Stair Quest
A downloadable game for Windows, macOS, and Linux
The realm of Castle's Wood is in despair.
As famine, war, disease, and natural disaster wreak havoc upon the land, good King Jonathan seeks the counsel of a wise old Soothsayer.
"Seek ye out the Orb of Stars," she tells King Jonathan.
Says the King, "The Orb of Stars is but a legend!"
The Soothsayer replies with a sly grin, "Even in legend may one find the truth, m'lord."
So, King Jonathan dispatches his bravest knight, Sir Devon, to quest for the legendary Orb of Stars. Little does he know his own daughter, Princess Ingrid, has also set out in search of the legendary relic...
Stair Quest is a retro adventure game that pays homage to the most enchanting, pulse-pounding moments from the early King's Quest games.
Features
- Gorgeous EGA graphics inspired by classic Sierra On-Line adventure games like King's Quest and The Black Cauldron!
- An innovative text parser that recognizes literally thousands of commands!
- Multiple protagonists! Choose to play as either the brave Sir Devon or the daring Princess Ingrid.
- An original 8-bit soundtrack so good it could pass as a 9-bit soundtrack!
- An old-school instruction manual filled with Stair Quest lore and important tips for success! So authentic, it could have been written by Roberta Williams herself. (It wasn't.)
Developed for AdventureJam 2016 by No More For Today Productions (Patrick Johnston, Gareth Millward, Jess Morrissette, Frederik Olsen, Troels Pleimert, Chris Ushko, and Kevin Wallace). Cover art ("Roll for Initative...") by Jon Hodgson. Cover design by Andy Couch.
Download
Development log
- Listen to the Stair Quest Soundtrack!Jan 11, 2024
- Download the Mac Version of Stair Quest: Winter Edition!Jan 08, 2024
- Stair Quest: Winter Edition Available!Jan 05, 2024
- Mac Version Updated!Apr 14, 2020
Comments
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You can't just drop a sequel tease like that unless you're planning to really do a second one. I'd buy it, to be honest. I wasn't even a King's Quest fan, but there's just something hypnotic about those stairs...
I told a friend about this game because another reminded me of it, and it gave her a good nostalgic laugh.
I guess it's the price of "progress" but I don't seem to be able to run this on Mac OS 10.14.5 (Mojave) - any insight? I've played it before (and it is brilliant) but was wanting to take another look!
The Mac version is a simple Wine wrapper around the Windows version. Let me see if I can get it up and running here (I'm on 10.14.4).
Thanks for taking a look - would be great if it works. If not, I can of course get hold of a PC to get my second play-through in. Such an excellent game.
I second this – I'm also trying to run it on Mojave. It would be great to play it on my Mac but otherwise I'll switch to the PC.
I am looking at this occasionally; Wine stopped getting updates a while back so I was investigating the various spin-offs
I see that this game was created using the Adventure Game Studio, so there is an easier (and MUCH smaller) way to port the game over to the Mac that will run on macOS Mojave and Catalina. I'm testing out a port of the game. I'm not using Wine, so the app has been reduced from a hefty 590 MB to a svelte 57MB.
Really enjoyed this one, lots of memories fading back!
A friend joined me playing. We talk a lot and die a lot:
Piece of cake.
Homocidal, unfair, horrible cake with nice retro computer music and scenes and excellent writing.
MAN... the game is awesome but ... It's so frustrating HAHAHAH
I was born in 1978, and some of the earliest games we ever got were KQ1, and then 2. WE had "unoriginal" copies, and SAVE - for whatever reason - never worked...
Now... we loved those games, but we had to try to finish them in one sitting... the game could only ever be tackled right from the start.
You can imagine, there might be a bit of tension in the room - 3 brothers huddled around the monitor - when it came time to walk the path of thorns, to try to reach Dracula's castle across the poisoned moat in KQ2.
Oh, my, god. And that path of thorns was so unforgiving, sooooo not-even-laid-out-fairly-or-intuitively to know which footstep might be your last... and we had no save. One bump of a thorn and the entire game had to be played from the beginning!
Once! Once upon a time... we made it.
Oh the delight to see inside the castle! What was in there? What awaited us there?!?
A circular stairway, leading up. My brother and I (twins), were asked to leave the room while our older brother attempted the climb.
He promptly fell down and died.
At this point, he deemed it appropriate to get scissors and cut the disk into "8 even pieces". Not something I approved of at all, and yet, it seemed somehow like a justifiable reaction.
This became a long standing family quote, and "fond memory" of playing Sierra games in our youth.
Without having played any of these games, I assure you that was probably a justified reaction at the time ;)
I loudly applaud thee for making a true Sierra homage! Many of us grew up playing it, and perhaps many of us (including me) were inspired to make games because of Sierra. Hooray for you! Gold. :)
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it. You could probably tell that our entire team was raised on Sierra adventures.
:) Totally. I think King's Quest 3 was my favorite, partly due to my own age and engagement at that time in history... the leap forwards in coherence of setting and storytelling was immense!
The sense of it being an ACTUAL story - moving ahead on a timeline with or without the player - with Manannan's overbearing attitude, and scheduled movements within the world. Super cool...
Your sweet EGA style graphics capture the feel of those screens - that world I got so involved in - so well!
I was immediately put in mind of the winding mountain pathway to get down from Manannan's house atop the hill!
Keep it up! So good. :P I wonder if there is more fertile ground for this approach to game making. I so enjoyed Peasant's Quest, too, for it's brilliance as a parody, but also as a really fun little game!
You are a funny person.
Does anybody know how many hellish levels there really are?...
At least there were no ladders.
yet?
Now I hope your next game project will be a reference of ladders in FPS games. There was this old LP of Thief where there was a collection of videos of the LPer failing climbing ladders....
There are ten levels, but only four or five of them are truly hellish. :)
Ladder Quest, eh? *jots down a few notes*