Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon/Gameplay

Space Quest III belongs to the now-defunct line of Sierra On-Line Graphical Text Adventures. It is the fifth Sierra title to utilize the Sierra Creative Interpreter (SCI Version 0.000.453) engine used in other Sierra games (King's Quest IV, Leisure Suit Larry 2, and others). Although the game is a classic 2D adventure, a sense of 3D is achieved by clever layouts and beautiful graphics. Apart from walking, your every action, from looking at something to killing an evil bloodthirsty robot is taken care of by typing in an appropriate command, similar to ancient text-only adventures. The major change from the previous Space Quest games is that the game pauses to wait for the necessary input of the command, and utilizes a floating command box, as opposed to the usual bottom-prompt seen in Space Quest I and Space Quest II. According to Space Quest III Manual, SCI understands the following commands:



In order to communicate the commands with ease, this guide will highlight the necessary command in italics, like this: take keycard. Furthermore, Space Quest III also contains a few scenes that operate on the use of "hot keys," so you have to press numbers (and sometimes letters) to communicate with the game. Similarly, the commands will be in italics, but they will also be in parenthesis. For example: "Turn on your engines, (1)".

Since Space Quest III (like other Sierra On-Line Adventures) utilizes a point system, the walkthrough does not only provide every action necessary for scoring the largest amount of points. The point value per action will appear in square brackets immediately following the action.

The Walkthrough that is to follow contains solution(s) to every puzzle in Space Quest III. Although Appendix A contains some curious material regarding the gems of the Space Quest III experience, the full enjoyment of the game comes from the slow paced exploration. In other words, use look around as much as possible. Oftentimes (as shown in Appendix A) knowing the solution can diminish the experience, stripping it of the whimsical complexity of game design.



Last but not least, it should be mentioned that the game may become exceedingly frustrating because of high risk of death (A Sierra On-Line Trademark of sorts). Since this game was made before "Try Again" feature was implemented, your only choices are Restore, Restart, and Quit. While the guide does not explicitly tells you to Save your game (F5), it is imperative that you save your progress often. Even the most die-hard Space Quest fans will admit that beating any of the Space Quest games without saving at least once is not an easy trial to endure (although not impossible).