King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human (Sierra On-Line) - 1986

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

King’s Quest III: To Heir Is Human is the third installment in the King’s Quest series of graphic adventure games developed and released by Sierra On-Line in 1986. The game was originally released for the Apple II and MS-DOS, and later ported to several other computer systems. It was the first title game in the series not to feature King Graham as the player character.

King Graham and Queen Valanice had two children, Alexander and Rosella, and the kingdom was once peaceful. It wasn’t long until Alexander was snatched from his crib and things started to take a turn for the worse. A three-headed dragon threatens the ever-peaceful Daventry, and requires a maiden to be sacrificed every year. Rosella is the chosen one.

Meanwhile, in a secluded house atop a mountain in the land of Llewdor, the evil wizard called Manannan keeps a young lad named Gwydion as his slave, forcing him to do menial tasks as he prepares his spells and observes the country through his telescope. Gwydion must find a way to outsmart the wizard, escape, and eventually discover the truth about his own identity.¹

I’m pretty sure I was about 8 years old when I first got a copy of King’s Quest III for our 386. Since a friend of mine made me a copy of the game and I didn’t have the manual, I printed off a copy someone had typed up and uploaded to a local BBS.

For me, King’s Quest III brings back memories of learning how to touch type. These old AGI games that I played as I was learning how to work with computers sort of forced me to become a better typist because hunting and pecking for letters while there’s a timer running meant I used to die a lot.

You start off in a wizard’s house on top of a hill. He’ll give you a task that you need to complete, and you’ve only got a certain amount of time to complete it in before he gets mad at you and zaps you.

I’m pretty sure you have about 5 minutes of in-game time to do the initial task, which is actually plenty of time given how small the house is. This gives you a chance to explore a bit, interact with the world and start collecting some items.

If you’ve read the manual, you know there are a number of spells you’ll need to prepare - and these are prepared using various items you collect throughout the game. As a result, you’ll find yourself picking up pretty much everything that isn’t nailed down on ever screen you visit.

The problem though is that when the wizard comes back to check on you, if you have any magical items in your inventory he’ll assume you’re up to no good and kill you on the spot.

When you bring up your inventory you’ll notice that some items have an asterisk at the end of their entries. This is how you differentiate magical items from normal items. If you pick up any of these items while the wizard is out, you’ll need to stash them under your bed before he gets back.

I honestly can’t remember if I figured this out through trial and error, if someone told me about it or if I read it in a walkthrough, but it wasn’t obvious to me that this was what you needed to do. As a result, though I have fond memories of this game - I also remember it being extremely frustrating and annoying to play.

When you finish your first task for the wizard, he (eventually) will appear and tell you he’s going to go off on a journey. This ends up giving you about 30 minutes of in-game time to figure out what to do next.

Since this wizard is a pain in your ass, you might as well try to get him out of your way first. Based on the spells you have recipes for, it seems like turning him into a cat might be your ticket to freedom.

This spell only requires a couple ingredients (mandrake root powder, ball of cat hair, fish oil, magic wand), and you’re able to find 75% of these in the wizard’s house. Since the fish oil isn’t here, you venture down the mountain to explore the world.

The mountain path is a pain in the ass, but given this is a Sierra game released in the late 80s you sort of expect every step to potentially lead to a game over. This was just how these games were designed, and if you’d played any other titles released around that time - you knew this was coming.

Unless you’re playing with a walkthrough it’s unlikely you’d be able to collect everything from in and around town in your first outing, so you’ll need to make the trek back up the mountain to the wizard’s house a few times - trying not to fall off the cliff each time.

If you can fall off of anything (not just the cliff), expect a game over. This game will give you many opportunities to shoot yourself in the foot, and you’ll likely muddle your way into those scenarios more often than not, so save early (and often).

Finding the fish oil is easy enough as it’s sold at the store in town, but you don’t have any money. You’ll need to steal gold from some bandits to buy this, but first you need to find their hideout - then get in without being caught. Once you figure all this out though you can return to the wizard’s house to whip up your first spell.

One item you’ll find early on is the magic map, which allows you to quick travel to any location you’ve previously visited. This is extremely convenient for warping from the wizard’s house down the mountain, but it doesn’t work to get you back to the house. As a result, plan to (safely) climb back up the mountain multiple times.

Typing these out whisks me back to the first dozen times I played this and didn’t know what “soporific” meant

With spell ingredients in hand, you find the wizard’s lair in the basement of the house, and flip to a specific page in the spell book to start preparing a spell. Having to laboriously type out the spells exactly as the manual describes is a good form of copy protection, but after the first couple spells it does become tedious.

You’ll need to prepare multiple spells, so you’ll be back in the basement a few times throughout the first half of the game as you get everything ready to eventually leave the island.

Any tiny mistake you make during spell preparation is a game over - but at least it’s kind of funny. Gwydion will transform himself partially as a result of the failed spell, and the results are specific to the spell you were trying to prepare (my favourite is him turning half into a fly).

If you’re able to get the first spell completed, you’ll end up with a magic cookie that when eaten will turn the consumer into a cat. If you try to give this to Manannan, it’s a magic item so he’ll just kill you. You need to hide the cookie in something else and give that to him, but if you didn’t get the porridge from the 3 bears house - you’re out of luck.

Without the right items, you’ll have to give Manannan something else to eat from the kitchen, then wait for him to leave again and go get the porridge and wait for him to come back again. Once you feed him the magic porridge, he turns into a cat and you have free reign of the world to finish collecting magical items, mixing spells and figuring out what to do next.

If you find the oracle she’ll tell you you have a sister that’s a princess, that you’re a prince and you have to go save her. You’ll find some pirates in the bar and pay them to get access to their ship.

They sort of kidnap you at this point, and you have to wait (and wait and wait and wait) for 15-20 minutes for the ship to progress far enough that the game will allow you to progress.

The timer is not a welcome element to this game, so I’m glad it doesn’t make an appearance in any subsequent titles in the series.

Once you get off the pirate ship (using one of your spells and the magic map), you’ll end up in Daventry and it’s a short jaunt up to the dragon that is holding your sister captive. There’s some minor platforming here (climbing the cliff and navigating caves), but you eventually get there, cast a couple spells and escort your sister back to the castle.

Though I have fond memories of this game, it’s not really much fun. The whole experience sort of feels like work and there isn’t really much to do once you reach the pirate ship but wait. If you use the map too early, you’ll drown … so you have to wait. Waiting is too common a theme in this game.

KQ3 does give you some quality of life improvements over the previous 2 entries in the series, but it’s not really adding much to the overall gaming experience. Most game screens don’t have any background music, so you play in silence for the majority of the game.

The vast majority of the game involves fetching ingredients for spells, so once you’ve completed that all you really have to do is get to the dragon. Trying to get past the snow monster is a little frustrating, but that’s the only real challenge once you get off the ship.

Yup, you’ve still got some waiting to do

I do like this game, but it’s a bit tedious to play nowadays. There were however remakes (yes - plural) by Infamous Adventures and AGD Interactive that drop the text parser in favour of a more traditional P&C interface.

I couldn’t get KQ3 Redux working on my Macbook (the game was released in 2011), but the Infamous Adventures release works perfectly. I would recommend trying one of these remakes if you want to experience the game today.

Game Information

Game	King’s Quest III: To Heir Is Human
Developer	Sierra On-Line
Publisher	Sierra On-Line
Release Date	October 1, 1986
Systems	DOS, Apple II, Apple IIGS, Amiga, Atari ST, Mac, Tandy Color Computer 3
Game Engine	AGI

My Playthrough

How Long To Beat?	4 hours
Version Played	DOS via ScummVM
Notes	Walkthrough, Manual

Score

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

Graphics (15)	6
Sound (10)	3
Plot / Progression (25)	13
Characters / Development (15)	8
Gameplay / Experience (15)	4
Replayability (5)	1
Impact / Impression (10)	5
Bonus / Surprise (5)	3
	43%

Gallery

Footnotes

1. Description from Moby Games ↩