King's Quest VII: The Princeless Bride is an adventure game with pictures created and released by Sierra On-Line for MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, and Macintosh computers in 1994. The game uses clear and detailed pictures similar to the style of Disney and Don Bluth movies. It is the first King's Quest game to include more than one main character: Queen Valanice and Princess Rosella. Both characters are taken to the realm of Eldritch, and Rosella is changed into a troll. The characters must find a way to turn Rosella back to normal, discover her true love, defeat a strong evil force threatening the realm, and return to the kingdom of Daventry.

King's Quest VII is the first game in the series to split the story into chapters. Some puzzles in the game have more than one solution, and there are two different endings. Reviewers mostly gave positive feedback about the game.

Gameplay

King's Quest VII is structured differently from earlier games in the series. The story and gameplay are divided into six chapters, each taking place in a different area of the realm of Eldritch. Players switch between two characters, Valanice and Rosella, in each chapter. Both characters visit some of the same locations during the game and reunite at the end. Players can choose which chapter to start the game from and will begin playing from the start of that chapter.

Another major change is the use of a smart pointer, which makes the game easier to control. When the pointer moves over an object that can be used or interacted with, it lights up. Players can pick up or use items, explore areas, and speak to characters by clicking directly on them. Earlier games required players to select an action icon first and then click on the environment. Some large areas are shown on a single, moving screen instead of being split into multiple screens. Although the game includes dangerous situations that can cause the player's character to die, players can restart from the same point without needing to reload a saved game, unlike previous versions of the series.

King's Quest VII uses SVGA graphics, a new technology at the time that was later used in other games like The Dig and Space Quest 6. This allows the game to have colorful, detailed environments and smooth, artistic animations.

Plot

The title of this entry, The Princeless Bride, is a play on the name of The Princess Bride. Like other games in the King's Quest series, it also refers to the story: Princess Rosella is about to become a bride, but she travels to another world just before her wedding. This is the only game in the series where Queen Valanice plays a major role, and the only one where King Graham is not shown or mentioned at all, except in version 1.4.

Princess Rosella walks through a forest in Daventry with her mother, Queen Valanice. While her mother pushes her to find a prince to marry, Rosella dreams of adventures in faraway lands. As they argue, Rosella sees a castle in the clouds reflected in a pond and jumps into the water, followed by Queen Valanice.

After escaping a desert she was sent to by a magical portal, Queen Valanice finds herself in a forest. There, she learns that Attis, the Lord of the Hunt, and Ceres, Mother Nature, have been turned into a stag and a tree by the evil enchantress Malicia. Malicia drove an iron stake into Ceres’s roots, causing a life-threatening wound that could harm all of nature if Ceres dies. Queen Valanice travels to the nearby town of Falderal, where she is arrested after recovering a giant block of cheese that fell from the sky, which is the moon of the realm.

Meanwhile, Princess Rosella is pulled into the Vulcanix Underground by Otar, the Troll King. To her shock, Rosella has been transformed into a troll and is to be married to Otar. She seeks a cure and meets Mathilde, a friendly troll who agrees to make a potion to reverse Rosella’s transformation. Rosella gathers the ingredients, is cured, but Malicia locks her away to stop her from distracting Otar. Rosella escapes and discovers Malicia plotting with Otar to cause a volcano in the Underground to erupt, which would destroy the realm. Rosella and Mathilde learn that the real Otar is being held in the Land of Ooga Booga, while the Otar Rosella met is an imposter working with Malicia. Rosella uses an elevator to reach the Land of Ooga Booga to find the real Otar.

Rosella reaches the Land of Ooga Booga, but the path back to the Underground collapses behind her. With the help of Dr. Mort Cadaver, a local doctor and mortician, Rosella searches for the real Otar while avoiding dangers, including a boogeyman loyal to Malicia. After rescuing Dr. Cadaver’s black cat, Rosella gains one of the cat’s lives and learns where Otar is. Rosella finds Otar and plans to return to the Underground to stop Malicia using a secret entrance in Falderal. Otar convinces Rosella to steal a mysterious device from Malicia’s house nearby, the only thing that can stop the volcano. After escaping the Were-Woods, a forest with werewolf-like inhabitants, the two find the secret entrance in Falderal’s town hall and reenter the Underground, only to find the imposter Otar has already started the volcanic eruption.

Meanwhile, Queen Valanice is pardoned after returning the moon to the sky and breaks Attis’s curse by restarting a local river. Using a magic salve, Valanice safely crosses the Were-Woods and travels to the Land of Ooga Booga, where she learns about Count Tsepish, a former ruler, from his dog. Valanice returns Count Tsepish’s missing head, and he allows her to use his horse to reach Etheria, a kingdom in the sky. In Etheria, Valanice meets the Fates, who tell her that King Oberon and Queen Titania, who can stop the volcano, are missing. She must travel to the dreamworld to speak to Mab, the lady of dreams. With Dr. Cadaver’s help, Valanice enters the dreamworld while sleeping and finds Mab frozen in ice. By breaking the curses on Ceres and Mab, Valanice contacts King Oberon and Queen Titania, who prepare to stop the eruption.

In the volcano’s control room, Rosella uses Otar’s magic wand to reveal the imposter Otar is actually Edgar, a fairy she met earlier who had helped her save her father. Malicia knocks Otar out, pushes Edgar away, and imprisons Rosella in the volcano’s crater. As Oberon, Titania, and Mab try to stop the eruption, Rosella returns to the control room and awakens Otar, who stops the eruption. With Edgar’s help, Valanice reunites with her daughter, but Malicia kills Edgar. Rosella uses the device she stole to turn Malicia into an infant.

The game has two endings after defeating Malicia. In the good ending, Rosella revives Edgar using a life she received from Dr. Cadaver’s cat. Oberon and Titania arrive and explain that Edgar is their son, who was kidnapped by the fairy Lolotte and later brainwashed by Malicia, who is Titania’s sister. Edgar apologizes for his actions, and Rosella agrees to court him. The realm celebrates as Rosella and Edgar fly away in a white swan-like carriage.

In the bad ending, Rosella fails to revive Edgar, who dies. Oberon and Titania explain what happened and take Valanice and Rosella home in a black carriage.

• Queen Valanice (voiced by Carol Bach y Rita): After her daughter disappears, Queen Valanice is left with only Rosella’s comb. She searches for her daughter, tries to bring peace to Eldritch, and aims to return to her kingdom.
• Princess Rosella (voiced by Maureen McVerry): Rosella jumps into a lake after seeing a castle in its reflection. She must stop her marriage to the Troll King, end Malicia’s evil plan, and return home with her mother.
• Malicia (voiced by Ruth Kobart): Malicia is an evil enchantress who is both human and fairy. She was banished from Etheria for trying to overthrow her sister. She plans to destroy Etheria by using the Vulcanix Underground’s volcano.
• Edgar (voiced by Jesse Moises): Edgar is the Prince of Etheria, who was kidnapped by the fairy Lolotte and later brainwashed by Malicia. He is restored to his true form and either lives to court Rosella or dies, depending on Rosella’s actions.
• Mathilde (voiced by Esther Hirsch): Mathilde is a former nursemaid to King Otar. She helps Rosella by giving her a potion to reverse her transformation into a troll and assists her in escaping the Underground.
• Mort Cadaver (voiced by Marcus Lewis): Mort is an undead doctor, undertaker, and coroner in the Land of Ooga Booga. He helps both Rosella and Valanice during their journey.

Development

The developers wanted to create a style similar to traditional animation seen in works by Walt Disney Pictures and Don Bluth. As a result, the game contains more than five times the amount of animation compared to any other Sierra game from that time. Art director Andy Hoyos mentioned that the bright colors in Disney's Aladdin inspired the game's visual design. Composer Jay Usher explained, "How a character moves or behaves influences the music. We created unique musical themes for each character because every character is different." The final version of the game was shorter than the original plan to fit on a single CD-ROM disc.

The game's backgrounds were drawn by hand and then scanned into a computer. The characters, or sprites, were also drawn on paper with pencil, scanned, and then edited and colored digitally, similar to how animated films were made during that time. Of the 70 characters in the game, some look more realistic and human-like, such as the main characters, while others have a more cartoonish appearance. Lead animator and character designer Marc Hudgins noted that this was the first time the art team used outside animation studios from Russia and Croatia. A challenge was that the animators had little experience creating animation for computer games.

Reception

According to Sierra On-Line, total sales of the King's Quest series reached more than 3.8 million copies by the end of March 1996. By November 2000, PC Data reported that King's Quest VII sold between 300,000 and 400,000 copies in the United States alone.

Some critics and fans of the series did not like the use of Disney-style cartoon graphics. However, when it was first released, PCZone praised the game's "stunning graphics and superb gameplay." A reviewer for Next Generation approved of the series's shift from idealized fantasy images to highly detailed cartoon graphics. The reviewer noted that the game kept the King's Quest standard for excellent soundtracks. The reviewer concluded: "While it's certainly not the most challenging game available, it may be one of the most impressive in look and feel, and fans of the series should definitely check this one out." A review in Computer Gaming World praised the game's "animation of quality that would make Disney proud." A later review in Adventure Gamers described it as "an eminently playable, if not revolutionary, adventure game," and "a solid—if not stellar—entry in the King’s Quest collection."

Computer Gaming World nominated King's Quest VII as its 1994 "Adventure of the Year," although it lost to Relentless: Twinsen's Adventure. The editors called King's Quest VII "one of the year's most charming releases," and concluded: "The feature-quality animation and the hodge-podge of classic tales make it the closest we're likely to come to a fairy tale on the computer."