If Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time was a multimedia product after its name, how does the second multimedia entry, an adaptation of sorts of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the Quest for the Holy Grail compare to it? Is it better or worse? Less or more of a game? Or just more of the same.
The answer is kind of. To all.
For those who don't know, the Holy Grail was the second feature movie by the legendary Monty Python group. Their first, And Now For Something Completely Different, was a collection of re-shot sketches from the series, strung together to feature-length and that's pretty much it. The Holy Grail was a far more ambitious attempt.
The movie follows King Arthur (Graham Chapman), who with his loyal servant Patsy (Terry Gilliam), travels to ancient England, looking for knights to gather around his round table. He is then given a mission by God, who asks him and his knights to look for the Holy Grail. And that's really all you need to know about the setup. What follows is, if you ask me, 30 best comedy minutes Monty Python group ever created, followed by an hour of pretty solid comedy. As a side note, Eric Idle based his hit musical Spamalot on the Holy Grail.
So, the movie out of the way, how does this adaptation fare? Well, surprisingly enough, this time around, there seems to be a purpose about it beyond being just a collection of clips from the movie. There are clips, no need to fret about the lack of them, but they aren't sprinkled around randomly. No, this time around there seems to be an actual game present. Not a great game nor a very well designed game, but something that resembles a bare-bones adventure game following the movie, more or less.
The basic gist of the adventure is to go through a series of scenes based on the movie. So you have the God-given quest, the village of plague victims, the witch-burning, the Black Knight and the castle Anthrax and the French Knights and the cave as well the Bridge. Then there's the Official Book of the Movie Game.
The gameplay consists of clicking everything in view in order to see what happens and if you might get some inventory items. Yes, there is an inventory and you even have to solve a couple of puzzles with the loot you haul. Not good puzzles, but puzzles nonetheless. There are also minigames because of course there are. Some of them you even have to complete in order to proceed.
Thankfully you don't have to "complete" all of them in order to proceed. Some of them are pretty clever though as game parodies. My personal favourites are the Tetris variation where the blocks are corpses flung in a corpse pit and the combat game parody fought against the Black Knight. The best thing about the Black Knight fight is, you can play it either as Arthur or the Black Knight and both modes are different. As Arthur, you hack away with your sword from a 3rd person view, as the Black Knight you play from a 1st person mode, seeing the scene through a narrow slit of his helmet.
This is approximately how the gameplay goes. Let's take the castle Anthrax and its lusty maidens for example. The castle area consists of two scenes, the exterior and the interior. Outside the castle, you can, before Sir Galahad the Pure (Michael Palin) proceeds to be seduced by the ladies keen on getting spanked, click on everything you see. This clicking can open up some additional jokes, but also allows you to find a couple of items you may or may not need during your quest.
You can then enter the castle, you could do that earlier actually, but it does pay off to click everything just to be on the safe side. Inside, you need to click on the many lusty maidens in order to open a minigame of Spank the Virgin, where you need to do exactly that while being cautious of not so virginal virgins. After some vigorous spanking, you get to a bonus round which reveals you a 4 digit code, which you then need to use outside the castle to get a false Grail. Then you can go back in, start clicking the maidens again until you finally get the hidden maiden to appear and can get a piece of undergarments from her you need in another part of the game.
After you've gathered all you need, you should have 10 items you have to relocate elsewhere. Like a samurai helmet, that needs to go to the closet of the Black Knight (John Cleese). Doing this will finally open the way to cross the bridge of death, but only if you answer questions three. Which you've answered if you've filled the in-game registration form. Or at least a part of it, as it has over 100 extremely unrelated questions.
It's very likely that you've gathered a tonne of unrelated stuff as well during your adventures, so you need to discard all the junk as well, including the thousands of gold coins in your purse. Thankfully, the money is gone by spending it on a shrubbery related website, through which you can send shrubbery related gifts to a certain group of knights.
Now, if you've finally done everything and found all that is necessary, you can finally cross the bridge and locate the Holy Grail. Congratulations, you've won the game. And I mean that you can actually play this whole thing through if you are just tenacious enough with your clicking about.
And that is really what I mean the Quest for Holy Grail is kind of better, kind of worse, kind of more of a game and kind of more or less the same as the Complete Waste of Time. It isn't a well-made game, but it does have a sort of a game-like purpose besides being an assortment of the best bits of the movie. In that sense, it is also a bit better, as it is also funnier. But it also is more of the same, as that's really all the gameplay mounts to; clicking stuff in order to see what happens. And it is kind of worse as the actual gameplay is basically tied to the fact that you need to click all you see.
Monty Python & the Quest for the Holy Grail is a product you might get something out of if you are a fan of the group. That said, everyone else would probably be better off watching the movie itself. And the same might go for most of the fans as well.
Just like Complete Waste of Time, the Quest for the Holy Grail is not in sale in any digital storefronts. If you really, really, really would like to have a copy, eBay and the like are your best option. Or Some other, perhaps not so savoury sources. Then again, even if you do find it, you might have a hard time making it run on anything newer than Windows 98, so again, just watch the movie. Or don't, I'm not your mother.
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