Questmaster I

Questmaster had already been released under a different name, Dondra, in 1988 by Spectrum Holobyte but few copies were produced. The rights were then passed onto MicroIllusions, where the game sat for 2 years and wasn't re-released at all. The game finally made a come back, with a few changes including the title and the inclusion of real time puzzles, in 1990. So much fuss over a relatively average adventure game.

Questmaster is a text/graphic adventure. Unlike other text/graphic adventures such as Tass Times and Dream Zone, Questmaster did not incorporate an interface that allowed for interaction with the mouse and the graphics presented. Everything is to be typed in from the parser. Unique to Questmaster was character creation, much like a role playing game, for use when other Questmaster games were to be released and characters transferred easily with the same attributes and items found in their last adventure.

The story involved your entry into a world where you must obtain a special crystal to aid in the downfall of the evil Colnar. Questmaster was meant to be trilogy, where you were to defeat Colnar later and it seems that most games that intend to have sequels right from the beginning are always doomed otherwise. Perhaps if they concentrated all their efforts into the first part of the saga, the game itself might have been great in the first place, which would have sold more, allowing for the opportunity of sequels arising. The designer behind Questmaster was Sean Barger. We can't fully judge his epic masterpiece because we never got to see the rest of his creation and how the other games would have interwoven with the first chapter. Perhaps if the continuing adventure was ever released, it could be appreciated just how large or complex the world of Questmaster was. Alas.

Questmaster's graphics were OK. There are some terrifically drawn cartoon pictures of characters and scenes, but the excellent graphics are outnumbered by the average ones. Interestingly, the artist Rick Incrocci, seemed to use the default colour palette found which virtually every IIGS paint program used. So, not a lot of variety found in colour throughout the game. The animation was OK as well, but compared to the amount of disk space they consumed, I hardly feel the animation was worth it, because it was almost certainly the reason why the game came on three disks.

As an adventure, it's quite tough. Real time puzzles certainly don't help either (I've always found them especially annoying). A walkthrough for Dondra was included in the book "Quest for Clues II" but the solution doesn't account for the changes made between Dondra and Questmaster. It's a good guide anyhow.

The game does not come with an operating system on disk and so must be loaded from another, including System 6, which works fine for playing this game.