Oh god it’s been a month since I posted + King’s Quest

I really want to apologize for not being super active with my posts. I haven’t had a lot of inspiration for what to write about.

But Pax Dev is in a couple days, as is Pax Prime, so I’m very excited for that and I would bet money I’ll get some inspiration to write about game design or about a specific game

On a side note, I have a very small post about the recent King’s Quest game.

Now I have a full King’s Quest review on the way, but I want to talk about the really weird thing that stood out to me in the game. This game took WAY too much from the Princess Bride.

At what point does a little reference to a famous movie become an homage, and when does that homage just become a lack of creative writing?

I found no less than 4 things taken straight from the Princess Bride, lets look at all of them.

1. A grandfather telling his grandchild a story. King’s Quest A Knight to Remember is told through narration by King Graham, the protagonist of many of the King’s Quest games, tells his granddaughter Gwendolin (daughter of Graham’s son Alexander, protagonist of King’s Quest 6) about this adventures before he was king. The Princess Bride is told through the same lens, but this is arguably a very small similarity, so lets move on.
2. A crazy old couple of potion makersAnother small, similarity, both King’s Quest and Princess Bride feature a couple of old potion makers who help out the protagonist. Like I said, it’s a small similarity, but the resemblance is there.
3. The Fencing sceneI didn’t actually catch this one until I rewatched the movie. When Westley fights Indigo in a sword fight, at the very beginning they exchange a few swings, where they both dodge the other. In one of the ending’s to King’s Quest episode 1, Gwendolin and her cousin recreate this opening sequence. Now this is undeniably a reference, but it really hasn’t been an over dose of references so far, but this last one really takes the cake.
4. Wallace ShawnIf you’ve seen The Princess Pride, you know that Wallace Shawn plays a dumpy little man who claims to be the smartest man in the world, and he challenges Westley to a battle of wits, where he poisons some goblets of wine. He also loves to use the word Inconceivable. Now in King’s Quest, Wallace Shawn is a voice actor, who plays a dumpy little knight, who you have to face in a battle of wits, which include drugged goblets of juice. Oh and as one more small reference, he says the line “That’s incon…siderate!”

If King’s Quest had just the fencing scene, the inconsiderate line, and the story telling lens, I probably would have caught the references to Princess Bride and would have just written it off as kinda funny. But this…this is ridiculous. To practically recreate the entire scene with Wallace Shawn just shows a lack of creativity. It’s not cute anymore, it’s not funny, it’s just astonishing how unoriginal they were with this in the game.

King’s Quest a Knight to Remember is still a good game, and I’m looking forward to future episodes, but I really hope they don’t just recreate the entire movie, or rip off another movie entirely.