After heroically recovering the three lost treasures of Daventry from assorted looters in the first King's Quest, the new monarch – erstwhile knight, Sir Graham – has restored the kingdom to its old glory. The citizens are cheerful once more, enemies are taking a breather, and all's well with everyone... except Graham. The crown sits heavily on the head of the young man whose adventurous life has come to a standstill amidst the daily drudgery of administering the peaceful and prosperous province. While not dozing off during dull recitals of statistics by his advisors, nearly-bored-to-death Graham spends his days half-heartedly trying to find a bride for himself. His efforts are wasted, however, as he has little patience for wannabes and sycophants. But since he's the king, his soirées to hobnob with potential suitors are naturally doomed to be populated with precisely those sorts.

And so it goes until the day his security advisor, Gervain, suggests that Graham seek a clue to his future in the Magic Mirror. As he peers into the glowing glass, Graham is swept away on a virtual rollercoaster ride through the neighbouring land of Kolyma, his flight of fantasy ending with an enticing, irresistible glimpse of a lonely tower on a psychedelic island. Entrapped within is a beautiful maiden, and it's love at first sight for Graham, who immediately exchanges his crown for his feathered adventuring hat, collects his sword, and sets off on his galleon to rescue her. Meanwhile in Kolyma, warty witch Hagatha is informed by a mysterious entity – who she addresses as Father – that Graham's about to stick his neck out to rescue the damsel in distress, and that her new priority is to “sever it”.

AGD Interactive's King's Quest II: Romancing the Stones is an inspired remake of Sierra’s King's Quest II: Romancing the Throne, originally developed way back in 1985. AGDI's version is based on the same characters, and retells “with gusto” the tale of Graham's quest for his bride. First released in December 2002, Romancing the Stones is an epic labour of love not just from Graham, but also the tiny development team behind this remake, featuring over 15 hours of complex storytelling, a fantastic script, intricate plot twists, challenging sub-quests, delightful old-fashioned VGA graphics, soaring MIDI-style orchestral music, extensive and expert voice acting, and most importantly, a faithful recreation of Sierra's later point-and-click interface instead of the dreaded text parser that fuelled the original. It's not a perfect game, hobbled in places by vague gameplay, clunky navigation, far too much clueless walking around, and a reliance on sheer luck to trigger randomly-initiated events, but I suspect part of that is intended to retain the flavour of adventuring in the golden days – the era of 16-colour EGA graphics and (gasp!) no World Wide Web (read: no handy walkthroughs), when it could take months to complete a game. On the bright side, the game is totally linear and has no dead ends, just nasty surprises that temporarily kill Graham and maim your ego (if you've been conscientious about saving).

Graham's quest starts in earnest once he's dropped off on a pier at Kolyma. The story unfolds over the next day-and-a-half as he scouts the perilous area riddled with real and magical dangers, runs errands for sundry locals in exchange for useful information and items, fights various breeds of evil that directly and indirectly ail Kolyma, and eventually locates the mystery tower. Initial exploration leads to an encounter with the ‘Stone of Destiny’, a gravelly-voiced rock face which informs Graham that he needs to find the three ‘Gems of Nature’ to succeed. At this point the game becomes literally multi-dimensional, as besides ransacking Kolyma and its outskirts, Graham must also delve underwater to negotiate with King Neptune and make time for a walk in the clouds.

The first few games of the King's Quest series were laden with concepts from popular fairytales and mythologies, and Romancing the Stones stays true to this theme, devoting detailed plotlines to stories such as Little Red Riding Hood, The Ugly Duckling, Aladdin and Dracula. The remake, however, takes the original game to a whole different level of excellence, delving deeper into the plot and greatly expanding its complexity, ramping up difficulty with creative situational and inventory puzzles, and giving every character – human, undead, fish, flying horse and pumpkin – distinct, engaging personalities. The update also actively tackles the eternal conflict between right and wrong, often presenting dilemmas directly to Graham (and therefore the player), who must choose the one solution that best suits his unimpeachable moral integrity while ensuring that others are not judged solely on their apparent nature – quite a few seemingly evil creatures eventually reveal hearts of gold, and far friendlier entities just as shockingly are exposed as turncoats.

The game world, which includes a lengthy coastline, an endless swamp and a sprawling forest, can feel overwhelming until you get a hang of the 'blocks' that each location is broken into. In the original game, the map wrapped around so that if Graham kept walking in one direction, he'd eventually end up at square one, but that's not the case here, with each location ending physically in all four directions. While more logical, this exponentially increases the amount of backtracking from one corner of Kolyma to another, a problem compounded by three issues: Graham walks reasonably fast but doesn't run; the next course of action is often unclear and the only way out is to roam around hoping to stumble into either a new crisis or the solution of an existing one; and many events are triggered by other events or the day/night cycle, and these locations must be revisited frequently just to check if they've become active.

Besides walking, Graham can look at, touch and talk to everyone and everything. Each action elicits a comment from the narrator’s staggering database of witticisms, and absurd moves earn verbal raps on the knuckles (“The tree looks climbable, just as you look breakable.”) You can cycle through the actions either by right-clicking or rolling over the menu at the top of the screen and selecting the desired icon. Graham can also be moved using the keyboard, and while sometimes this is inconvenient when he gets 'stuck' against screen elements like trees and rocks, overall this is the quickest way to navigate. You'll gather quite a few odds and ends during your quest, but the remake refrains from the indiscriminate object collection that commonly plagued adventure games of that era. On the downside, hotspots aren't labelled in any way and many are present only to add intricacy to the settings, which leads to many unhelpful clicks. Objects in the inventory can be looked at, felt and used with on-screen hotspots or with each other, though inventory combination puzzles are infrequent.