King’s Quest Chapter 4: Snow Place Like Home had a bit of a rough release. Now that it’s playable for everyone, how is the fourth chapter in the rebooted King’s Quest? Too many puzzles bog down a story that is already pushing gameplay aside. With such an emphasis on story this time around, even that ends up feeling rushed.
Where we last left King Graham, he was deciding which woman he would make his queen. Fast-forward a bit, and Graham and his wife (whomever you got married to at the end of Chapter 3) now have two beautiful babies. Everything is right with the world, until an old foe reappears to steal away your son, Prince Alexander.
Fast-forward again, and it’s now 18 years later. Just as you and your wife decide it’s time to move on, Alexander comes bursting through the castle doors. There’s no better way to celebrate his return than to go on a family vacation.
With such an interesting story, it feels like Chapter 4 really had to shoehorn gameplay in to break up the cutscenes. And unfortunately, that gameplay can be pretty hit and miss. There are a TON of puzzles in Snow Place Like Home, to the point where it becomes part of the plot. These puzzles also come in two varieties: incredibly simple and annoying.
The simple puzzles are kind of boring, since there’s so little challenge. Taking a page out of The Witness, most of these involve lining everything up right, then walking a path to the door. If that sounds dull, you’re right.
When the puzzles start getting more complex, they don’t really get harder, they just get more annoying to complete. For example, one somewhat tricky puzzle involves stacking luggage into a carriage. While the difficulty of the puzzle is fine, the fact that every movement results in fairly long audio clips of Graham grunting, which take multiple button presses to skip, gets old fast.
Another puzzle involved climbing between three different levels, which means you have to press the action button over twenty times just to get from the top to the bottom. If you mess up the puzzle at all, expect much more climbing in your future.
The pacing also felt kind of strange. The story is told in bigger chunks than previous chapters, meaning you’ll be sitting around waiting longer between stretches of puzzles. That is, unless there are odd conversations that happen during the puzzles, breaking the gameplay flow.
Also, some major story questions are simply not addressed. You’d think for all Graham’s talk about being a good father, he’d actually take the time to speak to his son about what happened for the first 18 years of his life. This kid probably needs major therapy, not a family vacation, to make things better.
There also seem to be fewer major decisions in this chapter. While it’s cool to see some already-made decisions play out in lines of dialogue or different characters in different places, this chapter didn’t seem like I ever had to stop and decide how I wanted the game to play out. It was all very straightforward.
That being said, the story is still interesting, and the “present day” story with old King Graham has some twists and turns to it. The voice acting is top-notch as always, and performances feel genuine. Chapter 4 ends with a nice tease into Chapter 5, and there’s even a bit of a cliffhanger right at the end. Thankfully, The Odd Gentlemen have announced that the King’s Quest story will be wrapped up by the end of the year, so there isn’t too much longer to wait.
So what do you think? Are you interested in knowing how the King’s Quest reboot will end? Did you find the puzzles as annoying as I did? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
