King's Quest III shows an evolution toward gameplay that's more tightly integrated into the story being told. In an attempt to win Gwydion's freedom and uncover his destiny, you'll find yourself doing chores around the house for Manannan, collecting and mixing spell ingredients, casting magic spells, and making a quite a few treacherous climbs up ladders and down mountains. KQIII even features what may have been adventure gaming's first crate puzzle. Overall, the gameplay supports the story well, and it's a refreshing change from the random treasure hunts that dominated the first two games.

However, the gameplay does have frustrating aspects, made somewhat worse by the text parser and low-quality graphics. As with any text parser, you run into the problem of having to figure out how to say what you want in words the parser understands. This can be especially tedious while preparing magical spells (more on this below). On the graphical front, although the screens are by far the most detailed of the AGI games in the KQ series (especially the ship that gives Gwydion passage midway through the game), the items you can take don't always stand out from the backgrounds. In a busy screen, it's easy to miss what you need. One particular (and crucial) item is even worse than a pixel hunt—you literally can't see it. Even though I sort of remembered where it was from playing KQIII years ago, the game doesn't offer any clues and I ultimately had to consult a walkthrough.

KQIII is the first of the King's Quest series to use copy protection. Portions of the spell book Gwydion discovers in Manannan's laboratory, "The Sorcery of Old," are printed in the KQIII game manual. Gwydion must perform these spells exactly as written. This prevented people with pirated copies from progressing, with the added bonus of blurring the line between the player's experience and Gwydion's. Unfortunately, twenty years later, many people with legal copies have lost track of their manuals, and second-hand copies inevitably don't include them. Your best bet at this point is to ask for help on a community forum or scour the web before you get started with the game.

And here we come to another of KQIII's frustrations—the magic spells. You're supposed to follow the directions in the manual to the letter, space, and period, but even then, some don't work. For example, typing "Mold the dough into a cookie," as written in the game manual, yields the response "What's a mold?" (I took a lucky guess and found that Gwydion needs to "pat" the dough instead.) Even without typos, it's very easy to mess up these spells, and it's game over if you do. In a way this is nice because it conveys the high stakes of the situation, but after the third or fourth bungled attempt it starts to feel like busywork.

Between making little mistakes on these spells, tripping over Manannan's cat, and having to travel up and down the perilous mountain multiple times, I died more during my replay of KQIII than I did in the first two games. Climbs are manipulated with the arrow keys, and reducing the game's speed to "slow" did help with some of them, but I'd be lying if I said they're not annoying. And if these deaths aren't bad enough, KQIII also has several potential dead ends. As always, save your game often.

I said early in this review that KQIII took the series to the next level, and the time has come to defend that statement. People who didn't play the KQ games when they were first released are often puzzled by why this franchise is considered groundbreaking by so many adventure gamers. I'll admit, if I'd played only the first two KQ games, I'd be in that camp. They're nice little games, but they're simple, their stories are weak, and other than what they represent—Sierra's early years—there's nothing too special about them. Not so for King's Quest III. Replaying it, I felt proud of designer Roberta Williams for telling such a complex story using such primitive technology. KQIII's art, while still only 16 colors and 160x200 resolution, sports an impressive level of detail. The gameplay has evolved from the simple picking up and trading away of random items to a truly integrated network of challenges that fully support the story. But of all KQIII's innovations, the story itself stands out the most; a dark contrast to the relatively superficial quests that came before it. Twenty years later, developers are still searching for the best way to integrate challenging gameplay with a complicated, serious story. If not for King's Quest III, they may never have begun to look.