Peasant’s Quest (By Jubal)

[Jubal]

Peasant's Quest

Game Type: Free Online Play
Genre: Single Player Adventure

Link: http://www.homestarrunner.com/disk4of12.html

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Peasant's Quest is a game made in the style of 1980's text-and-animation adventures, following the player's attempt to kill the dragon Trogdor. The graphics are entirely in a very basic style, the music is designed to be the most annoying game jingle you've ever heard, and the game is mostly an attempt to poke fun at the genre.

If you're looking for graphical beauty, you came to exactly the wrong place with Peasant's Quest. Everything is stripped down to pixellated, basic animation and badly made music, which can get very annoying after a while. The animations are repetitive and boring, and the effect is, obviously, a vast comedown from modern, detailed 3d graphics with all the realism and effects we now have.

On the other hand, the beauty of the game is that that doesn't really matter. Even if you're not old enough to have a nostalgia for the old adventure games of the 80s, the humour is genuine and unaffected by the graphics. In many modern games the graphics have been pumped up to the point at which gameplay is very much second fiddle or even is compromised – Peasant's Quest has a humorous plotline and a lot of text which would be less workable in a more modern game format. The text-based commands cut down on menus and make the game more elegant in terms of gameplay too (the 'die' command is always good). There is no better way to get me to give a five for immersion than really zany plot ideas, and setting yourself on fire, putting a baby in a well bucket, and the prompt saying "night falls like a clunky PowerPoint presentation" are good ways to fit that bill.

In general Peasant's Quest was a game I found enjoyable and very funny indeed; would highly recommend as long as you don't mind pixel art...