King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! Overview
King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! is an adventure game where King Graham's castle and family are magically abducted by the wizard Mordack. Aiding him, a talking owl named Cedric guides Graham to the land of Serenia to seek help from the wizard Crispin.
This title introduced a point-and-click interface to the series, replacing typed commands. Player interaction is managed through a set of icon-based cursors for walking, looking, manipulating objects, and conversing, which are accessed via a hidden top-screen menu or by cycling with a right-click. Collected items are stored in an inventory bag that opens into a sub-window for examination and combination.
The gameplay is considered challenging, as exploration in Serenia presents numerous fatal hazards. These range from dangerous creatures to environmental perils, making the use of multiple save files a practical necessity to avoid significant progress loss.
A later NES adaptation maintained the core icon interface, locations, and puzzles but required graphical simplification due to hardware limits. This version streamlined the experience by removing many alternate puzzle solutions, restricting unwinnable actions, shortening or cutting scenes, and reducing the size of some areas. Certain death sequences were altered or removed, and some text was changed.
