There’s an old quest in World of Warcraft that grants you the “privilege” of briefly experiencing what it’s like to be a quest giver. That is, to be a non-player character (“NPC”) who stays in the exact same spot for all eternity, doing nothing but waiting for adventurers to click on you and mindlessly accept all the quests you can offer them. That quest in WoW sees you hand out quests to three parodies of player characters before the NPC who gave you this duty realizes that a quest giver’s life isn’t for you and frees you from the monotony.

I know I haven’t exactly made that concept sound exciting, but DarZal Games’ Quest Giver does an excellent job of turning that idea into an entire game. I’ve enjoyed my time with Quest Giver so much that I’m excited to hopefully draw new players to it. However, there’s an elephant in the room that I want to mention. Characters in games who hand out quests to players are traditionally NPCs, and Quest Giver refers to you as an NPC even though you are demonstrably the player character.

I felt compelled to at least mention that logical paradox, but I’d rather not dwell on it because it makes my brain hurt. Anyway, in Quest Giver, you play as an unnamed NPC who works for a guild that apparently employs temporary quest givers and dispatches them wherever they’re needed. There’s usually some work that needs doing (typically slaying monsters), and there are adventurers capable of doing it. Your job is mainly to act as a liaison between whoever wants things done and the adventurers who want to be handsomely rewarded for completing those menial (and potentially deadly) tasks.

In other words, your job is to handle a lot of paperwork. The townsfolk post quests they want done on a board in town, adventurers look at the quest board and make their way to you, and you draft up the contracts so that there’s a written record of everything. You’ll often have several adventurers of different character classes on your roster. It’s up to you to decide which adventurer to send on which quest. You ideally want to make sure that you send adventurers on quests that are appropriate for both their skill set and their experience level.

For instance, suppose you have a hero who’s a Rogue on your roster. If you send them on a quest to assassinate an important target, the fact that the adventurer is a Rogue means that quest will likely have a much better outcome than if you assigned them to train novice wizards for battle. The goal is for you to consistently assign each hero to quests that will end well for them. You want to do this not just so the adventurers themselves will grow stronger, but so that you won’t invoke their wrath.

If any adventurers feel that you’re not giving them appropriate quests, they’ll likely only warn you about that once. If you don’t shape up after that warning, whichever hero you angered most recently will probably outright kill you. Your absolute jerk of a manager is constantly looking for any excuse to fire you as it is, but she may not get the chance if a scorned adventurer gets ahold of you first. All of that is to say that you’re under a fair bit of pressure to do your job well within Quest Giver.

That brings me to the only thing I dislike about Quest Giver. Its core gameplay loop expects you to have a decent understanding of common tropes and character class archetypes within role-playing games in order for you to succeed at your job. Of course, I have that necessary foundation, and I’m sure most of our readership can say the same. However, I can still see this being an issue for anyone who picks up Quest Giver and doesn’t have at least some familiarity with RPG basics. In fairness, though, your intuition can fill any potential gaps in your RPG knowledge.

You might have a Wizard on your roster and quests that involve things like enchanting cursed rings and brewing mana tinctures. Even if you’re not an RPG veteran, you could still connect the dots there: Wizards are skilled in magic, and enchanting and potion brewing are commonly considered forms of magic, so a Wizard would excel at those quests. However, in Quest Giver, a hero’s mastery of their character class is dependent on how many experience points they’ve earned and how many times they’ve leveled up. This can require you to pay attention to what sorts of quests they successfully complete until you know their class.

If you have any characters on your roster at level 0 or level 1, they’ll be listed as a “Noob” or an “Adventurer,” respectively. That isn’t a very helpful description of what they excel at, so you’ll have to send them on quests designated as “trivially easy” that don’t require any sort of class-specific abilities until they’ve reached at least level 2. Quests are also arranged by difficulty: “Trivially easy” quests can be completed at any character level, “tricky” quests require a hero to be at least level 2, and “deadly” quests require adventurers to be at least level 3.

You can still send any adventurer on any quest regardless of their level, but doing so means the hero is likely to fail their assigned quest. They could be killed for trying to tackle a quest that’s too difficult for them, and even if they survive, they’re not going to be happy with you when they make it back to town. Not only do heroes not gain experience points for failed quests, but they instead lose experience and can “level down” when this happens. That’s how it’s possible to have level 0 adventurers on your roster.

Quest Giver’s story is divided into seven chapters. Each chapter has at least one good ending and one bad ending you can discover based on the choices you make each time you play through any given chapter. Once you’ve completed a story chapter, you can replay it as many times as you like. You technically play as a new NPC in each chapter of the story for various reasons, but that doesn’t affect the core gameplay loop. Each time a chapter ends for any reason, Quest Giver will show you how you did in terms of effectively managing your assigned adventurers.

There are three main aspects of Quest Giver that I really like: Its sense of humor, the ways its core gameplay loop allows me to exercise my experience with RPGs and my ability to make logical deductions, and its atmosphere. Put simply, Quest Giver is what Papers, Please would be if it were made into a high-fantasy RPG with an excellent sense of humor in place of soul-crushing despair. As I’ve said before, I’m a sucker for games that make me feel smart, even if their gameplay just simulates some sort of otherwise boring office job.

With that all being said, I can categorically recommend Quest Giver, especially if your tastes and experiences are at all similar to mine. If you’re an RPG veteran looking to put a new twist on the genre, I think Quest Giver will be right up your alley. Even if not, I’d still recommend that you give Quest Giver a try. At a base price of $5, it’s a tiny investment that very well might inspire you to try out some classic RPG titles on your platform(s) of choice and broaden your experiences with the genre as a whole.

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Quest Giver

$4.99

8.5

Score

8.5/10

Pros

• Great sense of humor.
• Well-implemented high-fantasy atmosphere.
• High replayability.

Cons

• Players unfamiliar with basic RPG concepts might have trouble playing.