I will skip all information about the story (or what little of it exists) and gameplay, assuming you're familiar with it already. If not, other reviews have covered that ground. In general, I found the game breathtakingly beautiful visually, with great attention to background details, nice music (in both versions, though the heavy metal style doesn't exactly fit the game, IMHO), fluid gameplay, the camera that usually behaves well and responsive controls. I played the game on normal difficulty level and while the first two or three levels are easy enough, things quickly get more challenging. Fortunately, you have infinite lives, so practice doesn't cost anything. And you'll definitely need those lives because some parts require quite a bit of training to get through them. Those parts require very nimble fingers and quite a lot of quick world-changing, so you'll be very pleased with yourself when you pass them and reach the next checkpoint. Now for the other side of the coin. My version of the game has a bizarre bug which messes up the camera when you play with a gamepad. Switching to keyboard brought problems on its own. If you use the default settings, there is no separate button for changing the world (it's tied to dashing and twirling). This makes most of the challenges much more difficult, and some simply impossible (when you have to change the world under water, where you can't dash or twirl). So, if you use keyboard, before playing, go to options and assign a separate key for world changing. I'm surprised the authors left this glaring mistake in the game. There are also some smaller bugs (I got stuck in a rock one or two times), but those are no big deal. Another problem is the final boss fight, which is insanely difficult and completely out of place in this game, the rest of which was challenging but never unfair. I tried for hours before I finally gave up and switched to easy difficulty just for this fight.
Looks like this will be the first review of this game! So cool! :-) Anyway, this is a classic Legend game, with an interface that some might find too archaic even for 1993. Basically, it's a text adventure with static pictures, but you can use your mouse to interact with the hotspots on the pictures and the list of available verbs in the menu to the left. However, for me nothing matches typing sentences by hand. The story is rather simple - collect some Magic Items scattered around the world, defeat the Evil Witch and release the Princess in Distress. However, the game shines in at least two aspects: 1) The humor is absolutely hilarious and I don't even know where to begin describing it. First of all, you will constantly find yourself in ridiculous situations (pulling a banana from a stone, attacking a fortress that has only the front wall, fooling a dwarf by dressing up as another dwarf, trying to break a spell by kissing a pig, etc.), with each chapter ending with some disaster you have inadvertently caused, "truthfully" described in the newspaper you find at the beginning of the next chapter. Also, no matter how ridiculous the thing you attempted, the game will have a more ridiculous answer. Try EVERYTHING. 2) The game is designed by Bob Bates and closely follows his design philosophy. This means that, despite all its weirdness, it never tortures you with illogical puzzles or pixel hunt. If you are careful and have some prior experience with adventure games, you almost certainly won't need a walkthrough, so you'll be able to enjoy the game without frustrations. All in all, for me this probably ranks up there with Gabriel Knight, Monkey Island and the likes as one of the best adventure games ever made and I would recommend that you try it even if you're not a fan of text adventures (it's not that this game simply has an archaic interface - this is actually a pure text adventure in all its heart and soul and it probably wouldn't work as a P&C game).
Now, before you lies the very beginning of graphic adventuring. While the first two games are of extreme historical importance, they don't offer much (or anything) in the way of story. You just go around, collect random items to solve some random quests and then the game ends. However, the third game is a giant leap forward. Playing as Gwydion, a slave-child of an evil wizard whose name I still can't pronounce (let alone spell), you have to collect a bunch of magic formulas and send the aforementioned wizard to oblivion (which is truly a great moment, once you manage to achieve it), before finding out your true identity, which connects this game with the seemingly unrelated first two parts. A large chunk of the game consists of avoiding the wizard, smuggling suspicious objects to a safe space without getting caught and then creating some magical items by closely (VERY closely) following the instructions from the manual. That's right, this is truly a masterful copy protection if there ever was one, making the game completely unplayable without the original documentation (hey, it worked back in the day). The process is not easy, but it really makes for an entertaining game. A lot has been said about the difficulty of these games. They are certainly not easy, but if you are careful and patient, you will probably manage to get by without a walkthrough. Here are some spoiler-free tips: 1) You WILL die. A lot. In all three games. Save often (meaning: on every screen). 2) All three games have some dead ends, but almost all of them are fairly obvious. If you lose an item or get a negative score after trying something, restore (see 1) ). If you get in unwinnable situation, it will rarely be because you missed some well-hidden barely visible small object. 3) Examine EVERYTHING. In each new location, type EXAMINE ROOM. You can also EXAMINE GRASS. Examine all trees and rocks. Look under things and behind them. Many important items are not readily visible on screen.
The historical importance of this game is undeniable. Made in 1979 by a boy in his late teens (as impressive feat in itself), it brings to our screens for the first time some of the standard elements of what was later to become the RPG genre - quests, dungeon crawling in first person, items, health points, top-down world map etc. Of course, all of these things are inevitably present in their absolutely most rudimentary form. So, historical importance aside, exactly how entertaining this game is today, more than three and a half decades after its release? In short, I would say it is interesting maybe for the first half an hour or so. However, as there (understandably) isn't much content here, the playing will soon become repetitive and not much different from peeling a huge amount of potatoes. First, you find the Lord British's castle somewhere on a 20x20 (or 21x21, at least in my case) map. You get a quest to kill a creature. You go to the nearest town, buy lots of food and some weapons, enter the nearest dungeon (they are all exactly the same, given the lucky number you chose at the beginning of the game), kill some enemies on the first two levels, go out to regain the HP (you get them back only upon exiting the dungeon, there are no health potions), repeat this for 5 or 10 or 20 times until your health is around 300, get down to the dungeon, kill the creature, get out of the dungeon (not easy, since the enemies respawn), go to Lord British, receive another quest. Repeat. The fights are tiresome. Unless you abuse the magic amulet, you will be pretty weak and most of your attacks will result in a miss. The same goes for the monsters, so it's an endless parade of missed attacks until someone finally hits someone. Add to that that the enemies always appear in exactly the same place and you get the idea why fun quickly evaporates from playing. I think it's possible to finish the game without the amulet, but it would require dozens of hours of grinding.
