The Order of the Thorne - The King's Challenge

The fantasy genre comes with a huge lore regarding various creatures and characters that may coexist in a certain story, although nothing is set in stone. It’s much easier to adhere to a couple of standards, however, rather than creating everything from scratch. Hence, it’s a given that elves have long ears and they love trees, just how orcs are violent and usually green.

The Order of the Thorne - The King's Challenge is a retro point & click adventure game which presents you with a classic quest, one that should take you to every corner of the world in search of riddles and answers. The game is designed to look as old school as possible, and you even have to play it like back in the day. Hence, a lot of reading and dialog is required to get through most of the puzzles.

The story puts you in the role of a jolly bard by the name of Finn, who’s on a journey to write the most legendary ballad the world has ever seen. In order to do so, he enrolls in the King’s Challenge, which is a quest handed down by the king to those who wish to pursue glory. In this case, the participants must find the queen and bring her back to the palace unharmed.

Your powers as a bard allow for interesting gameplay mechanics, since you can use the lute to play various songs and even solve quests. It’s obviously not as easy as that, but music certainly has a lot to do with Finn’s journey. The rest of the gameplay revolves around finding useful objects and combining them in the right way, not to mention the fact that you also have to talk your way to some answers with various characters.

As mentioned before, the retro influence is quite overwhelming, and it shows in the graphics department as well. The pixel art is not bad at all, but it would seem like the characters and the sprites are a bit too simple, almost like no one thought it matters if everything looks old. Thankfully, things are much better in the sound department, and there is even voice acting for every line in the game.

All things considered, The Order of the Thorne - The King's Challenge is not without flaws, but it’s still quite well-designed and very engaging. Hence, if you enjoyed the classics of the genre and you are up for some puzzle solving, this may very well be the perfect cure.