I can just imagine the gamers getting all worked up in 1986, FURIOUS that King’s Quest 3 dared to shake up the formula. Can’t believe they made me play as this COOL character in an INTERESTING situation instead of the faceless, blank slate nobody I’m familiar with!!! Let my fury echo across time so that two generations from now people will somehow be UPSET that they make you play as the ARBITER???? Gamers are a truly hopeless breed. Every single popular video game homogenizing into a generic slop is just one symptom of a time-honored problem with pop art, and Gamers happily eating the feed because they’re comfortable with these narrow modes of play and expression is an equally ancient tradition.

That said, I do, like, I do GET IT, to some degree. I like to poke around at these games and failing in them never bothers me even slightly. I keep a meaty stable of frequent and rotating saves and the exploration is a lot of the fun for me. I THINK that’s the appeal for a lot of people who enjoy this kind of game, and King’s Quest III’s attempts to complicate that formula are as inelegant as they are bold and exciting. Couple that clumsy implementation with what FEELS like a sharp uptick in Unfair Sierra Bullshit (I’m not sure how true that actually is – certainly a bit but denser screens and a smaller world map might be working against the game here) and I get how it’s frustrating. FOR ME HOWEVER, intense pedantry for spelling and strict time management gameplay with NO room for error are the kind of video game gimmicks that I eat the fuck up so I was goddamn living the life for all three hours of this bullshit. That’s twice as long as either of the other two games took me, and I suspect that might have something to do with this game’s reputation as well. It’s not a LARGER sequel, but it’s a more compact and CERTAINLY a more obtuse game, one that reveals its complex and substantial layers pretty much exclusively via rng and trial and error. It’s a much stricter enforcement of these principles than either previous adventure, even as it retains all the unfair bullshit from those games in near equal if not excess amounts.

And yet I find it utterly compelling, much more so than its predecessors. The setting is instantly more characterful, with the intensity of the stakes laid out from moment one: Gwydion is a slave in this house and you are going to fuck up this evil wizard and get the fuck out of here. That’s more than Graham ever got. The game does a small but great thing where it drops you into the full mechanical situation before the game in earnest begins. There’s an ever-ticking clock on the screen that helps you track the wizard Manannan’s comings and goings and sleep schedule. If he’s not out or sleeping, Gwydion will be confined to the house and to a very limited set of actions and interactions within it; some infractions result in lectures, others in instant death (there are good reasons for Manannan’s overreactions that become apparent later). None of this is explained to you, but you’ll certainly find out as you try shit, and when he does make his first trip away after five minutes elapse on the clock, there’s certainly a freedom to that, but it’s a trepidatious one. You’re not actually free; you barely have the illusion of it. You don’t know how long he’ll be gone, he could be back any time. There’s fear in that, anxiety. I know from personal history how good that precious faux-freedom feels but I also know intimately the dread-pit in your stomach that accompanies it – it’s not you’re house, and every moment you’re somewhere you’re not supposed to be is a moment you could be caught. This extremely crude, borderline experimental attempt to prevent the adventure game setting and formula from becoming stale on Apple II computers or whatever other boxes it was out on because that’s how we were doing things in 1986 captures this feeling better than almost anything I can think of from the following forty years, and this comes with the bonus of true escapism because I never had the opportunity to poison my dad’s food, turn him into a cat, and steal all his shit on my way out.

There are other things that don’t work as well as the clock. Everything bad about KQ1 and 2 that I haven’t mentioned as improved is still pretty much the same here; the spellcasting system that doubles as outdated copyprotection is genuinely hateful but in a way that is pretty funny and kind of fun to fuck around with. Stairs are still the most challenging obstacle in the entire game, but here they’re much more frequently troublesome and come with obstacles?? Fucked up. There’s a part of the game where as far as I can tell you do just have to stand in one place for like ten minutes straight which, again, sucks but is also extremely baller, just a huge swinging cock move from Roberta Williams, the queen bitch.

I guess I just don’t get it, really. I was WARNED, by more than one person, about this game, but it’s by far my favorite experience with the series so far. What’s bad here is the same shit that’s bad in all of these, and what’s good is so singular and full of interesting character and ideas that even crushing difficulty and obviously unfair programming couldn’t keep this one out of my heart.