Loses What Made the PC Game Great

User Rating: 2 | King's Quest: Quest for the Crown SMS

King's Quest: Quest for the Crown on the Sega Master System is a bare bones port of the classic adventure PC game. This game does keep the key elements from the original, such as using interactive graphics, the game layout, and the puzzles. However, it loses a lot of the details that really gave life to the game and adds in frustrating elements that really make it unbearable.

I hated this game. The game has the same core design as the original PC game, so a lot of the puzzles are generally needed to be solved with outside knowledge or a good guidebook. While I don't agree with that design philosophy, it was counterbalanced in the PC by having good text and commands to encourage world-building, exploration, and immersion. Those world-building elements are not present in the Sega Master System port. This port also features really frustrating controls / design. The most obvious of that is staircases. When you encounter stairs in this game, you'll quickly find out that if you don't follow the exact contour of the staircase...you die. This makes the stairs the biggest execution hurdle in the entire game. These are just a couple of my complaints, I have a list of them. However, for brevity just take my word for it. I played this game so you don't have to. Avoid it at all costs. You'll have a much better time trying this out on the PC than this disaster of a port.