Quest for Camelot (Game Boy Color)
The 1998 animated film Quest for Camelot was a box office flop and it didn’t end up earning much love after its brief time in theaters, its most enduring legacy perhaps being the lovely “Prayer” song that is even squandered thanks to a baffling choice where the gorgeous emotional song plays over an action-packed chase scene. Few people were probably even aware the film received a video game adaptation on the Game Boy Color, that is, until September of 2023 when it was added to Nintendo Switch Online’s Game Boy offerings with no explanation on why it specifically was selected. While people expecting value out of the service were likely less than enthused by such a strange choice, such a fascinating revival of a forgotten licensed game couldn’t escape my curiosity.
Quest for Camelot is mostly an adaptation of the events of the film, but how it goes about sharing such details as it tells its slightly altered version of the tale lacks heart. Important details are presented to the player on a plain white screen with black text gradually appearing recounting the story in absolute silence, these story screens covering a lot of narrative ground since this action adventure game isn’t interested in depicting too much during the actual gameplay portions. After the quiet exposition the game will then present some recreated stills of scenes from the film with a range of quality and sometimes poor decision making on what to even present. Sometimes it will just be a character standing there or even a still of a character walking in an unidentifiable place or caught mid-action. With the text covering a lot of ground you’re sometimes presented a sporadic set of images after that try to link to different parts in what you just read and are a bit hard to parse for failing to establish their own chain of events.
The important details to know about the game’s story involve Kayley, the daughter of a knight who was killed protecting King Arthur from betrayal at the hands of a power-hungry knight named Ruber. Once Kayley has grown old enough to adventure on her own, Ruber turns up at her family farm as part of a plot to steal the legendary sword Excalibur and begin his conquest of Camelot, but the sword is lost in transit to Ruber and Kayley sets out to find it and return it to the rightful king. While Quest for Camelot for Game Boy Color invents some sections like an encounter with a wizard and removes parts from the film like the encounter with the ogre, the most important change is how heavily downplayed the role of Garret, Kayley’s blind companion and love interest, is compared to the movie. Considering he often took over during action scenes and Kayley is the playable character here though it’s understandable at least and the game has little difficulty in plugging any plot holes he would have left behind, especially since the wizard Merlin is a much more active character in the game adaptation as he’s often guiding Kayley or teleporting her to the next area.
The poorly told story certainly makes Kayley’s quest hard to get invested in, but the actual action she engages with along the journey isn’t much better. Typically, Quest for Camelot is a top-down action adventure game similar to something like The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, Kayley having to fight her way through a range of areas, from the Forbidden Forest to the dragon lands to Castle Camelot itself. One immediate problem you’ll notice when fighting though is very few enemies have any sort of intelligence. Once you slash them once with your sword, they’ll line up and try to close in, but if you stand your ground and just mash the attack button, they have no hope of closing in. This works on knights, dragons, mages, and even a few bosses, and while some bats can upset your efforts with their circular flight patterns and snakes will wrap around you for trying to slash them, they also aren’t huge obstacles themselves and you can even eventually get a slingshot that takes care of most any monster that would otherwise bother you. Bosses feel like they’re the only ones who can break away from combat simplicity and that’s not a consistent truth, some having special attacks aimed to break through your wall of sword slashes but if you stand in the right spot they might not be able to pull it off.
The bulk of Quest for Camelot will be simple sword combat spread out over fairly open spaces where you’ll usually be asked to wipe out all the pushover enemies or look for some items to collect before you can move on. You do gradually get new items like a shovel for digging up items, and healing hearts aren’t hard to find underground so this can further sap the sense you’re in danger in some areas. You’re given a shield that mostly seems meant for blocking dragon fire but it doesn’t feel too necessary for success, and that slingshot uses gems as ammunition which isn’t too much of a concern since they are common drops from enemies. Some points in the game will ask you to pay and the save system requests 30 gems any time you wish to save besides when you’re entering a new chapter of the story, but it’s still not going to drain your coffers much. There is a bit of a leveling system involved, Kayley’s swordsmanship improving after she’s beaten a certain amount of enemies and some areas of the game won’t let you continue unless you’ve done so, but with enemies so easy to kill most of the time it’s not hard to build up experience and thankfully you’ll be able to kill enemies more quickly once you are stronger.
Quest for Camelot does lean on its vapid battles and empty exploration quite a lot, but the game does try to get inventive with ways to obstruct progress. Some are simple like needing to ride a horse to get through a strong wind, but others involve gameplay shifts or new goals that don’t often work in the game’s favor. A treasure hunt leans far too much on exact paces taken rather than interesting clues on where to dig, an indoor area contains a maze of locked doors where you grab a bunch of keys that you’ll need to test on each door to make marginal progress towards more keys and more doors, and a vertical shooter section ruins what could have been basic fun because the enemies you’re firing at can barely be seen in advance so firing constantly and without much direction is the best option. Some ideas Quest for Camelot hits on aren’t too bad, there are some puzzles where you push boulders into set spots that muster up a few good arrangements, although the game throws them all together one after the other instead of spicing up other dungeons with something more involved than the battles. These experiments are at least a bit better than moments like needing to slash through a tree that looks like all the others to access an important place or how it can be difficult to tell if some of the more puzzle-oriented bosses are actually impervious to the strategy you’re attempting or it just didn’t properly detect your intent. With some repetitive music underscoring your unexciting adventure, there’s not really much in this adventure that ever hits a higher mark than “acceptable” and many that are far lower than that.
THE VERDICT: Quest for Camelot for Game Boy Color is a lifeless retelling of a subpar film, this medieval fantasy adventure a snore as enemies too willingly throw themselves into your effortless sword swinging. Little experiments on how to shake things up often go awry thanks to issues with hit detection or concepts that weren’t thought out much beyond the basics. While wandering around collecting things and easily carving up baddies is more likely to make you yawn than groan, this quest drags on for too long and really tests the limits of the player’s patience with areas like the locked door maze that don’t do much beyond extend the unfortunate amount of time you’d spend playing this game if you decide for some reason to stick with it.
And so, I give Quest for Camelot for Game Boy Color…
A TERRIBLE rating. Early sections of Quest for Camelot are boring but bearable as you’re not really doing much beyond easily cutting up knights and collecting chickens, but when things start to get a little more complicated they also get much duller. Large areas require you to poke around them for longer periods and when you are made to break away from the hollow combat, you’re not often treated to a new gameplay type worth experiencing. Block pushing puzzles are often the low point of games that claim to have puzzles and yet they’re probably a highlight in Quest for Camelot since they require some real thought to solve. Other points often just involve moving all around the available space looking for things to kill or grab, and while the game at least expands your arsenal a touch with the slingshot, too much of the game never really moves away from the basic actions you’ve been doing from the get-go. The poorly told story should have distributed images in between the text to make it flow better, the enemies you face should have had strategies besides running face-first into your blade so you might get something out of encounters, and the gameplay shifts like the shooting section should have chosen better movement patterns for its enemies and definitely remove much of the horizontal movement space so that you’re more likely to actually see your foes.
There really isn’t much of a case for why this game in particular should have been added to Nintendo’s subscription service, although Nintendo did at least publish the game in America and Europe so perhaps they still had some rights in hand to make it easy. Whether or not it is deserving though, the fact it was pulled up from obscurity is still heartening in a way, since licensed games tied to unpopular media almost never have a chance of being revived. Merely knowing a game like this was revived delights me more than anything the game offers and I’ll be even more pleased if this becomes less of an oddity going forward. While you can usually count on a good game to come back around eventually, choosing to provide modern players with a chance to go back to a 1998 video game that isn’t even good helps keep even the stranger and insignificant parts of the medium’s history at hand. Much like the film, it will be something some enthusiasts take a look at and likely walk away unimpressed, so don’t let my amusement at its inclusion on the Switch Online service read as some endorsement. It’s not quirky in some fascinating way, it’s just a game that didn’t do anything to earn the unusual attention it has thanks to its strange inexplicable return.