't very interested in their parts, but being a free game, I have no idea if they were paid for their work. Voice direction was shoddy, as there were many problems with inflection that could have been fixed if anyone had noticed. It's like each actor was given their own lines only, without context.

Food wasn't really a problem. You can carve meat off of wolves, which are easily killed once you've learned to dodge their attacks. Most enemies don't carry money but you can get items now and then that you would've bought anyway, which saves you the cash. Actually the money becomes worthless fairly quickly, which is spot on accurate to the Quest for Glory series. There are a number of items you can collect to ward off the cold, eventually making it a nonissue, but I'm not certain if every class can get into towns at night without resorting to cross-class skills. The game could have benefitted from an Erana's Peace type of location.

As for exploration, the game's automap is fantastic. QfG 1 and 4 could have really used something similar.

The puzzles necessary to progress the plot are very fair, I think, but if you want to get the maximum score, some of them are rather obscure in a "never would've guessed I could do that" sort of way. To their credit, the devs were very careful to avoid deadend scenarios.

The big failing point is the humor, which falls flat almost every time. The game is chock full of references to books, movies, and games, but simply making a reference isn't making a joke. Then you have the wizard Aurvandel's dialogue, which is clearly meant to be a joke but is painfully unfunny.

Even if it doesn't quite capture all the same charm, it's still very faithful to QfG in terms of gameplay. So if you loved the series, you shouldn't regret giving this a shot.

Aurvandel's actually speaking magically, which he does so by repeating three times, in order to speak magically.

True, but the key word in there is "eventually." Early on in a "Quest For..." game is when I like to do the most grinding and exploring.

The fighter can climb up the walls in those towns. I imagine so can the thief. I haven't played as a wizard yet, but I would think if the wizard can't just climb up then there's probably a levitate spell of some kind.

I don't think QFG1 and QFG4 really needed this feature. In those games, you can explore freely. That is to say, you can take all the time you want to with exploring in those games; you don't have to worry about getting somewhere warm before you freeze to death even though Spielburg and Mordavia are cold places and the hero of Gloriana can't get a scarf from a wizard or any of those other items. I think that affects the need for such a map. Also those games take place entirely in one small valley, so it's not too hard to learn your way around. In fact I can go months without playing those games and still know my way around those games almost as well as I know the back of my hand.

Well I look at it like the start of any of these games, you're going to want to stay within reach of safety until you buff up a bit.

Climbing is cross-class for the sorceress. I'm guessing the Blink spell would get you over the walls, but it's unavailable until later. So there's one class that could potentially have some problems. Oh, and it turns out there is an Erana's Peace-like area, but again not accessible until later.

The free exploration without time constraints is actually why 1 & 4 are my favorites in the series, but a map still would have been very convenient is all.

Spielburg wasn't cold enough to freeze to death. They were growing crops and all. Mordavia I don't recall being cold at all. Midgard is in the midst of the Fimbulwinter, an unnatural event precipitating the end of the world, so I think it's justified.