Game #102: DragonQuest Adventure

Be verwee verwee quiet, we’re hunting dragons!

DragonQuest is an interactive text adventure from Charles Forsythe. It was published in 1980 for the TRS-80. I played the game on a TRS-80 emulator and it took me about three hours to complete.

The beginning of DragonQuest and the immediate plot hook

You begin the game in the throne room of the king and you find out right away that the king’s daughter is being held captive by a dragon. The dragon is going to devour her at sundown and if you save her you will be awarded half the kingdom. Who could pass that up? When the king pontificates that there is not much time left he is not exaggerating. In DragonQuest, you are racing against the clock and if the sun goes down before you have found the princess the game automatically ends and you will have to start over. I actually lost this race against the clock – twice! I’m not sure how many moves I had used each time but be aware that you are on the clock.

Finally able to safely open the coffin

I really enjoyed DragonQuest. There was an actual plot to the game and the puzzles and the game’s locations were original and inventive. The map and the number of locations are cohesive, original, and logical.

Map of DragonQuest

The game can be on the shorter side but that’s not because the puzzles are easy. There are a couple of challenging puzzles to get through and once you solve them the game moves rather quickly. I did want to point out that I died quite often. I probably had to start the game over about a dozen times.

You’ll encounter a graveyard in the game and having a trusty shovel in my possession I thought to myself is there a better place to dig in than a graveyard? So I dug a hole, naturally jumped into it, and discovered a coffin. Having learned nothing from Scott Adam’s The Count, I quickly opened the coffin. There was a blinding flash of light and I was irrevocably blinded! The coffin and it’s blinding flash of light would force me to start the game from scratch again roughly 3 or 4 times as I tried different solutions to this conundrum.

The game turns a text adventure trope upside down when it presents you with a lamp and a flask of oil in the beginning of the game. When you examine the lamp it tells you that there is no oil in it. When you examine a flask in the beginning of the game it tells you that the flask is filled with oil but that the seal is very tight. So your logical conclusion is that the oil is meant for the lamp but when you go to break the seal in any way the flask shatters and the oil spills all over the place. This dilemma had me restart the game twice as well. Later at a temple, I would find an empty box labeled Aladdin’s Lamp and I had an “aha experience”. In that same temple there is a sword embedded in a stone that you cannot pull out…

I also perished trying to climb a 100 foot pillar in a cavern I discovered. The skeleton lying at the bottom of the pillar with two broken legs did not discourage me from making the attempt. The poor, unfortunate individual also had a scroll lying next to her skeleton. According to the scroll, she had an amulet of flying in her possession that she wants you to take. Unfortunately the amulet was not on the skeleton nor anywhere in the cavern.

So once you have your map to DragonQuest Adventure fleshed out, you can find yourself stuck as to how to proceed further. You encountered an alchemist in his hut who tells you that if you drop a treasure with him he will trade you a magic item for your troubles – yet you have no treasure. You have a coffin which, when opened, exploded in a blinding flash of light leaving you irrevocably disabled, you have a missing amulet, oil that you can’t get into a lamp, and a sword stuck in a stone that you can’t pull out.

The river locations and rowboat should get an honorable mention here. You can only access certain locations on the map by rowing “upstream” or “downstream” in your rowboat that you find attached to the dock. Just another original and inventive feature from this charming game.

The empty box that you find at the temple should allow you to solve your lamp problem and that should cascade into being able to solve the dilemma of how to get the sword from the stone. The hardest part of the game was trying to figure out where the missing amulet was and trying to get past the coffin conundrum.

At the top of the pillar in the cavern

I probably spent about an hour at this point moving from location to location using assorted objects in my inventory and trying to find hidden locations; which is exactly what I found, well, not exactly hidden. When you reach the dock there is a rowboat attached to it so my mind immediately leaped to the conclusion that I should get into the boat. On a whim I tried to enter the water from the dock and you can indeed do so! When you do enter the water you spot a manatee; and you just happen to have some food on you…

Once I made that discovery the game went smoothly and was extremely entertaining. I obtained the missing amulet from the manatee, used it to get by the coffin’s trap where I then found a ruby inside, gave the ruby to the alchemist who generously gave me a magic shield, and off I went in search of a dragon.

In the dragon’s lair!

I was feeling pretty confident at this point, drinking my Mountain Dew Zero and enormously pleased with myself, when I suddenly found that I lost the game and had to begin again. You see, Charles Forsythe ingeniously laid a psychological trap for me. He armed me with a silver sword and awarded me with a magical shield. So my lizard brain immediately leapt to this idea that I needed to slay the dragon. But that’s really not what I was there to do. My primary mission was to rescue the princess. So when the dragon fell asleep due to my magical shield, I chose to attack it. My attack woke the dragon up and he promptly ate my face off.

So once again I went through the entire game, made my way into the dragon’s lair for the second time, and this time allowed the dragon to remain asleep. I went north and discovered a sleeping princess, rescued her and took her back to her father in the castle.

DragonQuest Adventure – Victorious!

I really enjoyed Charles Forsythe’s DragonQuest Adventure. I thought it was inventive and contained original puzzles and interesting locations. Charles did a great job at turning a couple of adventure trope ideas upside down and excelled in fooling the player with his misdirections. If you are a fan of text adventures this one was a pleasant surprise from the 1980 list and a must play in my opinion.