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Not quite Sierra, not quite Lucasarts, Westwood’s foray into adventure games remains a strange one fifteen years after its release. While it doesn’t combine the best elements of the two adventure gaming giants, neither does it pull exclusively from the worst; indeed, the rationale behind some of the development choices in Kyrandia are still anyone’s guess.

The world of Book One is a blend of fantasy staples and archetypes, including some direct homages to specific works; The themes, names, and even some of the character types from Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia are well represented. Recurring motifs like gemstones, scattered randomly across the woods and cliffsides, and seemingly innocuous odds and ends like apples, pinecones, and tulips satiate the kleptomania adventure games insist on. And though the first two thirds of the game consist of what seems like a lot of aimless wandering and arbitrary puzzles, the last third provides a satisfying resolution involving royalty, revenge, and honor. The storyline, a nature-friendly tale of a boy raised in anonymity discovering his heritage and reclaiming his destiny, is presented at face value and yet periodically approached with a quirky irreverence. While the unserious tone doesn’t go quite as far as the anachronisms in Monkey Island, it feels oddly disconnected. The game never quite seems to be sure with what tone it should be relating its material — the early scenes with Kallak and Malcom, and with Brandon and Brynn, seem serious and imply dire happenings in the land of Kyrandia. But what to make of Zanthia, who seems extremely frustrated with the almost comical lack of competence of everyone who’s helped you thus far? It tries to have things both ways and ends up second-guessing itself a bit.

But these moments don’t terribly drag down the proceedings. There’s a classic and welcome fantasy feel to the proceedings, aided by some lush and beautiful background art (though the low resolution is starting to wear on it in 2007), and wonderful and generally consistent art design for the characters, items, and interface. The voices are decent enough - though Brandon sounds cheerfully naive if not downright silly sometimes - and the music, though it can get repetitive, is well-suited to the atmosphere. An adjustable walking speed helps make the proceedings a little more efficient to move around in (anything other than the fastest speed quickly becomes unbearable, considering the amount of backtracking you have to do).

Kyrandia’s bag of tricks ultimately leans more toward Sierra in terms of gameplay holdovers, and this often includes the more dubious game design choices of that era. Many items that are required for later puzzles can be lost or destroyed. Others can be left behind after traveling beyond a Point of No Return. Still others have to be sought out in out-of-the-way places, with no prompting for the search. This combined with an extremely simplified interface — only one “command”, a mouse click, is used to examine objects, which aren’t highlighted to show that you can interact with them — and a proficiency of cheap deaths lower than your average Space Quest game but higher than Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis….and you can see where things might get aggravating.

This method of challenging players is considered inadmissible in games today, but in the original text adventure games of the 70s and 80s and the first graphical adventures that followed, they were fundamental to the design structure. Sierra in particular liberally inserted opportunities for destroying important items and creating unwinnable scenarios - some of them even spanning the entire length of the game. In comparison to those, Kyrandia isn’t quite as bad, but the lack of prompting for the iron key in the catacombs, the ease with which the player can destroy necessary items, and the lack of precision in examining objects without physically touching them makes frequent and multiple saves an invaluable part of your strategy. The last of these leads to some particularly cruel deaths, including a scenario where the accompanying verb line in a Lucasarts game would be something like “Walk directly into horrible lake of fire.”

Tangent: Some deaths look much more interesting than others. The deaths at the gate to the castle or the aforementioned stroll into molten lava are beautifully animated; meanwhile, when a crazed lumberjack attacks you with a saw, the animation is pathetic. I was expecting something really violent and grotesque.

Anyways. In addition to holding over staples from the first generation of adventure games, Kyrandia does a few rather strange things that seem to be unique to itself. The game alternates perspectives from screen to screen, using a top-down angle when all four directions exit the room, but just as often switching to a landscape background for more detailed locations (and thus only allowing passage from the left or the right). This makes functional sense, but it’s a little confusing aesthetically. The sheer numerical abundance of screens in a few of the woodland areas, with no objects to interact with, seems rather arbitrary. I can’t imagine making it through this game at the slower walking speeds, seeing the same three or four screens of trees and bushes repeating upwards of eight or nine times as I explore an area far bigger, in screens, than it has any business being. The catacombs are ruthless for this. If your adventure game diet consisted of LucasArts games, the catacombs will eat you alive. You don’t have the luxury of a navigator’s severed heat to point you around. Go find some graph paper.

I don’t refer to these bizarre elements as design flaws, because I don’t quite consider them to be problems with the game. Kyrandia was obviously intended to be exceedingly difficult and punish players that didn’t thoroughly explore its world and proceed with caution and pragmatism. Multiple saves, careful item hoarding (your inventory will only hold ten items, and occasionally you will be carrying many, many items you haven’t found a use for yet), trial and error, and some sideways logic (who thought up that damn gold dish puzzle?) will see you through it in a few days at the most. Book One definitely punishes players, which triggered my seething frustration at Book Three, but this time there is an element of balance that doesn’t ruin the play experience through tedium and insipid busywork. Kyrandia requires patience, determination, and stubbornness not to let its puzzles defeat you.

That said, you may still want to check a guide in advance to see which items you’ll find yourself sorely missing at a critical moment in the game’s final few screens.

7/10.