A solid remake of a classic adventure game.

User Rating: 8 | King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human PC
By Talonfire | Review Date:
In King's Quest III VGA you assume the role of a new character, Gwydion, who is seemingly unrelated to Graham and Daventry. Gwydion is a servant boy under the "employ" of an evil wizard called Manaanan who wants to escape servitude. The first half of the game involves learning a few magic spells under time constraints in order to outsmart Manaanan and the second half involves finding your family. Like King's Quest II VGA, the remake of III also expands upon the story a bit by having Manaanan's brother Mordack (the villain of KQ 5) make a couple cameos, as well as several other additions which improve the game.

What separates this King's Quest game from the previous two is its time limit for the first half, you only have an hour and forty minutes to escape Manaanan's employ. To top it off, you have to replace Manaan's wand and hide all of your magic items before he either wakes up from his nap, or returns from one of his journeys. Naturally, since you can't take your time, this cuts the length of the game significantly. The second part of the game is also very easy, especially if you skip the mountain segment using the teleport spell (which you shouldn't do if you want to earn all points and see the complete ending). Both of these combined equate to what is probably the shortest King's Quest game in the series.

KQ 3 VGA features beautiful hand drawn environments. Unfortunately I encountered an area that they didn't bother redoing, but since this is a hard area to reach that actually kills you if you reach it, that's only a minor gripe. The voice acting is pretty good, Gwydion is voiced by a fan but the guy didn't do a bad job. Manaanan is voiced by Andy Hoyos who voiced both him and Mordack in King's Quest V which is nice. Also Graham is voiced by Josh Mandel during his several appearances. The rest of the voice cast is made up of fans, including the narrator. Infamous Adventures brought someone in to give the music an overhaul, and the result is a very nice collection of remixes of the original KQ3 score.

King's Quest III definitely isn't the best game in the series, due to the time limit during the first half and the relatively easy difficulty during the second half it's very brief. On the other hand, it's still an entertaining and memorable adventure.

+ Beautiful visuals
+ Good fan voice work
+ Great remixes of the original music

- First half of the game is timed
- Second half of the game is ridiculously easy
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