Hero's Quest: Final Rating

In-game, the saurus didn't look quite that big.

Hero's Quest: So You Want to Be a Hero
United States
Sierra On-Line (developer and publisher)
Released 1989 for DOS, 1990 for Amiga and Atari ST
Re-released in 1992 as Quest for Glory: So You Want to Be a Hero

Date Started: 20 November 2012
Date Won: 24 November 2012
Total Hours: 12 (two wins)
Difficulty: Easy (2/5)
Final Rating: 53
Ranking at Time of Posting: 62/71 (87%)

Blogging about Hero's Quest has been a unique experience. Every other game I've played for this blog, my postings were just behind my playings, and when I won the game, I wrote my last posting and gratefully moved on to the next one. But with Hero's Quest, I won the game in my first 8-hour marathon session and it took me six postings to catch up in text what I'd done already in gameplay.

As you all saw, my first ending wasn't quite satisfactory, so I played a second time with a similar character and did much better. After that, I spent a lot of time just screwing around, compiling material for screen shots and the two amateur "montage" videos I put on YouTube.

Part of the reason for drawing out the game was that I was supposed to be playing in tandem with Trickster at The Adventure Gamer. But more important, I didn't really have any incentive to move on; I was enjoying myself. Hero's Quest isn't my favorite game, or even the game I've liked most since starting this blog, but more than any other game so far, I really felt like I was "playing." I don't mean "playing" as in "playing a CRPG." I mean "playing," like a kid playing with a toy. I can't remember the last time I fired up a game and thought, "Let's try to kill every creature in the game without saving in between" (that video never made it to production) or "let's figure out all the ways that we can die."

This was clearly the inspiration for "Once More, With Feeling." (Charles won't get this reference because he doesn't know who Willow is, if you can believe such a thing.)

One of the things I didn't really cover during my in-game postings was all the fun and creative ways that you can die in the game (or otherwise get the game to come to an end), other than simply being killed by monsters. The ones I experienced include:

• Getting caught while burglarizing houses
• Trying to kill the thieves in the alley or Bruno at the gate (they use poison daggers)
• Trying to kill the castle guards
• Falling off a variety of things while your hit points are too low
• Sleeping in an unsafe area (you get eaten by a "night gaunt," this game's version of a grue)
• Trying to harm the fairies in the mushroom circle at night (they dance you to death)
• Trying to kill the white stag, then visiting the dryad (she turns you into a stag)

• Going to Baba Yaga's place and saying "HUT OF BROWN NOW SIT DOWN" while standing under it
• "PICK NOSE" when lockpicking skill is low
• Ringing the bell on the front gate of the bandit fortress
• Falling in any of the numerous traps in the bandit fortress, or failing to negotiate the action bit in the dining hall
• Trying to kill the giant
• Walking too close to Barnard when he's in bear form

 

• Not responding to Baba Yaga after she's turned you into a frog (or saying "no" to her mandrake quest)
• Being too slow with the dispel potion when encountering Elsa in the fortress
• Eating mushrooms more than once
• Visiting the graveyard at night without protection
• Falling into the open grave in the graveyard
• Buying and drinking "Dragon's Breath" at the tavern

Each of these deaths is accompanied by some humorous end-game text that describes what you did wrong (if it wasn't obvious).

A YouTube user named "MrWhitman" has collected all of the ways to die in all of the games, although he uses the Quest for Glory VGA remake. I tried my own hand at another montage video, but I screwed it up a bit. I didn't realize it was capturing the system sound during the first minute or so, and DOSBox had gotten stuck on something, so there's this constant drone in the background until the music starts. Nonetheless, I don't feel like remaking it, so here it is if you want to watch [Edit: no it's not. I had copyrighted music in the video, which caused problems.]

The different ways that you can die in the game are simply a microcosm for the huge amount of effort that the developers clearly put into thinking of everything the player might do (and screw up). Rarely did I encounter any kind of message saying "I don't know what you mean." The developers seemed to have looked at each screen and thought "What are all the things that the player will try to do here?" and then created scripts for them. There's even a series of humorous messages when you swear.

Let's get on to the GIMLET:

1. Game World. Well done. You don't have much of a sense of the world outside of Spielburg Valley, but the Valley itself, and all the characters, are original, thematically consistent, memorable, and interesting. There's a solid history behind the current troubles, and it's fun to slowly unravel the history as you solve the quests. Nothing is very deep or serious, of course, which I generally regard as a negative, but the whimsy seemed to work okay here. As in most adventure games, the game world is persistent: actions you take leave a mark on the valley, sometimes in ways that come back to haunt you (hint: don't try to kill the white stag or the spore-spitting plants). I have to save perfect scores for the games that really go deep with their lore, but this game deserves a relatively high score of 7.

2. Character Creation and Development. One of the stronger parts of the game, and where it really gets its CRPG credentials. The initial choice between fighter, mage, and thief has more serious consequences than the average game (partly because it's single-player), and you have extensive customization abilities with attributes and skills. I loved the skill-development part of the game. We've had games that base their skill development on use before (Dungeon Master, Wasteland, The Magic Candle), but I think this game has the most useful selection of skills so far, and the most variety in how you can grind and develop them. You can get your weapon use skill pretty high, for instance, without having to kill a single foe: just play Dag-Nab-It, use the archery range, or practice with the weapon master. Similarly, you can develop strength and vitality through actions as diverse as climbing, running, and heaving a stone door open and closed. It's shockingly quick to get your character up to some pretty high values, but the game itself is pretty short, so it doesn't seem like an unfair advantage. I can see why Andy_Panthro wanted to go for a "perfect 100" game; I was tempted myself.

My winning character. I like the way the thief dramatically cloaks himself.

I particularly like the way different classes have different natural approaches to encounters. Need to get a key from a kobold wizard? You can attack him (fighter), sneak up to him (thief), or cast a "fetch" spell on it (mage). I don't want to oversell this because there are a lot of puzzles (Baba Yaga, the fairies, the dryad) that seem to only have one solution, but it's just enough to make me want to play the game again as different characters. And I can't think of many CRPGs that you can end without having killed anyone, and yet attributes still make a difference.
 

There are a couple of drawbacks. The thief's burglary missions seem out of touch with the "hero" theme of the game. The game could have offered a straight "evil" option (i.e., join the bandits and become the "Scourge of Spielburg") or given you the ability to burglarize truly odious people (instead of the nice sheriff and the old woman), and I would have appreciated some more diversity in character options, like sex and basic appearance (I don't know why, but I hate playing characters with long blond hair). But all in all, you have more options for development and role-playing here than in many straight CRPGs. Score: 7.

3. NPC Interaction. It's very Ultima-esque with its keywords, and I actually prefer this version, where you have to read the dialogue and ask about the right things, to the VGA remake, where all the terms are given for you to click on. The NPCs are memorable, with unique personalities, so much so that when some of them show up again in later games, you're actually glad to see them.

Not this guy, though. This guy was a jerk.

Most important, you have to talk with NPCs to understand the lore of the game and the details of your quest (not to mention to get a perfect score at the end). I suppose you could blow through the game without asking Wolfgang about every head on the wall, but what kind of player does that? That said, the conversations are also a little shallow on the hero's end, with essentially no dialogue options or possibilities for role-playing. Score: 6.

Interactions like this are a lot of fun,and important to understand the game's story.

4. Encounters. Lots to talk about here. The "encounters" in this game, like most adventure games, take the form of puzzles. You could blaze through a lot of them--the giant, the minotaur, the troll in the secret passage--by just pulling out a sword and fighting, but to get full credit, you have to approach them with a little finesse.

As I noted previously, you have a series of options to most of them that depend on your character class. This category has an element that says "game features scripted encounters with opportunities for role-playing," and I didn't realize until now that I've always thought of such role-playing as alignment-specific, not class-specific. This game offers a lot of opportunities for the latter but not the former. I suppose I can't complain: right on the box it says, "So you want to be a hero."

There are two ways to resolve this.

The puzzles, I must say, tend on the easy side. I don't play a lot of adventure games, so I don't know how they compare to the average, but in Hero's Quest you have a limited enough selection of items and options that you almost always know what to do. The only times I got tripped up involved a) puzzles that you have to revisit a screen at a particular time to activate, or b) timed encounters. I didn't like the timed encounters. The bit with the three stooges in the bandit fortress is the most egregious, but there are a few others. In Baba Yaga's hut, for instance, you have to answer her in a brief window of time or she cooks you. When you knock on the door of 'Enry the 'Ermit, you have a few seconds to get out of the way or get knocked off his ledge. The problem with these encounters is that it's not always clear when the game is waiting for your input. And of course the bandit fortress is only solvable through trial-and-error.

On the monsters, they're interesting and well-described, and many of them are original (I particularly like the cheetaur), but in practice they're distinguished mostly by their graphics and how hard they hit. None of them behave differently from the others once combat is actually joined.

A timely use of my dagger makes baby antwerps out of the one large one.

 
This category also has a bit about respawning, of which I'm pleased to say there's plenty in this game. You never lack opportunities for grinding. This is rare for both adventure games and hybrids. (Beyond Zork, for instance, had a fixed number of enemies.) Score: 5.

5. Magic and Combat. As a hybrid, the game doesn't do so well in this important CRPG category. Even a character with skills in everything has a very limited selection of activities in the game's action combat system: attack, dodge, parry, cast a spell, or escape. Some characters might only have two of these actions. Parry and dodge don't work very well, so combat generally comes down to thrusting at the enemy until he dies. Since every enemy pretty much acts the same in combat, there are no "tactics" to speak of.

I do give it some credit for allowing you to toss rocks and daggers, or cast flame dart spells, at enemies when they first approach, but that's all that I can say about combat that's really good. The ability to drink potions while in combat would have been much appreciated.

Solving the puzzle in Erana's Peace to get the spell scroll hidden beneath.

 
I didn't play as a mage, so it's hard to comment directly on the magic system, but I messed around with it enough to realize that it's not very complicated. There are seven spells in the game--zap, flame dart, open, fetch, calm, trigger, and dazzle. [Later edit: Whoops! I forgot about one: "detect magic." Thanks, Zenic.] You get "zap" automatically if you choose a mage; flame dart, open, and fetch can be purchased from Zara; the last three are obtained as puzzle rewards. Except for "zap" and "flame dart," the spells are generally about solving puzzles. The spells are treated like separate skills, so your skill with them increases with use, as does your maximum mana pool. I hear that "flame dart" performs pretty well at high levels. Score: 3.

Chester the mage "fetches" the nest.

6. Equipment. Another CRPG staple where this game falls a little short. You have a very small selection of non-puzzle equipment: rations, potions, and daggers and rocks to throw. Everything else is the solution to a puzzle. You have no opportunity to upgrade your beginning weapon (the thief never gets anything better than a dagger; the fighter keeps his first broadsword), and your armor upgrade is limited to replacing your leather with chainmail. I forgot to mention food during my posting: the game forces you to eat a meal every day, but you start with 5 rations and food is otherwise plentiful enough that it's essentially a non-issue. Score: 2.

Chester's final inventory.

7. Economy. The game does have an economy, unlike most adventure games and even a few CRPGs, and there are things to buy, including the aforementioned chainmail upgrade, a thief's tool kit, rations, spells, and potions (if nothing else, healing and vigor potions are always useful). The weapon master takes a gold piece for each training session if you want to develop your skills that way. You're rewarded with gold and silver for solving quests, and for the time you're saving up for that chainmail upgrade, each pile of silver pieces you find on a corpse (or get from the thieves' giuldmaster when you beat him at Dag-Nab-It) is pretty sweet. Once you rescue Barnard, though, you're pretty set economically. I wouldn't have minded if there was more stuff to buy. On the other hand, the game is over quickly enough that you don't notice the effects of the limited economy. Score: 4.

Looting a bandit corpse.

8. Quests. As with Pool of Radiance, I like how you're not trying to save the world here, but rather just solve a series of local problems and...well, become a hero. Rescuing Elsa seems to be the "main quest" in the sense that it triggers the end-game sequence. In this sense, the main quest has only one outcome. But there are a few side quests (rescuing Barnard, driving off Baba Yaga, collecting the healer's reagents, finding the healer's ring) that contribute to the overall score and the end-game text. I like that they're not mandatory. Many adventure games feel like a huge Rube Goldberg device, where some instigating event leads you predictably down a path to a fixed end, but Hero's Quest (within a limited game world) seems more flexible than most. Score: 6.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. I continue to find the EGA era my graphically least favorite. In the CGA and monochrome eras, things were less graphically advanced, but at least you could see distinct objects. When VGA came along, it created much sharper images. EGA, stuck between the two, creates screens in which I have a lot of trouble seeing objects, or making out what certain objects are supposed to be, or distinguishing between objects and shadows. My colorblindness is undoubtedly a factor here. Still, I could see why the developers felt a VGA remake was in order.

The music in this game was a lot of fun. The main theme is composed and memorable, and throughout the game, you get variations on the theme as you visit different locations: slow, pizzicato, and creepy when you visit Baba Yaga, triumphant and major-scale when you solve the main quest. There's even a little Arabian version at the very end, serving as a preview for the next game. There are leitmotifs throughout the game, including wandering through the forest, fighting combats, visiting Erana's Peace, and committing burglary.

The other sound effects are less compelling. They are rare and scattered, and absent in places that you would expect them, such as delivering and receiving blows. I had constant emulator issues (not the developers' faults, of course) in which DOSBox would get stuck on the last note played while leaving an area, and in which the sound volume varied considerably between areas, so even though I liked the music, I generally played with the sound off.

The commands are intuitive and easy to memorize. There's a menu at the top of the screen that pops up when you hit ESC, but the developers gave everything an easy-to-remember keyboard shortcut. I did have a few interface issues, though. Sometimes the game would refuse to allow me to leave a screen or enter a building unless I toggled my mode (sneak, walk, run). It's way too easy when walking to hit some single pixel of a bush or stalactite and be unable to continue (particularly annoying when you're being chased). There's one combat sequence in which the game mysteriously departs from the regular combat interface and creates some confusion. Other little quirks along these lines sometimes inhibited smooth playing.

Balancing some of these problems, I give a lot of credit to the attention given to the text-based inputs.
There's nothing more frustrating, when playing a text-based game, than when you know what to do but you can't get the game to understand you. But here, the developers accounted for almost every contingency. When you're charging the bandit fortress while arrows are raining down on you, you don't want a parser that makes a lot of distinctions between CLIMB LOGS and CLIMB OVER LOGS. In this case, they both work, as do CLIMB TREE, JUMP OVER TREE, VAULT, and other combinations of these verbs, prepositions, and nouns. If you're on a screen with an enemy and type THROW DAGGER, it assumes (sensibly) that you want to throw it at the enemy. This was very refreshing. Score: 5.

10. Gameplay. Here's where Hero's Quest really shines. The game bucks a lot of adventure games by being mostly non-linear in between a fixed start position and a scripted endgame. It is extremely replayable thanks to this non-linearity, the differences in character classes, and the "scoring" system that encourages you to explore every facet of the game. (Evidence of this is that it's the only game so far in this blog that I have immediately and enjoyably replayed after winning.) I might fault it for being a little too short. I say this because the character development is so satisfying that I wish there was more to do with the skills I've spent so much time developing (but, of course, there's a sequel!). Because of the lack of combat tactics and the lack of complexity to the puzzles, I also have to fault it for being a little too easy. But both "too short" and "too easy" are significantly preferable to "overstays its welcome" and "frustrating," which I find myself writing about a lot of games. Score: 8.

As I suspected, the final score of 53 is a bit lower than what is reflective of my actual enjoyment of the game (a fate that also befell Pirates! with a score of 48), but it's still a good score, tying the game with Ultima IV, Starflight, Wasteland, and several others. If it still seems low, keep in mind that the GIMILET is meant to rank CRPGs specifically and not "enjoyment" in general. If combat tactics, gold, and equipment are your bread and butter, it is inescapable that you will find Hero's Quest wanting.

If you don't care so much about these traditional CRPG elements, forget the score and just listen to my textual "final rating": Hero's Quest is a near-perfect CRPG-adventure game hybrid, and the beginning of a series that only gets better. If it sounds like you would like this kind of game at all, don't miss out on the chance to play it.

You might, however, want to play the VGA remake, under it's new name, instead. The graphics and sound are inescapably better, there are a few additions, and the only reasons I can think to prefer Hero's Quest are that (like me) you prefer the text parser to clicking on things, or you don't want to be jarred when you go from the VGA Quest for Glory to the EGA Quest for Glory II.

The first screens from the two versions.

With all that I've said about the game, is it any surprise that its reviews have been universally positive? In the January 1990 Computer Gaming World, Scorpia called it "a cute little gem that combines role-playing and adventuring with a healthy dose of humor to produce a game that is extremely fun to play" (she also noted that the puzzles are a bit easy). In September 1990, it got CGW's award for "Adventure Game of the Year" for its "interesting story, fascinating encounters, and intriguing puzzles." They revisited the game in November 1996  as one of the "150 Best Games of All Time." Every single review on MobyGames is deliriously positive: "The best Sierra game, period"; "The first and quite possibly best game I've ever played"; "A solid opening for a great adventure/RPG."

The game's notable wit and humor continues all the way through the end credits.

Fortunately, there's plenty to look forward to. There are four sequels, starting with Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire in 1990. I'll visit the VGA remake of Hero's Quest in 1992, around the same time I play Quest for Glory III: The Wages of War. Without remembering much about it, I remember Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness (1993) to be my favorite of the series. But even after I wrap up with Quest for Glory V: Dragon Fire in 1998, I can anticipate a Quest for Glory II remake 10 years later and, of course, the Coles' newest project: Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption, which made its Kickstarter goal just as I was getting started with Hero's Quest.

I'm also intrigued to try 1991's HeroQuest, based on the Milton-Bradley board game that forced Hero's Quest to change its name to Quest for Glory.

Oh, after all this, I still want to play a little more. What kind of end-game message do you get if  you rescue Elsa but you didn't free Barnard? If you kill Barnard? What if you go to Baba Yaga's hut with the magic mirror without doing the mandrake quest the first time? If you eat the dryad's magic acorn does it create a "walking dead" scenario? Wasn't there anything unique to do at the lake, the guard barracks, or the forest area with the hidden goblins? But alas, I must move on to the intriguingly-titled Don't Go Alone.