5/6/2023 0 Comments Quest for infamy combatOne big reason is, unfortunately, its entire reason for existing - leading man Mister Roehm and his titular Quest for Infamy. So why doesn't it work as well as it feels like it should? And indeed, make no mistake, it is absolutely one of the best and most ambitious adventures in quite a while, indie or otherwise, especially if you're a fan of the original games. Aside from the truly wretched voice acting and production, where half the cast sound like they've never been near a microphone before and a good half of what's left should never be allowed to again, everything seems to be in place for Quest for Infamy to be both a modern successor to Quest for Glory and an indie classic in its own right. Quest for Infamy completely understands the big picture here, and the amount of work that went into it is genuinely impressive - the pathing, the animation, the sheer scale of the world a valley that takes in two sizeable towns and stretches out through deep atmospheric woods to mountains, caves and beyond, almost all with unique, lovingly painted backgrounds instead of just filling the map with a big grid of flip-flopped trees pretending to be forest. The overall story is the same for all of them, but the distractions on the way change dramatically. Faced with a challenge like a thick bush blocking the path, the Sorcerer might fly over it, the Rogue set it on fire, and the Brigand simply chop the damn thing down with his bastard sword. The Rogue for instance gets to join the local thieves' guild and raid the town's houses for goodies, while the Sorcerer spends much of the early game on a scavenger hunt for reagents to cast spells and the Brigand. Each class isn't simply given a different weapon and special attack either, but their own stories, locations the other characters might never see, and radically different puzzle solutions. The words 'labour of love' are horribly over-used, but there's really no other word for any adventure that dares to take on the Quest for Glory template - a hybrid of adventure and RPG that demands, just as a starting point, huge sprawling worlds, a hero with stats as well as stuff, shitty combat (it's traditional!) and at least three paths through the game to cater for fighters, wizards and thieves - here, Brigands, Sorcerers and Rogues. Playing it though, it's a wonder we got it at all. (And, technically, Quest for Glory 4.5, but the less said about that one the better.) only to just get pipped to the post by Heroine's Quest! Ouch. That makes it a riffing twenty-five years in the waiting, if not making. It's a satire of a series that had its last real hurrah back in 1993 (Quest for Glory IV, one of my favourite adventures ever), but which is closest in theme to the original, 1989's Hero's Quest. Quest for Infamy is what happens when a joke gets completely out of control the gaming equivalent of waking up one day with a headache and a fuzzy tongue to find that you actually own a pancake shop called Wholly Crepe and that this is a thing that has happened. But do the bad guys really have more fun? Here's Wot I Think. Hot on the trails of Heroine's Quest, with Mage's Initiation and the original creators' Hero-U: Rogue To Redemption still to come, Quest for Infamy wants to take a rather less heroic approach to its mix of RPG and adventure. Isn't it just typical? You wait sixteen years for a new game that picks up where the Quest for Glory series left off, and suddenly four of them come along at once.
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