Requires: 030 Macintosh or better; 256-color monitor; CD-ROM Drive; 4 MB RAM. To play faster and install to a Hard Drive, 20 meg HD Space.
Protection: None
 
I remember my initial reaction to MYST was very similar. I’ve never been that hot and heavy a fan of Sierra games – though I’ve enjoyed them most of their translations to the Mac had left me rather cold.
From the opening, running the introduction, you realize King’s Quest VII has done something no other game is capable of doing: it has brought Disney-like animation to a playable screen. In fact, the introduction should rightfully be called an opening number; I was almost sorry other songs were not performed in the interims between “chapters” of the story.
My hat – hell, my entire closet of chapeaus – is off to Sierra. Roberta Williams, who has long been a designer of note, has melded her talents with writer Lorelei Shannon and a fine crew of animators, programmers and voice artists to produce something quite extraordinary and beyond the pale. I had friends fighting me for play time over the computer in order so that they could get a chance to play this game. Its enchanting, entertaining, humorous, fun at different levels, breathtaking in its animation skills, and suitable for all ages of play. King’s Quest VII is a major achievement.
The Opening Number. The storyline has a few unique features. For one, you are playing two characters, not just one: the mother/daughter team of Rosella and Valanice Davenport. Rosella is at marrying age, and like many good mothers, Valanice wishes her daughter to be wed to a good young man. (And, like most mothers, Valanice is a little blind to certain choices. Extolling on Prince Throckmorton’s virtues: “And he’s so smart. . . how many other young men conjugate Latin verbs as a hobby?”) But Rosella, wistfully gazing in a pool, sees the magic floating castle of Etheria. Drawn to it, she jumps in. Her mother, worried for her daughter, jumps in after her. Sucked down a vortex, a hand reaches out and steals Rosella away, as Valanice is deposited in an arid desert, alone, with only Rosella’s golden comb to remind her of her daughter.
Play goes in chapters, during which you alternate between playing Valanice and Rosella. Each becomes involved with the plotline in different ways, with Rosella for a period of time unaware that her mother is looking for her. Rosella and Valanice are very different women, with different reactions and different manners of handling problems. And how wonderful to see a game that has two strong feminine leads!
 
Interface. King’s Quest has evolved its interface and improved on many of its ideas over time. You still have a pointer (in this case, a magic wand) that will change as it goes over something you can interact with – either it will sparkle (meaning you can touch, take, manipulate, or talk to whatever it is passing over) or it will turn into a direction arrow (meaning you can walk in that direction. Your inventory is below you, always in view, which makes the manipulation of objects much easier than it used to be. Grab and object and put it on the stylized eye, and lo and behold, a 3-D window with the object appears! This is another cool new feature on KQVII – the ability to spin each object in the 3-D window. Some of them have manipulatible parts in the 3-D window, and in order to solve some puzzles you may have to change an object’s settings, open an object, or carefully examine an object to find something that comes off of the object.
If you have played through an area before, a familiar fast forward button appears below when a QuickTime movie plays, so you may click on that button and skip the sequence. (Do not do this if you’ve never seen the sequence – many clues are given in small talk interchanges). Also, if you click during a dialogue, you will skip to the next character’s lines.
There are a few minor gripes on the interface: KQVII has a highly non-standard saving routine. You can only have one saved game. If you quit threw the interface (click on the jewel on the right, click on Quit) it will save your game position; if you hit Command-Q, it will exit without saving. Command-S is unavailable. You can copy and rename a saved game to keep an older save available, but a simple save and save as option would have been nice.
For the most part, though, saving the game is not a major issue; KQVII gives you the sense of being able to explore (even do dumb things just to see what happens) because if you do something that kills you – and lots can kill you – you get a screen with the talking head of Rosella or Valanice chiding themselves, and offering you to start again just before you knocked yourself off. Sometimes what they say can be a gentle hint as well. I applaud KQVII for its choice in making the game much more playable and fun this way.
 
You can also, if all seems lost, start a new game at the beginning of any of the chapters. However, this is something of a tricky business. You won’t have all the inventory items you might have gotten from a previous section (you may have to go back and get some). And, as mentioned below, a few hours of playtest uncovered a rather heinous and glaring bug in the restart at chapter function.
One interface feature that kinda bombed was the optional scrolling feature. An interesting idea – rather than moving to one edge of the screen and then “appearing” in the next local, the scenery would scroll in a natural, fluid motion – or that’s the concept. But I found scrolling to be jerky and slow even on my Quadra 800, and repositioning the screen with the scrolling tool was a pain. It was one option that I tried briefly and immediately knew it was an idea, however good, whose implementation had not yet really been fully realized.
Bugs and Requirements. KQVII requires a prodigious amount of power to run at good levels. I’m off of a Quadra 800 and it ran fine; but I also copied the 20 megs of Hard Drive Program over. Although I encountered no installation bugs, many users on America Online have reported some problems with both 030 and Power Mac installations. Some of the Power Mac problems involve virtual memory, it seems. These bugs are probably common to the high-end CD-ROM venues, and as always, when purchasing a game that takes horsepower, drop any excess extensions if you are having problems.
More egregious is a programming flaw in Chapter Five. In Chapter Five (very late in the game), there is one area that you might enter where if you lack a particular item, you will be unable to leave that area. Since you are not killed by that action, the game does not let you restart before you enter. In effect, you are caught and need to restart before you made that mistake. Do not, like this reviewer, make the error of quitting out of the interface and saving the game at that position! (Command-Q yourself out!) This in and of itself is not the error, but an annoyance; the programming error was uncovered as a result of that sequence.
As a result of this reviewer screwing up his game late in level five, he decided to start a new game at chapter five in order to get back into it and finish his review. However, even though I duplicated all of the steps necessary to do everything I needed to, the game was caught in an endless loop. Let me call it the “Fates are confused” loop. The explanation goes like this:
At one point in chapter five, you must visit the Fates. They will tell you the first time you visit them that you must seek Mab, the Queen of Dreams. Without them telling you this, you cannot do the action that lets you see Mab. If you keep bugging the Fates, they will tell you “Child who can turn wood into flesh, seek your own way to Mab.”
However, if you start a new game in chapter five, the first time you visit the Fates they say to you, “Child who can turn wood into flesh, seek your own way to Mab” and throw you out – before they have told you to go see Mab. The problem is that the first dialogue – them telling you to see Mab – trips a flag that lets you go elsewhere and sleep. Without that flag tripped, you can visit the area where you’re supposed to sleep but will be unable to use the item to make you sleep unless the “fate flag” is tripped. Since the Fates in the restart at chapter five version think they have already given you this message, there is no way to go beyond this point if you restart at chapter five.
 
Lesson: do not start a new game at chapter five. And, be aware reaching technical support can be difficult at Sierra. While their net representative on America Online was very prompt at first giving me a reply – mind you, the wrong one, as she misinterpreted my problem and after my further explanation has not yet gotten back to me – calling tech support on the phone will drive you mad. You can go through an automated “most frequently asked question” menu which may or may not help you. I then waited 10 minutes to talk to a “level one technician” – a front-end person who knew the common answers but couldn’t answer my question. I then got shunted into the hold queue for an “advanced technician” – I actually waited on the phone for another solid 40 minutes. (Thank God for speakerphones so I could do something else while waiting. As this was a toll call, it was a very expensive bug report.) Lesson number two: Contact Sierra through online services for tech support. And don’t find any unique bugs.
In Summary. King’s Quest VII is a remarkable achievement. If it weren’t for the quirky saving feature, and the rather large bug I encountered, this would be a four and half-joystick game. But these problems are ones you are unlikely to hit – and what is more important is that King’s Quest VII is a fun, humorous, entertaining romp that deserves to be on every adventure gamer’s shelf. The animation is wonderful. The characterizations are memorable and entertaining. Play it yourself first, then if you have kids help them play through the harder parts but watch them enjoy the grand adventure. They may not get all the jokes – one of my favorites was talking to the three-headed carnivorous plant who with one very Audry-esque voice exclaimed in response to being told that it might die soon, “Baaa. . .by, we’re nihilistic foliage!” The land of ooga booga is a little over-influenced by Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas, but beyond this, the game is fresh, innovative, and marvelous fun. Go buy it!
Pros
• Best single animation effort in a game yet
• Grand fun to play
• Entertaining puzzles – some easy, come challenging
• Memorable characters and storyline
• Great introduction / opening number song
• Two strong female lead characters
• Better inventory handling
• Cool 3-D closeups of inventory items
Cons
• Bug in starting new from Chapter Five
• Quirky save game function; multiple saves not available
• Calling phone tech support at Sierra can test the patience of a monk
