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Year 1991, winter outside the window, darkness in the room and the quiet whirring of a hard drive. The Sherwood Forest lit up on the screen in colors that looked like a miracle back then. Conquests of the Longbow entertained me differently than other Sierra games — it wasn't about space or a fantasy world, but about a story I knew from libraries and Saturday fairy tales.
The game casts you as Robin of Locksley — an archer, bowman, leader of a band of merry outlaws from Sherwood. The Sheriff of Nottingham pursues you and your men, Maid Marian is in danger, and Richard the Lionheart sits somewhere in prison. Classic material, nothing surprising. But Roberta Williams and the team at Sierra squeezed far more out of it than just an illustrated fairy tale.
The system is classic point-and-click Sierra interface from the early nineties — the text parser has given way to the mouse, but the spirit of the old school persists. The game doesn't hold your hand. Your decisions carry weight: if you treat prisoners or poor folk badly, you won't be Robin Hood — and the game will make you feel it in your score and your story. That was unusual back then. Most adventures just waited for the right command; here it mattered what kind of person you were.
Visually, the game made full use of 256-color VGA and the forest was genuinely beautiful for 1991. The music on Sound Blaster painted the atmosphere of medieval romance without getting on your nerves. What aged worse is somewhat confusing controls in certain sequences and the fact that one missed action can lock you out of completing the game — a typical Sierra trap I remembered painfully only after an hour of wandering.
Conquests of the Longbow plays today as an honest piece of adventure gaming from its era with real character. It's not as famous as the Quest series from the same publisher, but anyone who loves Sherwood, the Middle Ages, and stories with moral depth will do well to fire it up in their browser. One evening session is enough to understand why people who remember it smile about it to this day.
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