Space Quest V: Roger Wilco – The Next Mutation (Dynamix) - 1993

This review is part of the “Let’s Adventure!” series. See all reviewed games sorted by rating here.

This is the first game that I’m reviewing since I overhauled my scoring criteria in August of 2024

Space Quest V: Roger Wilco – The Next Mutation is a graphic adventure game, created by Dynamix, and released by Sierra On-Line for MS-DOS on February 5, 1993. The game is the fifth entry in the Space Quest series, and the first game to be only designed by Mark Crowe. The story, set within a spoof of the Star Trek franchise, focuses on players taking control of Roger Wilco, who achieves his dreams of becoming a star captain but winds up involved in saving the galaxy from a deadly threat posed by a man-made virus.

After traveling back and forth through time in the previous game, Roger Wilco is back in the Starfleet Academy, serving as both a cadet and a janitor. Cheating his way through the Starfleet Aptitude Test, Roger is finally given the rank of captain, his own ship (a garbage scow) and a mission: to explore strange new worlds (which no man in his right mind would explore), to seek out new life and new civilizations (which grew out of the massive amounts of trash Roger will collect on his way), to boldly go where no man has gone before. Step by step Roger will have to unveil a galaxy-wide biohazardous material dumping scheme, solve the mystery of the disappearance of a fellow Starfleet captain and his ship, and confront an agent of an old nemesis.¹

As I work my way through the games I’ve listed on this journey, Space Quest V was one I was more excited to replay as it has a lot of nostalgic value. I can still remember leafing through the Galactic Inquirer that came with the game. At that time I would still occasionally go out grocery shopping with my parents and would see the tabloids at the check outs with headlines like “Half-Man Half-Dog Baffles Doctors”, so the format here was immediately appealing.

Not really sure how well this stands up nowadays though…

The manual gives you a couple pointers on how to get started on your adventure, including getting to your classroom and cheating on the StarCon Aptitude Test. Once you sit down and start taking the test, there is a robot monitoring everyone to make sure no one’s cheating - so clearly the goal here is to cheat.

Roger can peer over to see the answers of the students to either side of him. If he gets caught, he’ll be ejected from the academy (into space) and it’s game over. If you copy from the wrong student you’ll get the wrong answers, so make sure you pick the smart kid to cheat off of (hint: the one with the big brain).

When you select the right student you’ll hear the tone play that indicates your score has gone up. This is a sure fire way to confirm you’ve done something correctly that will advance the plot or direction of the game.

The game is a mashup of all your favourite sci-fi properties such as Star Trek, Star Wars and Alien. Early on you’ll meet a critter on the shape that looks a lot like a facehugger from Alien. Instead of it killing you right away though, Roger thinks he looks cute, names him Spike and keeps him as a pet.

Many story sequences are presented in this comic book panel style and it’s clear a lot of effort went into the artwork for this game.

For game from 1993 you’re getting some of the best VGA graphics sprite-based artists could crank out. The character models are extremely expressive, the background artwork is detailed and there’s plenty of sight gags and hidden details to discover on each screen that immerses you in the experience.

Space Quest games never take themselves too seriously, and Space Quest V is no exception. I really enjoy clicking the LOOK action on as much as I can on each screen as the feedback you get tends to be witty or funny.

When Roger does something stupid, the sound effect they chose was Homer Simpson’s “DOH!”, which just feels weirdly appropriate for this game.

There is no voice acting, and many scenes don’t have background music - just some looping background noise. When on the deck of your garbage scow the sound effects are what you’d expect to hear on the deck of the starship Enterprise.

When you do get music in a scene it tends to help build tension or reinforce that something significant is about to happen, but it is used sparingly which can make some scenes feel a bit empty.

If you’ve played any of the Space Quest games you know that Roger Wilco is a bit of a tool, and sort of bumbles his way into situations he doesn’t belong in. For this installment in the series, he accidentally gets a perfect score on his StarCon Aptitude test and gets assigned to a starship as a captain.

This starship is actually a garbage scow - which is appropriate seeing as you’re a janitor. You’ll have to fly to various locations to pick up garbage in space as you wait for instructions or story elements to unfold that direct you to your next location.

Initially you have 3 crew members, and you issue commands through various menus you can access from your control panel (click a coloured button to bring these up, or speak the crew members directly using the COMMAND icon).

This is a bit more involved than previous games, but it ends up being fairly straightforward. You’ll need the Galactic Inquirer for the star codes to various planets (this is the copy protection), and the commands you issue are usually the same:

• lay in a course
• go to light speed
• wait to arrive
• go to regular speed
• orbit planet
• activate RSS

This will suck up the space trash and allow you to proceed with the story.

Like all good Sierra games of this era, there are many ways to get yourself killed. The Space Quest series always tends to have the best game over screens, so it’s worth experimenting a bit to see how Roger’s untimely end can be met in various scenarios.

Also, like many Sierra games at the time, Space Quest V contains an unrelated mini-game that acts as filler. Instead of having to play poker like in Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel, or that stupid card game in Codename: ICEMAN (Sierra On-Line) … this time you play something like Battleship.

Seeing as you can savescum your way to victory pretty easily, there’s not much challenge here. It is a decent distraction and can be fun for a few minutes, so I appreciate the fact that it was included.

There is some variety to the gameplay, and at one point you are teleported down to a planet at the same time as a fly and end up having your genes spliced with the insect. Playing as a fly, you have to solve a couple of puzzles to get your body back while also advancing the story.

Being a fly allows you to crawl through a security card reader to gain access to a building that you’d typically need a card for. By crawling through the beams and observing which ones activate locking mechanisms, you’ll later be able to punch a card to recreate the access card.

I remember really finding this puzzle clever when I originally played this game as it wasn’t overly complicated, and knowing I had a business card and a hole punch in my inventory it sort of made sense what I was going to have to do.

Not all the puzzles are fun though. When Cliffy (your chief engineer) gets himself ejected from the ship and you need to go rescue him it typically takes a few tries to navigate the awkward controls before you run out of fuel or oxygen.

Since I play these games on max speed, turning this down about 50% actually made the sequence a lot easier to complete.

As I’m writing this review and going back over my screenshots, it seems arcade sequences are actually more prominent that I remembered. This is potentially the result of Dynamix developing the game - not Sierra.

An interesting piece of trivia is that Dynamix originally developed the demo for Space Quest V using their DGDS game engine, but for the final game Sierra’s SCI engine was used.

The only real gripe I had with the game was the maze at the very end. I just really dislike mazes - unless I’m playing a CRPG that is.

Navigating this maze is just a pain in the ass, but thankfully it’s fairly short and you can burn through the entire sequence in about 10 minutes. If you happen to pop out under the elevator incorrectly and try to climb you will be crushed to death and get to enjoy one of the many death screens this game has to offer … so that’s something I guess.

Unlike most (all?) Sierra games, Space Quest V includes product placement in the form of the Sprint logo being displayed after every video call you make. I didn’t find this to be overly intrusive, but it was kind of odd for an adventure game.

The nostalgia factor on this game is pretty high for me, which is definitely reflected in the higher Replayability and Bonus / Surprise categories. I love the characters and the unapologetic parody at every turn - even if the plot is kind of thin.

I actually tried the demo in DOSBox just to see what the difference was, and surprisingly it looked almost identical to the final version of the game.

I had a lot of fun replaying Space Quest V and would highly recommend this title to anyone getting into the genre. It’s pretty accessible, easy to get into and full of great writing - and puns - lots and lots of puns.

Game Information

Game	Space Quest V: Roger Wilco – The Next Mutation
Developer	Dynamix
Publisher	Sierra On-Line
Release Date	February 5, 1993
Systems	DOS
Game Engine	SCI

My Playthrough

How Long To Beat?	6 hours
Version Played	DOS via ScummVM
Notes	Walkthrough

Score

See here for a refresher on how we’re scoring these games.

Graphics (10)	6
Sound (10)	5
Plot / Progression (25)	17
Characters / Development (15)	10
Gameplay / Experience (15)	9
Replayability (10)	5
Impact / Impression (10)	7
Bonus / Surprise (5)	2
	61%

Gallery

Footnotes

1. Description from Moby Games ↩