King's Quest 2¼: Breast Intentions

When people talk about King's Quest in the nineties, they mean Sierra's point-and-click adventure with knight Graham and his family. This isn't that game. Here Graham is old, tired, and his family gets into everything imaginable – which is a pleasant surprise for fans of the original, rather than anything else.

King's Quest 2¼ is a fan game from 2005 that looked at the original series from behind and decided to troll it. The point-and-click mechanics stayed, but the humor is now edgier, sexier, more provocative. It's a parody and self-irony – the creators knew exactly what property they were going to take into their mouths. Graham gets slapped around with all sorts of situations that Robert Williams and his puritanical approach would never dare to include. The graphics hold up as a decent point-and-click experience, the pixel art fits the era it was made in, the replay value lies in how stupidly absurd a situation can be when everything comes together for the stars.

Where does it fall apart? A fan game doesn't have the same budget or experience as Sierra. Puzzles sometimes stand and fall with logic that exists only in the creator's head. Dialogues sometimes drag on, the humor isn't for everyone, and technically it's nothing that would captivate you – it's simply an indie project from the time when indie projects looked like this. But that's exactly what you're looking at when you decide to play a fan game from 2005.

Today this is primarily a window into a time when fans dared to do things the way they wanted – without filters, without concern for a publisher's reputation. King's Quest 2¼ isn't a classic and has no ambition to be one. It's a breeze of light wind through the original series, a small blemish on its legacy that you're willing to laugh at more from nostalgia than from genuine heartfelt fun. It's worth trying if you like point-and-click adventures and don't mind textures that boldly dare to be provocative.

You can play it today through DOSBox – it's not hard to get it and run it. It's a legal preservation of a piece of internet culture that would otherwise remain only in the memory of those lucky enough to play it at the time of its original release. It's not the best thing you'll ever do, but it's an interesting refusal to say "no" to the true will of creators to make games without censorship.