So after toying around with my Raspberry Pi, I discovered that ScummVM supports King's Quest 6. Good thing that I kept that disc from the very first computer that the family had. I imaged this disc a few years ago, so it should be saved from bit rot. So I copied the ISO over to my Pi and fired up ScummVM.

This was one of those games I spent hours on, but eventually got stuck. And I later found someone else that was stuck at exactly the same place. Now that I know all of its secrets, I can just breeze through it. It suffers from the classic adventure game trope of clicking everything on everything else and seeing what happens. There's plenty of trial and error to be had.

The whole story is rescue the princess. Unlike that one time, it's an actual princess this time. You play as Prince Alexander of Daventry, and the narrator makes damn well sure you know about it at nearly every turn. So the prince sees this princess he's been dreaming of in a mirror, so off he goes and crashes a ship on foreign shores.

So you find a way to travel around this island group, even though travel is more or less impossible. It doesn't help that every island hates each other, so even if anyone were to get somewhere, you'd still have a rude welcome. So after some trickery and captures, you start fulfilling prophecies, dealing with beasts, and gaining trust of the island's rulers. The game was panned due to the ease at which you can die, but in today's world of shooters, it's not a problem at all. If you stay away from large bodies of water and use common sense, it's not that big of a deal. Whether or not you fly or die to get there, you end up in the Land of the Dead. Pretty much everything can kill you there.

It is notable that there is a short way and a long way to finish the game. It mostly involves going through the front door of the castle, or the "side" one. And like STALKER, there is a great deal more satisfaction in going the long way.

Unfortunately, KQ6 is not freeware. But if you have some old adventure games lying around, you might be able to run them in ScummVM, so check the list. If not, there's DOSBox. ScummVM runs fine on Pi (aside from having terrible sounding MIDI), but I'm not sure about DOSBox, since the Pi has a completely different CPU architecture (ARM) than PCs do (x86).