This time of year is usually quite busy, with the return to school and hockey season going into full swing. By the end of the month, I’ll have a grand total of 1 day where I wasn’t in a rink. Thankfully I enjoy it! Still, it takes up a huge chunk of time. The neat side effect is that I’m quite a bit more physically active as a result, which is great for my health. It’s not super for my back mind you, that physio needs to continue so that I can get more than 4 hours of sleep a night…

I did miss out on the launch of Silksong, which depends on your perspective of ‘miss’. After years of waiting, a few weeks or months more doesn’t really change much in terms of expectations. In fact, it’s a larger benefit since some stability/balance patches are going to be deployed before I press the buy button. It’s on the list, and again the Steam Deck provides the near-perfect tool to play games I really enjoy.

Given the extremely sporadic game time, I’ve opted to get super nostalgic. I can remember the Christmas where I received Hero’s Quest (now called Quest for Glory). I’ve owned the anthology from GoG for a long time now, and the improvements to DOSBox are quite noticeable. Not to mention the slew of game patches provided since to address a wide range of bugs.

QFG1 takes only a few hours to get through, and I know I took weeks to get through it all as a kid. It is pure nostalgia. There’s a VGA option for point and click, though I honestly enjoy the very limited text parser option from Sierra.

QFG2 only offers EGA on GOG, but you can find a free VGA version through AGDi. In this one, the VGA version is quite a bit better, if only for the really painful map option present. It is quite a bit more linear than the first one, but it offers a much more interesting playground of things to do. You can see the devs were reaching here and got most of it done.

QFG3 is VGA, point and click, and relatively simple. This model was retro-actively applied to QFG1+2. I wrote my own mouse driver in order to play this game! It is substantially shorter / simpler than prior games and has quite a few bugs in it. The final area is amazing mind you, and quite a bit different than the content that precedes.

QFG4 is a big departure. Everything is voice acted and more cartoony. The combat model here is quite poor, but is entirely offset by the amazing writing. I played this on release but encountered soooooo many bugs I had to shelve it for years. While it has my favorite storyline by miles, the game is a challenge to get through.

QFG5 is, well, it’s a cap on the series. It’s 3D before 3D was a thing. It addressed dozens of plot points from the prior game. It had a ton of interesting lore bits, puzzles, and challenges. I bought it really close to release and played the heck out of it. It was an amazing capstone of 5 games across 9 years. That dev cycle is insane to write out for an RPG series.

It isn’t a stretch to say that the modern RPG has a ton owed to this series. Multiple character types, different solutions to puzzles, stats that go up with use, cross-game saves, dialogue trees, 3D characters…. Do you think games like Mass Effect would be around without this foundation?

Nostalgia is a heck of a thing and really speaks of a golden age of game design where bold ideas were common, whether they stuck or not. Glad GoG has so much to pick from.