King's Quest: Chapter 5 - The Good Knight (PC) Review

The Good Knight begins with the elderly Graham at death's door, still telling stories to his granddaughter. This time he tells the story of his last adventure, one which he undertook as an old man. It has a few funny moments with a melancholic or sad undertone throughout the whole story, with moments where he can't recall what happened, among other things happening in the present time storyline. He also goes through a phase of talking about details he left out, which his granddaughter asks him to stop beating about the bush. This final episode is a sad finale to the series.

The gameplay and puzzles this time are environmental based. It's all about seeing how things change and working it to your benefit. Be it trying to extinguish a fire to counting the number of squirrels. These challenges are pretty fun and a fair bit less monotonous than the ice puzzles in the last chapter. This latest venture is split into four sections, each of which features two or three tasks to solve each puzzle. The final set of puzzles was great not hugely mind bending, but it required some solid thinking to make sure the riddles were solved correctly.

The emphasis is on the overarching story so there wasn't a huge amount of gameplay in this chapter, with the game taking two and a half hours to complete. Those two and a half hours have some of the best throwbacks, both in terms of the new series and throwbacks to the original games. It does have a couple of jarringly light-hearted moments like "Whisper's Song" which was brilliant, but the whole time there is a feeling of uneasiness. The scene where Graham tries to leave his bedroom is heart-breaking.

The controls and visuals are very much unchanged from the last few chapters but there are a few subtle tweaks in some scenes to help the player feel empathy for Graham. This includes mirroring the controls! The visuals still look nice and colourful, along with some cheeky visual references to the original games. Graham's character model has some subtle, and not so subtle, animation tweaks like shaky hands and slightly slower reactions. Most of the environments are recycled from previous episodes, as the chapter is set solely in Daventry, but it's cool to see how the world has changed since Graham became king.

This chapter also has some fantastic audio design; the voice acting is doubly good here, as the actors do an amazing job of adding raw emotion into their lines. It really helped with the empathy and sympathy that the chapter's story needed to portray. Musically this chapter is full of amazing compositions that really keep the mood going. From dark sinister tonal music to melancholic tinkle-y tunes it just breathes the King's Quest feeling.