4/29/2023 0 Comments Teenagent walkthruThe animation quality drops significantly during the few simple cutscenes that occur, but they are brief and uncommon. Every screen feels halfway between a storybook illustration and a Saturday morning cartoon, and the bouncy, versatile MIDI score does an excellent job of setting the mood, whatever the context. The characters are lively and fluidly animated, with their personalities coming through as much in the way they look and move as through dialogue (and often more so). There’s no word for the hand-drawn backgrounds but stunning their lush colors, painterly sensibilities and excellent compositions are on par with the best the era had to offer. Here Arivald’s narrative ends, and we join the fugitive Galador in a nearby graveyard as he tries to work out a plan: first, find the demon who swindled him second, get his own body back and finally, free the unfortunate prince from the clutches of Hell.įor the first hour or so, the game manages to glide along almost entirely on charm. The panicked protagonist, meanwhile, fled the field of honor as the duel began-in the process dishonoring his “father,” the king, who promptly disowned him and named him an enemy of the state. This prince, it turns out, had been the demon’s target all along, but he’d never have offered his soul voluntarily this trick provided a loophole through which His Highness might be spirited away to the infernal regions without technically breaking Lucifer’s rules. He explains that the titular Galador was a lazy young man who encountered a demon and was offered a simple trade: in exchange for his soul, he could have “a life of adventure and the title of prince.” The lad happily made the bargain, but the demon had something unexpected in mind: Galador found himself in the body of a handsome, brave and very much currently alive prince-who at that very moment was entering a duel to the death. The game begins with a close-up of Arivald, the self-proclaimed greatest wizard in the world, who fills us in on the backstory needed to understand what comes next. If nothing else, Galador provides an effective counterbalance to the overly rosy view of the 1990s that’s sometimes prevalent in adventure circles: it was a Golden Age, to be sure, but there was more electroplating in the mix than we often remember. Its story is a flimsy excuse to connect underdeveloped set pieces its characters, for all that their visual designs ooze personality, mostly appear for a single puzzle before vanishing entirely and its puzzles require such mind-boggling leaps of logic that I almost hesitate to use the term, implying as it does a clear sense of cause and effect imposed by comprehensible rules and boundaries. Like that earlier adventure, Galador takes its aesthetic cues from its much-beloved contemporaries-with Discworld II, The Curse of Monkey Island, and the later King’s Quest adventures standing out as obvious influences-but again like Teenagent, it fails utterly to grasp what made those games worth playing. Galador was developed by Metropolis Software as their follow-up to 1994’s abysmal Teenagent, and maybe the worst thing I can say about it is that it shows. Well, I’ve spent fifteen hours with the thing, and I don’t have the energy left to beat around the bush: No. At last, English speakers could finally answer the question themselves: does Galador play as good as it looks? ScummVM added support for Galador in 2020, with a community-produced fan translation following later that year, but even then it took until late 2021 for the game to reappear for sale via digital download. Well-regarded in its native Poland, it nonetheless spent two decades without any sort of English release, meaning screenshots of its gorgeous hand-drawn backgrounds and colorful cartoon characters were all many of us had to go on. For years, Galador: The Prince and the Coward has been an object of some curiosity among adventure completionists in the English-speaking world.
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