Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness – This is the fourth game in the series, but the number doesn’t officially appear in the title. I think there was kind of a stigma on using numbers for too many sequels at the time. It seems to have worked out all right for Final Fantasy, however, and those aren’t even sequels in the traditional sense. And aren’t all shadows dark? I still call it Quest for Glory IV, even if that isn’t the official title. This is the installment with a lot of horror elements, and it takes place in the Eastern European country of Mordavia. The layout of the land is similar to that of the first game, with a small town that includes most needed amenities, and the rest of the map laid out on a grid.

Characters and events appear on specific screens, rather than general areas like in QfG3. There’s another garden planted by the half-fairy sorceress Erana that serves as a safe space, and there’s more detail on Erana’s background here.

Monsters show up from time to time, but they don’t seem to be quite as common as in earlier games. One sort you can run into is a vorpal bunny, which has also appeared in several other video game series.

The battle system this time is reminiscent of Street Fighter, involving jumping and walking across the screen rather than just attacking and defending. I found it more challenging, but there is usually a way to back an enemy into a corner so they won’t be able to fight back. I found the monsters with projectile weapons particularly troublesome, including the wraiths that only show up at night.

Baba Yaga is back in a setting more suited to her origins, and as before, she’ll help or hurt you depending on her mood.

Also reappearing is Ad Avis, who’s become a vampire, which means he’s now in the service of their leader Katrina.

They don’t get along, but they’re still working together to summon the eldritch creature Avoozl.

Katrina does have a soft spot for the hero, and seems to genuinely want to make connections. There are some beings from Slavic mythology, including a Rusalka who tries to trick you into drowning but is friendly enough after she fails, a Leshy who plays games and asks riddles, and two Domovoi.

And there are other characters more familiar from monster movies and the like. Interestingly, there are no werewolves in this setting, at least not in the sense in which they’re generally understood. There are, however, shapeshifting gypsies who can turn into wolves at will. The provider of healing potions this time is a Frankenstein-like mad scientist, Dr. Cranium, who is identified as the ancestor of Dr. Brain from some other Sierra games I’ve never played.

He doesn’t believe in magic despite being in a world where it’s quite common, and considers pizza to be the fifth classical element. And I suppose the grue goo he uses is a Zork reference. The townspeople, living in a place so full of monsters and curses, are suspicious of you at first, but can be brought around as you do things for them. There’s a trio of farmers who sort of carry on the tradition of comedians showing up in these games, one sounding like Rodney Dangerfield while the other two are apparently both Jack Nicholson impressions. The voice actors ad libbed quite a bit, so the spoken dialogue doesn’t always match the text that appears on screen. And there’s a castle guard who’s based on Boris Karloff. This game also continues the trend of gnomes in this series being jokesters, this time with a jester named Punny Bones who’s been cursed by Baba Yaga to lose his sense of humor. After he gets it back, his jokes don’t actually seem any better, but they’re more successful. He teaches you the funniest joke in the world (shades of Monty Python), which you have to use to distract Ad Avis.

I understand the fifth game is more of an action role-playing game, and I’m generally not very good at those, so we’ll see how far I can get. King’s Quest VIII is another one I feel I should play but I’ve heard is more action-oriented.

Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender – I got this game as part of a package. It was made by MicroProse, which was mostly a strategy game company, but also did a few adventure games. This one appears to be pretty heavily inspired by Space Quest, with a clumsy, clueless hero exploring a strange planet with a lot of comical dialogue.

Yeah, Sierra had just done this bit in SQ4, but it’s still entertaining.
It’s a bit raunchier than that series generally is, though.

When I play games like this, I usually try to examine as many items as possible. This does result in some useful information and a fair number of jokes, but there are a lot of things that just result in Rex getting bored of looking at them. It might have worked better if you just couldn’t interact with those things, because I got bored of reading those non-descriptions. I played it on easy mode, which as far as I can tell means that a few of the more complex puzzles are simplified quite a bit. The plot is that Rex is being paid to find a vase on a hidden planet that had undergone a literal war between the sexes.

The women had wiped out all the men, which left them with no way to reproduce. They created a device that could temporarily switch someone’s gender, but they don’t like to use it. The population has also become stratified, with the technologically advanced women living underground and the others in huts on the surface.

Not surprisingly, there are a lot of jokes based on gender stereotypes. One of the surface residents determines that Rex is really a man because he knows about tools but not about place settings. (Personally, I don’t know about either one.) His spaceship is a total mess with rotten food in the refrigerator. The ruined city of Machopolis (like “macho,” not ratios in air travel) has streets called Powertool Lane and Biceps Way. Rex has to turn himself into a woman at one point in order to access certain areas, and is rather disturbed by it.

There are a lot of ways to die, but the game conveniently starts you back right before it happened rather than making you revert to your last save. And there are two separate occasions where you have to shove something into a dead animal. It’s all right to play, pretty standard for a point-and-click adventure of the time, but my main complaint is that it’s pretty small. There aren’t very many locations to explore, and there’s not a lot of variety in the humor either. It is interesting that, as in Monkey Island 2, the game is mostly a flashback being relayed to someone by the hero.

I’ve just started playing Dragonsphere, another adventure game from the same company, that has a quite similar interface but a different style.