Throughout the rest of this deep dive, we'll be talking about the single issue that contributes the most to the Vagabond's flaws: the faction's current design betrays its design philosophies and only works in its current state because it doesn't experience competition for resources. We'll take a closer look at the interactions the faction brings to the game, and highlight some problematic areas that comes with it. You can get more satisfying point-and-click and RPG kicks elsewhere.Continuing our examination of Root, this time we're focusing on the mixed bag called The Vagabond. If you don’t, however, there are just too many usability hurdles to enjoying Quest For Infamy. It’s the longest, most lavish love letter to that period that you are likely to find. If you have love for old Sierra adventures, you will likely have the required patience and affection to enjoy Quest For Infamy. The lack of guidance, charm and usability were obstructions to any kind of enjoyment. On the other hand, by choosing to be so willfully old-fashioned, we kept ricocheting off of its walls. It’s too confident in its approach not to. We don’t have enough experience to know if it nails that goal, but it certainly feels like it does. On the one hand, this is clearly made for someone other than us: someone with fond memories of the period and the ‘Quest For Glory’ series. It’s hard for us to unravel our feelings for Quest For Infamy. We’d have taken some vague indications of where to go, but there you are. It’s an ugly, brute-force method of dealing with its lack of direction, but at least it’s there. Quest For Infamy even comes packaged with one, present on the main menu. It’s also possible to replace the lack of objectives with a walkthrough. When it’s in this exploration mode, Quest For Infamy shows its quality. It’s at its best when you can ignore the objectives (or lack of them) for a moment, and move through scene after scene of gorgeously detailed environments and outlandish happenings. When Roehm and the narrator both shut up, and the walls around the game’s world fell down, we had real, actual fun. Much like the games that it’s homaging, you have to earn your enjoyment of Quest For Infamy, and we just couldn’t be bothered.īut there were moments when we got it. It’s nowhere near as funny as it thinks it is, it’s mired in misogynistic quips, and it wants you to put in the work to find its good stuff. Quest For Infamy is a royal mess, and for large swathes of it we wanted it to be over. We may be misunderstanding it, but that’s how it presented itself to us. You’re basically choosing combat options based on nothing other than how they look, and hoping that your random numbers are higher than your opponents’. No sane human being would create it afresh in the modern age. But the winner of them all is combat, which is an unholy mess that must be grabbed wholesale from an older Quest For Glory game. Choosing dialogue options means swinging a mouse cursor over to the middle of the game screen, rather than tapping up or down and pressing A. Try to use an item and you’re diving into multiple different menus to find it. He mostly makes snarky comments as other people are burdened with the narrative’s heavy lifting. We’re not sure if he’s meant to be endearing or funny, but he’s not adventurous enough to be a hero, or charismatic enough to be an antihero. He’s an opportunist, and that doesn’t make for great storytelling.
He’s not a hero set up for a grand mission: he’s mostly bumbling around, letting things happen and then capitalising on them. Roehm, the main character, is purely reactionary.
There’s a knock-on effect to the story, and we’re not well-versed enough to know whether it’s common to the other Quest For Glory games. Entrances and exits aren’t clear from a given location, and it’s possible to miss a path, simply because you haven’t clicked on the right pixel. It’s also a labyrinth, so you won’t know where to go, or whether you’ve seen everything. There’s no prompts to anywhere or anything, so you’re mostly walking around in the hope that something happens to you. Begin Roehm’s journey into Volksville, and you won’t have any idea of what to do or why you’re there. There’s the lack of any hand-holding at all, which some people will be cheering, but made us want to gouge out our eyeballs. Playing Quest For Infamy was, very generally, an occasionally rewarding slog, and almost all of its failings come from the strict adherence to old design. But the reverence for Sierra games of the ‘90s does lead to plenty of criticism.
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