Legend of Kyrandia: Hand of fate
The first legend of Kyrandia put you in the shoes of Brandon who was to be king. This time Kyrandia itself is dissapearing piece by piece and Zanthia, a young sorceress, is chosen to get the anchor from the center of the world to stop it from happening. Things aren’t exactly what they seem as you progress on your journey as some are trying to stop you from completing your quest.
Zanthia tries to take a shortcut and conjure a portal to the center of the world but unfortunately somebody has stolen all your things from your house in the swamp and this is where you start the adventure. The first thing to do is to gather some of your equipment which is still lying around the swamp but in the end you’ll have to figure out a way to get to the center of the world and to figure out what exactly is going on. The interface couldn’t be simpler than this as most of the screen is taken up by the main screen in which you can walk around. You have a simple inventory and when you find them a spellbook and a cauldron which you can use to mix potions that will help you in your quest. The ingredients and flasks will all have to be gathered by you so even when you know which potion you can use to help you go on you will still have to find a way to make it.
There is no interface to speak of like in sierra or lucasarts games but instead a single click on any item that can be used will automatically be used. This simplifies things a bit but the nasty thing is that your cursor doesn’t change at all when mousing over objects so at times you’ll have to just click on random items and see if they will do anything. The same goes for converstations whereas in other games you can choose what to say here you just click on a person and talk. Visually the game is very detailed and colorfull dispite the fact that the first part of the game is very dark as it is set inside a swamp.
Adventure games were really abundant at one time especially at the end of the DOS era when 256 color vga graphics were the norm. The legend of Kyrandia: the hand of fate was released at that time and the series tried to be somewhat different by having a simpler one-click-does-everything interface. Personally I like the regular ones better though as this interface will often lead you to just random click on everything to see if it can be used. The puzzles themselves aren’t too hard and many of them are inventory based or you trying to figure out which of the potions to use which can get repetitive soon. It’s not that the game is bad it’s just not a great game, it’s still worthy of a look though.
Overal rating: 7/10
This game was released for one system here are some notes:
| DOS | Released in 1993. |
| Date added | Jun-06-2008 07:56 |
| Name | Legend of Kyrandia: Hand of fate |
| Developer | Westwood |
| Publisher | Virgin |
| First released | 1993 |
| Genre | Adventure |
