"You'll never find a worse hive of scum and villainy! Spoken in Monty Pythonese, this is the audio phrase used to test your sound card during the setup of SCI's zany new adventure Kingdom O'Magic. This sets the tone for the immensely tongue in cheek climate present at all times in one of the funniest games you're likely to encounter - at least among recent releases.
Although it pretends to be an ordinary run o' the mill Adventure game, Kingdom O' Magic bursts forth with shameless parody and satire of everything from Jack and the Beanstalk to Lord of the Rings to Elvis impersonators.
At the opening of the game you meet the Narrator, a small monk-like character with two tufts of pointy yellow hair. And you are stuck with him throughout - not too terrible really, although he does sport a barbed tongue ready to smite you with sarcasm in an instant. His first order of business is to present you with the game's All-Crucial Choices. You may choose to play one of two characters: Thidney, the Lizard Bloke, or Shah-ron, the Girlie. Thidney, the Lizard Bloke is just that - a simply rendered lizard bloke - who hasn't any genitals. Really. When he attempts to purchase condoms in the bathroom at the Jolly Mutant, the Narrator chimes in with, "But you haven't any genitals." Shah-ron...well, Shah-ron looks like a scantily clad Barbie in crimson with hip boots and some way-overzealous implant surgery. If she wasn't a rendered graphical character, we'd spend hours wondering how she manages not to fall over forward. She does spend a lot of time bending over forward however, her back to the player, and the view is, well, interesting...and we are once again lucky that she is a rendered graphic. Non-graphic would be too graphic in this case.
The next choice you will make is which quest to play. You see, there are three possible quests: The Traditional Quest, The Bizarre and Slightly Twisted Quest, and the Magnificent 7-11 Quest. The traditional quest is a traditional quest with many traditional things to do, such as find the dragon and steal his treasure. In the Bizarre and Slightly Twisted Quest, you must find the Lost Lava Lamp of the Ancients and re-light it, and the Magnificent 7-11 Quest sends you out to rescue the Slurpee-in-distress. Well, not really. Actually you must recruit a bunch o'hard lads (seven to be exact) and defend Flake Town against invasion.
Once a character and a quest are chosen, you begin your adventure in Flake Town, the central town o'the Kingdom O'Magic. There are many other locations to visit such as the Magic Toilet in Rhitegard, the Ninja Bakery in Minar Tragedy and the Very Public Toilet outside of Rivendull, home of Don Elrondo, a sort of Elven Godfather IV.
The characters are a truly outlandish bunch ranging from the Orcs (all of whom have really disgusting names like Boil-Face and Splay-Cheeks and Diarrhea) to the formidable and fearsome Timmy the Dog. You will unplug toilets, steal Ninja French bread, and do battle with the imposing and dreadful Gingerbread Man #3. The rendered graphics are a bit on the primitive side, but the delightful style of this animation works extremely well with the material.
Puzzles range from medium to difficult, and there is a somewhat lame Pac-man-esque arcade game which must be won in order to proceed. The puzzle tasks, if listed, would probably not peak one's interest to any great extent, but no matter. The real reason to love this product lies in its outrageous sense of humor. Of course it has to be compatible with your sense of humor (which hopefully exists).
SCI would like us to view this game as six quests for the price of one. You do the math. Stumped? Fine. That's 3 quests X 2 characters = 6 quests. The problem with this is that each quest shares many subquests with each other quest, and although each affords us a unique major objective, the dialog and character interactions are identical in most cases. Additionally, playing the same quest as another character has only a few different solutions specific to your character - not enough to make it worthwhile to attempt the same quest twice.
While Shah-ron may exude pulchritude, her voice actor does a pretty shabby job of pulling off the dialog's humor. My advice would be to play Thidney almost exclusively. After giving Shah-ron a try, you'll see what I mean. Her delivery just doesn't work. Thidney says the line and we fall out of our chairs. Shah-ron delivers the same line and...(stretching)...we yawn or say, "huh?" I have a sneaking hunch that the development team would have liked to write completely separate scenarios for all three quests and characters so that we wouldn't experience the repetition, or poorly tailored dialog. Probably, as always, the cry became, "To market! To market!" before anything more could be done, as the ebon-clad marketing execs, dollar signs in their eyes, twiddled their Snidely Whiplash moustaches, deadlines dancing in their heads.
Despite the game's British origin, it is jam packed with universal humor and some obviously American pop culture references. And although it may be a bit heavy handed with toilet humor, there is lots here for everyone - well, just about. Dotted with anachronisms, hyperbole and visual puns, Kingdom O'Magic is a journey straight into the absurd. It does not pass GO. It does not collect $200.00. It does not even cost $200.00...so what are you waiting for?
