![]() Depending on your character class, you’ll have to turn to warm clothes or fire magic to traverse the wilderness, and the first few days of Heroine’s Quest feel more akin to The Long Dark than Quest for Glory. The first day of the game requires the heroine to venture beyond the city of Fornsigtuna to forage for food and a freezing meter appears in the upper left hand side of the screen, indicating the very real chance that she’ll turn into an icicle if she goes too far. With Heroine’s Quest’s frigid setting comes survival gameplay that is, once again, more advanced than Quest for Glory’s relatively simple “run out of stamina and you die” mechanic. For instance, the character Snorri is named after Snorri Sturluson, who compiled the Prose Edda.” Several of the puzzles come from there, and I rather like that many of the characters and locations can be found in myth books or on Wikipedia. So when I started writing characters and puzzles, I took a lot of inspiration from my Norse mythology books. ![]() “Myself, I’m a big mythology fan I’ve collected books from Greek, Indian, Egyptian, and other myths and legends since I was twelve. “The Nordic snowy setting was chosen for atmospheric reasons, because Corby wanted to try something new after doing ‘standard’ medieval forest work,” Simoons said in an interview. Inspired by the snowy landscapes of the region, he teamed up with Pieter Simoons, founder of Crystal Shard and the game’s writer and programmer. Heroine’s Quest was originally envisioned with a quasi-Celtic fantasy flair, and this early iteration, carrying the subtitle The Legend of Fair Spring, was the brainchild of artist Corby La Croix, who scrapped it and decided to rework the concept after moving to Yellowknife, Canada. This Norse setting wasn’t always present in the game. You’ll meet Ratatosk the squirrel, travel to Svartalfheim, and possibly even encounter trickster god Loki, who appears decidedly more like a frost giant than his more recognized depiction in Marvel movies. Quest for Glory I, for instance, may have been vaguely influenced by Germanic folklore, but Heroine’s Quest goes all-out by having the heroine interact with the likes of the Norns and the valkyrie Brynhild. Featuring a number of locations and characters straight from the Prose Edda, the 13th century poems that defined Norse myth, Heroine’s Quest feels distinctly rooted in real-world mythology to a degree deeper than any of the Quest for Glory games. Heroine’s Quest tasks players with choosing between the roles of warrior, sorceress and rogue to save the realm of Jarnvidr from Egther, last of the frost giants who hopes to usher in the twilight of the gods, also known as Ragnarok. It lives up to its Quest for Glory inspiration by offering a similar blend of point and click adventure and RPG skill-building, but goes one step further, arguably surpassing the series that Lori Ann and Corey Cole created with an intricate Nordic setting and deeper roleplaying mechanics. Originally conceived in the mid-2000s as an ode to Sierra’s Quest for Glory franchise, the game was made by the indie development group Crystal Shard and released for free in 2013. Heroine’s Quest: The Herald of Ragnarok is the very definition of a labor of love.
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