The Silver Lining Review
I need to start things off by first saying that I love King’s Quest. When I talked to “Leisure Suit Larry” creator Al Lowe a few years ago, he and I spoke excitedly about “The Silver Lining.” At the time it was in limbo because of Viacom/Activision not willingly letting an independant fan made version of a beloved series that weren’t doing anything with.
So, I was incredibly excited when my review copy of The Silver Lining (you can’t call it King’s Quest) showed up in my in-box. But I’m a reviewer, and I have to be objective about the game. So let’s get started.
The introductory cinematic is…interesting. It’s completely unvoiced, but tells the story of the game (a wizard appears and knocks out Rosella and Alexander at Rosella’s wedding) pretty well. The graphics are a bit…jarring. But we’ll get to that later.
The gameplay is very unpolished. There are games made in AGS that have better pathfinding. Graham will often wander into poles and walls. You pretty much have to guide him by hand across every screen on the game. The story, as it plays out in the first chapter, however, makes getting through these technical glitches worthwhile.
Extra Features:
No special features to speak of as of yet.
Technical:
The audio seems to drop at weird times, like the line wasn’t fully recorded. I’ve already mentioned the pathfinding issues. At times, playing the review copy felt a little like I was Beta testing. I had five or six crashes in a 90 minute playthrough. Including two within the first ten minutes. Hopefully the release version has been patched up.
Graphics:
There’s no good way to say this. The graphics are terrible. We’re talking Playstation 1 Era. I wasn’t expecting much from a fan-made game, honestly, but I’ve seen a lot of fan made games that are much more graphically polished. Just brace yourself.
The set pieces are actually really well crafted for what they are. They still suffer the same blocky polygon issues as the characters, but they’re lovingly crafted, and pretty impressive reanimations of some classic King’s Quest 6 scenery.
Sound:
The dialog is…it’s the first game in a fan-made series. Let’s put it that way. Graham is honestly not too bad, considering you hear him the most. He’s unpoished, but not terrible. The narrator however? I’m not sure what the deal was here. I’m not expecting every video game narrator to be Don Pardo, but she’s awful. She’s needling, annoying, and just sounds bored with most of the lines she’s reading. For a laugh, I guess, try clicking your hand on the guards in the very first scene to listen to her babble incoherently for thirty seconds and get cut off.
The music, surprisingly, is very good. The score is very orchestral and fits the settings very well. I honestly don’t have anything bad to say about any of the music that they used in the game, really, and it’s actually quite impressive for a fan project.
Replay Value:
No real reason to go back through unless you think you missed a joke or two in your first playthrough. But most of those come from the narration, and aren’t really worth going back to see.
Final Score: 5/10
I don’t want to be discouraging. The game is, by itself, not great. There’s a lot of love poured in here, that much you can tell. But it feels very disjointed, and I get the definite feeling that, as they’ve been working on this for years now, they just couldn’t let go of the assets they’d already created, so we get stuck with a game that feels like it came straight out of the late 90s.
It’s worth playing for the story, which is surprisingly well written, and as a continuation of the King’s Quest Universe, but don’t come in expecting much in the way of graphical or technical wow-factor. Or gameplay, for that matter, considering I never saw anything I could conceivably call a “puzzle.” But hey, it’s free, it’s pretty fun, and you get what you pay for.
If you’re interested in taking a look at the game, you can download a copy for yourself (for free!) at The Phoenix Online site.