If I had to pick an AGS favorite it would be A Tale of Two Kingdoms, which wins my award hands down, because it reminds me of Sierra’s masterpiece Conquest of the Long Bow: The Legend of Robinhood, which haunted my days and nights as a teenager. Not that Two Kingdoms would come close to being anything as good as Conquest of the Long Bow, in fact there will never be any medieval adventure game that would meet the standards. A Tale of Two Kingdoms is epic, like A Song of Ice and Fire, the series of books by George RR Martin, where nations war and kings clash and men find themselves marred not by good or evil but the shades of gray that struggles in between. A Song of Ice and Fire is the fictional version of the westernized A Romance of Three Kingdoms (except there are 7 kingdoms), which it is not a simple tale about a young lad growing up to meet that evil lord oppressing his land, but of wars and men, and what they do because they can, and what they have to do because they have no other choice.
A Tale of Two Kingdoms is free and created by Crystal Shard, an unpaid indie developer team, and it looks like a Sierra game and plays even more like one. The plot is simple, the player takes the role of a mercenary asked to protect the kingdom of Theylinn against the goblins, but is then framed for the murder of the king. Aside from the simplicity of the plot, the setting is epic, locations are breathtaking, and the cast of characters is immense. Like that in Quest For Glory, there are multiple paths to solving most things, and very much like Conquest of the Longbow, there are points to keep track of what you are doing, which leads to the 5 different endings of the game.
The comparison to Longbow is not just drawn from graphics and setting, in Two Kingdoms you begin and return to your base of operation in the forest, not unlike how Robin Hood waking up every morning in his outlaw camp in Sherwood, and as the days progress different events are accessible by the player. Robin Hood has to obtain different disguises to sneak into Nottingham, and he has obvious different solutions to his challenges. The woods in Longbow are vast and green and easy to get lost in, just like any Sierra games, you walk to the edge and it takes you to another screen, sometimes without logic governing them, and a lot of times you will walk to your death and you learn to save your game often. There are a bunch of non-linear moral choices as the game progresses, and you are forced to choose often than not, and it influences the outcome of the game (there are 4 endings if I remember correctly, 1 ending short of Two Kingdoms). Crossroads is what Robin Hood face every day, that he would stand at the crossroad (literally) and choose which plan of action suggested by his Merry Men gave him the best tactical advantage, and yes there is even a in-game board game you can play with the monks, Nine Men’s Morris, — it is an actual real game descended from the Roman Empire. There is also a board-game in Two Kingdoms, called Dampiry. The uncanny similarities of the two games don’t just stop there.
The mythological setting and the elegant writing for Longbow is unforgettable — and historically accurate — the prince’s scheme for the throne, the crusades, Knights Templar, and Druidic beliefs — dryads and songs and forests and fair maidens. Oh yes, and there’s romance, and it even leads to sex (obviously censored but extremely bittersweet taken in context), but Robin Hood has to play his cards right with his fair share of wooing and gifts and confessions. A tale of mesmerizing beauty it is, and every puzzle makes sense in the game, not unlike some of Sierra’s other efforts, when suddenly there’s a troll on the bridge blocking your progress, and you would need a gold coin to pay him off, which you might or might not have gotten at the robber’s cave in the last continent, which you can no longer access. There’s nothing like that in Conquest of the Longbow, every item you obtain you will use, every item you need that you don’t have you will have a logical way to obtain them, and there’s a damn good reason for every key that would fit into a different keyhole.
Not to say A Tale of Two Kingdoms’ writing is as poetic and its puzzles make half as much sense as Conquest of the Longbow, but it is simply enough that A Tale of Two Kingdoms exists to remind us of that golden age of adventure games, where games sometimes exist not just to entertain, but educate, enlighten, and complete us — that no other Robin Hood game would ever need to be made, because there wouldn’t be a point, and adventure games will never be made better, not with today’s next generation hardware and Hollywood budget. A Tale of Two Kingdoms, shaped from the glory of Robin Hood, stands firm on its own as a testament of its classic indie adventure status, as something we would likely not forget in our lifetime.
Read about Zilla’s favorite, Nelly Cootalot. (Yes she picked that because it was cute!)
