King's Quest: Mask of Eternity

King's Quest: Mask of Eternity from 1998 is the eighth and final entry in Sierra's original numbered series of fairy-tale adventures, made famous above all by designer Roberta Williams and her husband Ken. After seven installments that, since the mid-1980s, had built on item collecting, dialogue and puzzle-solving in the magical kingdom of Daventry, the development team at Dynamix arrived with a drastic change of direction. The series' main hero, the aging King Graham, dies in the opening and his place is taken by a completely new, previously unknown warrior named Connor, who sets out to find the shattered legendary Mask of Eternity, whose pieces have scattered to distant and dangerous corners of the world.

It's precisely the choice of a new character and a completely different approach to gameplay that make Mask of Eternity the most controversial and also the most different entry in the entire series. The game abandoned the classic adventure controls with a cursor and text parser and replaced them with direct character control in a genuine 3D environment with both first- and third-person views, complemented by a real combat system with swords, spells, a bow, and dozens of different enemies scattered across sprawling maps. Classic puzzles remained part of the game, but more as a supplement to exploration than the core of the experience, which split the series' longtime fans of the time into two irreconcilable camps - some praised the courage to experiment, others missed the clever riddles and distinctive humor they were used to from King's Quest. The graphics engine, adapted from the earlier action game Betrayal in Antara, also shows well where PC adventure games were heading in the late 1990s under pressure from rapidly developing 3D action games, and how they tried to hold their own in an increasingly demanding market.

Why play it: Mask of Eternity will appeal to players who want to see firsthand how one of the most famous classic adventure series tried to survive the genre's transformation, as well as fans of late-1990s 3D action games with a fairy-tale coating - not those who expect a traditional cursor-driven adventure from the King's Quest name.