King's Quest V

STORY / GAMEPLAY
King Graham wanders along, picking some flowers in the forest. But suddenly realizes that his castle was...missing! At this time he meets an owl who explains how an evil wizard has destroyed the castle, and so sprinkles King Graham with fairy dust., allowing him to fly to the land of Serenia, in order to defeat the evil wizard.
The entire game is played via a cursor and few pop-up icons system. Movement is simply a matter of pointing to a position on-screen, and the hero will work his own way around the scenery (much like Monkey Island).
The game is actually small. This is obviously partly down to the use of detailed hand-painted graphics in every location. There are plenty of locations to visit, and the graphics are well drawn. But after a while you really do start to lose interest. This isn't helped by the stupid plot (princes, damsels and distress), which may not sound like much of a bad thing, but when compared to the freshness and interest of the Indiana Jones adventure series, does tend to make things drag a bit. In general, gameplay is still of the classic fetch quest and inventory collection/combination variety King's Quest is known for. But it's more the tedious (and seemingly endless) amount of things you have to do to accomplish a task! Some puzzles are easy, some are more difficult, solving some of them depends on your ability to observe things. I also recommend to play it on at least 020 (A1200) or 030 CPU machine since the animations are dead slow on stock A500 at many places, thus gameplay is too slow (except if you could afford an accelerator card back in the days). Hard disk is also more than highly recommended, as swapping floppy-disks is a nightmare here.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The graphics (that Sierra converted from VGA to the Amiga hardware), the sound and the whole presentation trip are up to the standards of what Amiga owners expected back in 1991, and a big upgrade to its predecessors. Graphics detail is gorgeous using (the default) 32 colors on screen, with ambient animations, such as running water, gratuitous passersby in the town, smoke coming out of chimneys etc. Although the highly reduced number of colors used in the Amiga version (compared to the 200+ colors used in the PC version), the game here looks fine. But using so many highly detailed hand-painted graphics loaded by continuously swapping its 8 Amiga floppies, was a nightmare back then, and to afford a hard-disk in the early 90's with an A500 for fast loading, was too expensive.