With each new Legend of Kyrandia game, the story continues but the perspective changes. In the first game you play Prince Brandon, a virtuous sop whose parents were slain by an evil court jester named Malcolm. With the help of an alchemist named Zanthia, you turn the good-for-squat Malcolm into stone. In the second game, you become Zanthia and once again save the kingdom of Kyrandia. Then along comes the third adventure, Malcolm’s Revenge, in which everything learned earlier turns out to be hogwash. You play Malcolm, brought back to life by a freak bolt of lightning. And wouldn’t you just know it, you were framed! You didn’t kill Brandon’s parents. Okay, so you’re sarcastic and malevolent. But a murderer? Never.
The basic action is standard adventuregame fare. You wander around searching for stuff, adding stuff to your inventory, and trying to use the stuff in a way that gets you out of your current predicament. The screen resolution is just 320 by 240 pixels — partially the result of the game’s being ported from DOS — and some puzzles are plain impossible to figure out. (Who among us would think to blow up a brick wall using sesame seeds fertilized by an eel?) The game can likewise be unforgiving, and the action is peppered with repetitive tasks.
Luckily, Malcolm’s Revenge provides enough pleasant diversions to make the game ultimately enjoyable and engaging. The story line is good, slowly unraveling the mystery of just who did kill Brandon’s folks as you engage in your various acts of high adventure, such as aiding some cats in a revolution against a tyrannical dog empire and saving Kyrandia from certain enslavement at the hands of some equally tyrannical pirates. The game awards you points and praise when you show off your ornery side by destroying public works and even randomly poking people with sharp objects. (Notoriously malicious jesters like yourself have an image to maintain.) And occasionally you come across glimpses of gaming flexibility. There are six different ways to escape the first scenario, and you can elect to follow your good conscience, bad conscience, or both in the fifth scenario.
The Last Word Malcolm’s Revenge isn’t nearly as humorous as LucasArts’ Monkey Island, but it offers a complete and well-scored soundtrack as well as threedimensional animated transitions. Though Malcolm is hardly a role model, the game is perfectly suitable for kids (even one goofy death scene). And thanks to the complexity of the game and the number of variations, you’re looking at a week or more of game playing.
McClelland, Deke. (January 1996). The Legend of Kyrandia, Book 3. Macworld. (pg. 77).