King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder!

Description

King Graham of Daventry chooses to go for a walk in the woods that are located all around his palace on a particularly lovely and sunny day. When he gets back, he is shocked to learn that his childhood home, Daventry Castle, has been completely erased from the map! Cedric, a talking owl, suddenly comes before Graham, who is at a loss for words and trying to figure out how this could have taken place. He claims that he witnessed the entire event and that he saw a wicked wizard by the name of Mordack carry off the entire castle, along with Graham's family and everyone else who lived there. Cedric makes the generous offer to take him back to Serenia, Cedric's country, to visit his master, the wizard Crispin, who lives there. There is little doubt that Crispin will be able to assist King Graham in freeing his family from Mordack's grasp and returning them to safety.

The fifth installment of King's Quest, titled Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder is Sierra's first adventure game to employ a point-and-click mouse interface. The game is in the genre of point-and-click games. Instead of having to type in commands on a keyboard to interact with the game environment and use the arrow keys to move around, King's Quest V reduces all activities to their most fundamental forms, which are called basic commands. The player can access the various cursors by moving the mouse to the top of the screen. This will display a hidden menu that contains each of the different actions, as well as game options and the inventory bag. If you move the pointer on the "Walk" icon on the screen, Graham will go in the direction that gets him the closest to the correct location. Simply typing "Look at" or clicking the "Eye" cursor on an item will get the same result as providing a description. The "Hand" cursor is a versatile cursor that may be used to push, pull, interact with, and pick up items. It can also be used to move about the screen. Talking to humans (and, in the bizarre world of King's Quest, often objects and animals as well) is accomplished by moving the cursor to the "Head" position. Players also have the option to right-click the mouse button to cycle through the many cursors at their disposal. The items of stock that Graham retrieves are presently stuffed into a bag. When you select the bag from the menu, a new window will go up that lists all of Graham's possessions at the moment. Within this area, players have the opportunity to examine or interact with objects, combine them with other items, or pick them up to use as an alternative cursor elsewhere in the game world.

It is possible to perish, as is the case in the majority of Sierra games. Graham will meet his unfortunate end in a variety of ways, including but not limited to coming into contact with witches, venomous scorpions, falling off edges of cliffs, dying of dehydration in the desert, and many more objects, locations, and characters. The player needs to be careful as they explore Serenia; making numerous saves of their progress in the game across a number of different files is typically the best course of action to take in order to avoid being trapped in the game and having to begin playing from the very beginning again.