204: The Legend of Kyrandia

Number 204
(8.4 points)
The Legend of Kyrandia
1993: 80

With point-and-click adventures being the hot thing at the time, Westwood Studios decided to try their hand, with mixed results.

An evil court jester with magical powers has taken over the kingdom, and you take the role of the late King's son Brandon. You must find the three Mystics who can help you defeat the jester and restore peace to the land. Gameplay is done with a simple interface, wherein you can click on items, pick them up, and use them on other objects. This is far from the SCUMM system in Lucasarts games, and the text interface of early Sierra adventures, with the main challenge being in the trial-and-error in solving puzzles.

First, the good. It looks wonderful, it's very well presented, and certainly makes use of the Amiga's graphics - though by this point, the PC had VGA as standard, which looked just about as good. On the negative side, do not play on a stock Amiga 500: nine disks, with constant swapping between them, is bad enough, but the loading and general gameplay is unbearably slow. Even with the WHDLoad version on a more powerful Amiga, the PC has a full-voice release which is easy to get nowadays. I can't say whether the game itself is all that great, since I ran out of patience.

Recommended TOSEC disk(s):
Legend of Kyrandia, The - Book One (1992)(Virgin)(Disk 1 of 9)[cr SR]
Legend of Kyrandia, The - Book One (1992)(Virgin)(Disk 2 of 9)[cr SR]
Legend of Kyrandia, The - Book One (1992)(Virgin)(Disk 3 of 9)[cr SR]
Legend of Kyrandia, The - Book One (1992)(Virgin)(Disk 4 of 9)[cr SR]
Legend of Kyrandia, The - Book One (1992)(Virgin)(Disk 5 of 9)[cr SR]
Legend of Kyrandia, The - Book One (1992)(Virgin)(Disk 6 of 9)[cr SR]
Legend of Kyrandia, The - Book One (1992)(Virgin)(Disk 7 of 9)[cr SR]
Legend of Kyrandia, The - Book One (1992)(Virgin)(Disk 8 of 9)[cr SR]
Legend of Kyrandia, The - Book One (1992)(Virgin)(Disk 9 of 9)[cr SR]