Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon

DOS cover.

Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon is a comedic graphic adventure puzzle video game developed and published by Sierra On-Line on 1989-03-24 initially for MS-DOS, and later for Amiga, Atari ST, and Macintosh. It is the third game in the Space Quest series and the first to use the Sierra Creative Interpreter version 0. The game was primarily designed by Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy who go by the moniker "Two Guys from Andromeda."

The game's plot takes place following the end of the second game. Hero Roger Wilco awakens to find himself trapped on a junk barge. After he escapes he discovers that the Two Guys from Andromeda have been kidnapped and Wilco helps rescue them.

Personal

Although I very much enjoyed the first two Space Quest games, I had little desire to continue to series. However, my friend Beau encouraged me to play the third game saying it was both easy and short. So, I started playing it and, after needing two hints, ended up beating it the next day on 2021-01-11 with a score of 698 out of 738.

Status

I own this game in a Steam collection and have beaten it.

Review

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Best Version: MS-DOS

— This section contains spoilers! —

Good

• There are several laugh-out-loud jokes through the game, and plenty of chuckles.
• The EGA graphics are were really impressive for the time, and hold up well. The backgrounds are highly detailed and the sprite animations are well-drawn, and the death graphics are really funny.
• The music is pretty great too for the time, and more than passable decades later.

Bad

• The plot, the Two Guys from Andromeda have been kidnapped by a terrible game company and forced to make games, is not only self-serving and ill-fitting, but it doesn't work. Roger doesn't have the slightest idea who they are and has plenty of his own problems, so why would he risk his life to save them?
• The joke about your sentence being just too well-crafted for the game to understand was hilarious the first time I read it, but, by making it the only response for an unexpected input, I very quickly became annoyed with it as I struggled with the parser.
• The long delays with the claw puzzle make it annoying to get the item you're reaching for, and even more annoying when you're trying to deliver it.
• The "puzzle" with the rat thief was disappointing. I wasted a lot of time trying to come up with a way to actually prevent the rat from robbing me, only to find that you just do the same thing twice, to "solve" it.
• I don't like how the invisibility belt can't be used to bypass the pirates. It's nice that they designers prevent you from entering an unwinnable state later in the game, but it doesn't make sense. They should have come up with a better way to prevent you from using it too soon, or given you an alternate route later.
• The rotating hallway in the offices of Scumsoft looks nice, but it's a pain to navigate.
• The maze in the accounting department of Scumsoft is tedious.
• The game is a bit too short and too easy. I finished it in only a couple of hours, and I felt like most of the difficulties I had with the game was from struggling with the limited parser.
• The hint book tries to be funny, but the jokes are especially lame.

Ugly

• The Astro Chicken game is not only a rip-off of Lunar Lander, but features bad controls and terrible music. I know this was meant to be an in-game joke since it was supposed to be made by a terrible video game company, but there is satire, and then there is just laziness. To top it all off, playing the game isn't even necessary to beat SQ3!

Media

Box Art

• 

  All regions and releases use this art with minor variations on the layout. It shows Roger Wilco blasting away from a fleet of pirate spaceships while enjoying a Monolith Burger. It certainly gets across the point of a humorous sci-fi game.

Documentation

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  Multi-platform manual.

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  Hint book.

Videos

Ways to die.

Debug modes.

Longplay - Amiga.

Longplay - Atari ST.

Longplay - MS-DOS.

Links