Game Review: The Quest For The Holy Grail (ZX Spectrum, Mastertronic)

Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle. Terry Jones. Michael Palin. Six names that redefined comedy for a generation in the UK when they fomed the surreal comedy partnership known as Monty Python’s Flying Circus. While some of their work was something of an acquired taste, the gang still managed to produce some truly classic material, one such being the 1975 movie Monty Python And The Holy Grail. And as was the norm for the games industry in the 80s, it’s no surprise that the movie became the “inspiration” for a game and thus The Quest For The Holy Grail was born…

Brave Sir Tappin and The Quest For The Holy Grail

Just like many of the early Mastertronic games the year before, this isn’t actually an original release but instead it’s a re-release and was first published in 1984 by Dream Software. The title remained the same (unlike some other games that Mastertronic chose to rename like Vegas Jackpot on the Commodore 64 and Vic 20), and it’s based loosely on the Monty Python movie and you take on the role of Sir Tappin (known as Sir Robin in the movie).

As the title suggests, you’re off on a quest and yes, you’re in search of the legendary Holy Grail. Along the way you have to survive attacks the deadly White Rabbit, an encounter with the three-headed knight and avoid all manner of hazards and others characters who are set to stop you on your fearless adventure.

As is the norm for the genre, it’s played by entering one or two word commands – most of the usual ones you would expect with text adventures of the time – and you have to solve puzzles and find various objects scattered around the different locations in order to progress and ultimately find the Grail and complete the game. For some strange reason, the inlay makes no mention that this is a text adventure or how to play the game or even gives you basic information about some of the key commands you can use although thankfully there are screenshots so you know what to expect.

Let’s Make A Game

Prior to the original release of The Quest For The Holy Grail, Dream Software produced an adventure creation package entitled The Dungeon Builder. A predecessor to the likes of The Graphic Adventure Creator, it was released in 1984 (a year after the release of The Quill) for £14.99 and allowed users to create a text adventure using a grid based system building adventures using a series of inter-connected rooms basing games around a map.

As with similar packages, games could be developed to run independently of Dungeon Builder and Dream Software later used it to create this version of The Quest For The Holy Grail later the same year.

It’s Just A Scratch

If you’ve read any of my reviews of other text adventures, I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m no fan of games that put players  in situations where they face unavoidable instant death during gameplay. There’s nothing I find more frustrating than going to a location, reading the description and before you can do anything at all, an event is triggered and you’re told that you have been killed, either because you’ve walked into something or a character has attacked you.

Even back in 1984 this wasn’t really acceptable in any game, especially as there was no way to recover your game at that point. It basically forces players to not only map games out to the smallest of detail while playing so you can avoid these situations as you replay them, but also it means that continuous saves become an absolute necessity – and truthfully that just wastes time feeling that you need to keep doing this after every couple of moves.

While it’s not such a problem in the early stages of play as you don’t mind restarting after a dozen or so moves (and it’s actually possible to die within a few moves in The Quest For The Holy Grail) if you’ve played for a while and haven’t saved it’s quite easy to just feel like giving up on the game completely.

So You Think You’re Funny…?

One thing that the games industry still hasn’t learned after all these years is that developing video games of any genre and successfully incorporating humour into them rarely works. Arcade games can pull it off more successfully through the use of sound effects and surreal visuals that will generally put a smile on your face rather than having you laugh out loud while playing. One of the best examples I’ve ever encountered is the PC arcade shooter series Chicken Invaders – a single screen sci-fi shooter that sees you under attack from wave after wave of space chickens. As you shoot them, each one squawks! Sounds absurd but you can’t help but laugh at how crazy it is.

But text based games are another thing altogether. Humour derived from witty dialogue can work well, but poorly crafted jokes, sarcastic comments or abuse hurled at the players just isn’t entertaining to read. Even more so when you have to read the same thing over and over again as you revisit locations or are given the same verbal attacks while fighting with the game’s parser.

Do You Understand The Words That Are Coming Out Of My Mouth

One thing that frustrated players of early text adventures was the limited parsers present in many of them. And sadly The Qest For The Holy Grail can count itself amongst them. It seems to have quite a limited vocabulary and even the most basic words that you would think that it should know are missing. Whether it’s a case of trying to interact with objects in your posession, or examine specific items or characters that you are told are in the locations you are visiting, more often that not you’re simply not able to do so.

Instead, once again the game hurls abuse at you when you try to do these things rather than gives you an indication of whether it’s an issue with the parser or simply something that you are unable to do, leaving you wondering if it’s simply a case of you trying to do the impossible. One of the more unusual examples I found here were relating to a couple of items you need to solve different puzzles. In one location you find a baseball glove that you need to progress inside Camelot but if you try to WEAR it you’re given the usual abusive response.

Yet elsewhere you discover a jester’s hat which is needed for another puzzle but if you attempt to WEAR that you can do so without any issue. It’s times like this where playing the game just makes no sense.

Finally A Map That Makes Sense…

I know I’ve complained about maps before in adventures, especially in some of the games by my favourite interactive fiction authors Scott Adams and Infocom, but one thing I do have to say here is that the map layout in The Quest For The Holy Grail has been set out quite well. In part I’d say this is down to the way the Dungeon Builder engine works, creating games using a room based system with a grid system for its map.

Creating games this way really does make sense and prevents the world layout from taking a seemingly random nature for traversing the landscape. It genuinely makes finding your way around a more enjoyable gaming experience. While mapping the game is still advisable, it is possible to find your way around from memory without going around in circles.

Ministry Of Silly Copyrights

At the beginning I mentioned that The Quest For The Holy Grail is “inspired” by Monty Python… but Mastertronic’s version of the game goes further than that. The inlay makes a clear reference to Monty Python on a couple of occasions, and the game itself is more of a copy of scenarios and characters from the film rather than an inspiration or parody (which would have been safe legally under “fair use” terms.

But it doesn’t stop there. Even the physical cassette treads on questionable ground as there are multiple variants of the cassette label in circulation. Some refer to the game as Holy Grail while others go further and call the game Monty Python’s Holy Grail – it’s astonishing that Mastertronic didn’t find themselves facing another legal challenge as they did with Chiller.

Playability

Ignoring all of the technical details, the most important thing you want to know is how does it play. Well, to be completely honest it’s more frustrating than anything else. As I said earlier, the limited parser finds you fighting with the game at every turn as you spend more time trying to figure out what commands work rather than trying to solve puzzles. Add to that the frequent instant deaths you’ll encounter which at times feels like they happen at almost every turn. And to top it all off, the Spectrum version seems to run at an unbelievably slow pace, but I’ll come on to that shortly…

In addition to those frustrations, many of the puzzles are quite basic – there aren’t as many of them as you might think and some are simply a case of finding items in the game. Seeing an object on the ground in a location and picking it up is enough to complete it, and in another you simply have to open a locked door with a key you can pick up from your starting location!

Presentation

No one really takes the visuals into consideration when playing text adventures – graphics are always secondary to the way everything is set out on screen and what’s most important is how easy everything is to read. The Quest For The Holy Grail is split into two windows – the top section is used to display the graphics, location description, and information on what items you see and the bottom section is where you enter commands and see responses given to you.

Just like titles produced with The Graphic Adventure Creator, the illustrations are quite basic and do take several seconds to draw. It does give the impression that The Dungeon Builder uses a similar line drawing system for producing it’s visuals, although it does seem to allow for slightly more complex illustrations and allows for text to be added. Images are limited to just a few colours though and and they really don’t enhance the game in any way.

One thing that did shock me was just how slowly the game ran. Considering the speed of the Spectrum’s processor, it ran slower than the C64 version that I looked at previously – text entry seemed to be less responsive, there were longer pauses for the game to respond to commands and the game felt as it was struggling all the time. And surprisingly even the graphics took longer to draw for each location, when these type of line drawings should have been displayed much faster on the Spectrum.

Overall #

As a 70s kid, I grew up with Monty Python’s Flying Circus so I really wanted to love playing this. Like so many of us when we think about old 8-bit games, I had fond memories of playing it this when I was younger on the C64 and thought that I enjoyed it. But playing that and the Spectrum version today it’s clearly evident that that wasn’t the case and I just looking back at the game through rose-tinted glasses.

The Quest For The Holy Grail just wasn’t a particularly good adventure back in the 1980s then and it’s no different today. Strip away the Python references and this would have struggled to have been noticed at all when first released. Even at a budget price this is more of a gimmick title than anything else as it simply doesn’t make the grade. There are far better budget adventures out there worth spending your time and money on.

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