King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow

King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow is widely regarded as the high point of the entire series. Prince Alexander sets out to find Princess Cassima on the Green Isles archipelago, where every island is home to a different people — from winged beings through the realm of the dead to the insufferably logical Pedants — and where a plot against the throne lurks beneath the surface. The controls are the iconic point-and-click interface, the same as in the fifth game, but the game is noticeably more polished and far less punishing than its predecessor.

Its greatest strength is the script: the dialogue holds together, the characters are memorable, and the puzzles grow out of a fairy-tale logic that the game itself takes care to explain. Many situations have two different solutions and there are two separate paths to the ending, so it's worth playing through more than once. The classic Sierra traps haven't disappeared entirely — you can still die — but the game warns you in advance and doesn't lean on sudden cheap deaths the way earlier entries did, which makes it a considerably friendlier experience.

On DOS, a floppy-disk version came out first, followed later by an expanded CD edition with full voice acting, a longer animated opening sequence, and a number of enhanced scenes; it's the CD version that's still recommended today as the definitive one. The graphics use 256 colors and plenty of hand-drawn animation, and the music ranges between orchestral and fairy-tale in tone. At the time it was received extremely well and was seen as proof that Sierra could tell a story just as well as its rivals. Today it's the best entry point into the King's Quest world and one of the few games in the series that can be recommended even to a player with no nostalgia for it. The strongest sections are usually said to be the labyrinth in the realm of the dead and the puzzles tied to the Isle of the Pedants, which lean on language and precise reasoning rather than item-hunting. The game also knows how to reward an attentive player: whoever reads the descriptions and talks to everyone will reach the better ending more easily. Today King's Quest VI stands as proof that, by the end of the DOS era, Sierra had truly figured out how to make adventure games fair.