King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder!

King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! marks a turning point in Sierra's history — it's the first game in the famous series where you click instead of typing commands. King Graham returns home to find that the wizard Mordack has carried off the entire castle of Daventry, along with his family, and sets out on a long journey through deserts, mountains, and across the sea to Mordack's island. Controls consist of an icon bar at the top of the screen — an eye, a hand, a foot, a mouth — which the player switches between depending on what they want to do.

The game bet on hand-painted backgrounds scanned in at 256 colors, which looked unbelievable at the time and still has its own charm today, even if details sometimes blend into the surroundings. But with that came the series' well-known problem too: several items aren't needed until much later in the game and can be permanently missed, the player can easily die, and the infamous desert section requires managing water and saving regularly. Anyone used to the friendliness of LucasArts games will run into a considerably harsher school here.

King's Quest V was among the first big games also released on CD-ROM with full voice acting, making it an important milestone in the development of multimedia on PC. The music on sound cards sounded rich, and the locations have a strong fairy-tale mood — from a snow-covered village to a castle full of transformed servants. At the time it was a major commercial success and one of the studio's best-selling titles. Today it plays out as a mixed bag: visually it still charms and the story pulls you along, but the dead ends and sudden deaths are a reminder that the genre was still figuring out how to be fair to the player back then. Also worth mentioning is how the game looks in motion — Graham's walking animation and plenty of small background details felt almost cinematic for its time. Today's player will appreciate having a walkthrough handy, since otherwise there's a real risk of discovering hours later that you're missing a single item forgotten back in the opening village. Even so, it's a title that can't be skipped in the history of the genre.