3.5/5 ★ – Jrdotan's review of King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow.

Often considered the best in the series, Kings quest VI was released to a massive acclaim in 1992 and its still often celebrated as one of the finest titles in the genre, one of the reasons for its massively positive reception being the changes on the writing quality due to the introduction of Jane jensen (a romance novelist) as lead writer in this project instead of Roberta williams. Instead of the often charming but very poor writing we got on previous games, the writing was much improved, now we got dialogues that have all that classic medieval accent and advanced vocabulary we are used to know from classic literatury, but not overly hard to get nor is it "forced", the story was also a good thing that flourished out of this. Now, the main objective that moves the story is rather weak, the whole romance between cassima and alexander are indeed quite forced and it never feels organic, this + the overall abundance of "Love" being forced down your throat every now and then actually made me cringe. But the overall story revolves around a conspiracy revolving the whole setting, the land of the green isles, which was a place once united by its strong and fair law but after the death of both queen and king of the continent, however, the place felt apart with the isles starting to fight each other for an unkown reason. As you explore you will find out what is the reason behind all of this, then the plot becomes stronger and quite epic in a way that the previous games never got close to be, which is only enhanced by the strong voice acting in the game, such as Robby benson (the beast from disney´s princess and the beast) as Prince alexander or Bill Ratner (Known for acting as Flint in G.I Joe) as the narrator doing voices for the game The voice acting wasnt the only significant improvement either, with graphics and the overall art style being a lot more detailed, with moving backgrounds and a much better use of color compared to KQV, the character models are still quite low res and the animations for the movements in such are actually less smother than what we got in KQV but nothing too big to make you repulsed by it. As far as the gameplay is concerned, we still have the same point and click interface based on icons that KQV used, which is a good thing as it was not only more intuitive than the parser games, but also more intuitive than what lucas arts had with their verb system as you could easily just swap the actions by right clicking the thing you want or use the last item you selected as there is a quick acess feature in the hotbar What changed considerably in regards to gameplay was how puzzles and items were integrated to this game. see, the real problem with KQV (and a lot of sierra games in general) are that theres a whole lot of hard locks in those games, items generally can be picked in very specific situations and often puzzles dont make much sense such as the infamous cheese puzzle in KQV in which the player had to figure it out that using a cheese in a magical machine would somehow give magical powers to a broken magic wand. KQ VI´s puzzles are more logical and often are more satisfying to solve, some even have multiple solutions because yes, this game is somehow non- linear, not only by presenting the option to wander around the map and solve a lot of puzzles out of order, but by presenting optional puzzles, two paths to the main story and multiple endings based on lots of different factors The dead ends are still a thing tho and they can be annoying, you can very often find that an item you hadnt picked up previously or a character you didnt talk to before you entered in a place make it impossible to finish, hence why the game recommend you to save after reaching in every island by the first time, some of those dead ends are highlighted by the game in dialogue but some arent and overall this and the fact you can very easily die in this game, make it rather challenging (not KQ3´s level of challenge tho), as an example, i had to redo a lot of sections and think a lot on what i had to do in order to beat the game for the first time, it took 2 weeks and i got one of the weakest endings, then i came back, tried again and paid attention to puzzles i didnt solve in the first time, saved a lot and finally got a much more satisfying ending, it felt good to end the story even if i had to endure a lot. Thats the overall feeling with KQ VI. If you can endure the often cringe romance and the dead ends that are still in the game you will get a pretty satisfying and challenging adventure game that will feel epic to play throught, which make it still worthy playing after all those years. RANK 7/10