Space Quest offers an interesting stylistic counterpoint to King’s Quest. Designed by Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe, guys who have prior Sierra credits as a programmer and an artist respectively, with Crowe in particular being something of a superstar who seems to have done sprite work for essentially every major Sierra franchise release for like a full decade.

Both series sit in a kind of moderately successful space between serious homage to their chosen genres and loving parody with that 80s style of MST3K-esque attitude that is inescapable in works from a certain flavor of 80s nerd culture, but Space Quest feels moderately more sober much of the time. The narrator may be as sardonic as ever, the joke may be that you’re a janitor tasked with saving the galaxy, but there’s still a great deal more mundane death and terror here than is typical of its contemporary Sierra stuff, the villains really straight laced and scary, the danger imminent and prowling. Maybe it was a conscious decision around the time - King’s Quest III would see a similar tonal shift with its slave narrative and wizard villain only a month after this game’s release.

That’s not to say there’s no humor - there’s quite a lot of it, but outside of the diner set piece and a couple of interactions with NPCs that play more like easter eggs than meaningful bits of story, it’s mostly limited to narration and fail screens. My understanding is that this becomes The Comedy Series much more explicitly than King’s Quest does so this was a bit of a surprise for me.

Space Quest feels like it carries an ambition to genuinely thrill the player, to push the limits of visual interactivity in adventure games. There are so many cutscenes in this game, so many sound effects and cinematic screens and animations. Stuff that’s genuinely breathtaking on the hardware this shit runs on, in the year it came out. This would have been thrillingly realistic stuff. It’s still cool today.

I wish it was all in service of a game that was a little less dull. Space Quest is a much more linear affair than any of the three King’s Quests I’ve played, or Colonel’s Bequest, which is fine, good even. But it did also mean that it was rare for me to find myself in a situation where I was genuinely teasing my brain, too. Environments being so closed, with so few characters to interact with and so few ways to investigate problems meant that solutions were usually immediately clear, or revealed after a relatively quick moina of the available space. This does, interestingly, mean that there’s a greater reliance on player dexterity - limiting your movement by having you be pursued by a killer robot for a quarter of the game, or a bridge that comes closer to collapsing every time you cross back and forth over it, or asking the player to avoid physical death obstacles via character movement rather than puzzle solving. These things feel somewhat artificial in the way they impede the player’s ability to progress what might otherwise be a too-simple series of puzzles, but if I were to look at it more generously, which I am always inclined to do, I would say they also feel like a young company trying to figure out fresh ways to stretch the legs of a still pretty new genre. Adventure games certainly weren’t new, but ones with GRAPHICS were, and the idea of the player character’s little avatar really having a presence beyond picking things up and putting them down properly was news! Which sounds wild but norms have to be established! This game is interacted with via a text parser.

And to its credit also I would rather a game be too easy than too hard. I think there is only one truly, genuinely evil moment where this game makes itself unfinishable, where you need to pick a piece of invisible glass up off the ground like an hour before you need it and you don’t need it until after crossing a threshold you can’t return from. This piece of glass is located somewhere I would say is only moderately intuitive to investigate, and if you don’t grab it in a very specific timeframe it becomes basically impossible to retrieve even before you can’t return to that screen.

But that’s the only one. There are other ways to fuck yourself but I think they’re much more player-faulty. It’s fine to let the player dig their own grave, I think, and these games encourage keeping like nine saves to a degree that I don’t think having these kinds of situations is really all that big of a deal - recovering progress goes quickly once you know the tricks.

I think writing about this has made me like it more, which is always a nice feeling to have, but I’m still kind of taken by a feeling of apathy, mostly. Now that I’ve tasted how much Sierra will be pushing the envelope only a couple years from now, I can’t help but go to sleep thinking of Roger Wilco, and dream of Laura Bow.