Hero of the Kingdom: The Lost Tales 3

Hero of the Kingdom: The Lost Tales 3 marks the 6th and the latest installment of the HoTK franchise. The games are built with the same engine and art elements but have unconnected stories that allow them to be played independently of each other. In The Lost Tales 3, the player reprises their role as Brent the hunter, his current goal being to uncover the plans of Fendrel (also known as “the Dark Lord” of the kingdom) who has returned to this realm and is now preparing a massive attack. Additionally, Brent’s trusted dragon friend Muriel has fallen ill and he’s seeking a cure to help her heal.

HoTK games belong to the point & click genre, although their execution doesn’t fully match what you’d expect from a point & click game. There’s no player character to control, no interaction with the items in your inventory, and no flavor text aside from quests. The quest requirements are tightly woven into each other, although they do provide some sort of linearity. They’re given to you all at once but ultimately they can be completed only in a specific order, your task being to identify where the sequence starts and in what order they should be completed. It’s pretty much like this: to kill a certain enemy, you need a special potion. To craft that potion, you need to gather some ingredients. To get those ingredients, you need to fight specific monsters that drop them. To fight them, you first need to learn how to use a certain weapon. To unlock this, you need to complete the quest that a certain NPC gives you. And so on. Multiply that a few times, and imagine having several of these sequences simultaneously. Although one can get temporarily stuck on one quest (if so, then there’s usually something undiscovered – either a new location or a different quest), finding the “hook” in all this is quite satisfactory, because then everything falls into place like a domino effect.

The game doesn’t need more than a mouse to be played and runs on low-budget / old PCs too. Collecting items from the environment, fighting enemies, turning in quests, and traversing the game world from one location to another are done through a single mouse click. Icons visible above enemies or NPCs clearly indicate whether you have all the requirements to perform a certain action or to complete a quest. There’s a map you can use to fast travel, although it doesn’t display in which locations new quests are available – this is something you need to find out yourself by exploring each region of the map.

Hero of the Kingdom: The Lost Tales 3 takes around five hours to complete and there are no missable achievements. You can continue playing after the story ends, but you’ll probably unlock all the achievements before that while going through all the quest chains. Like in all the other games from the series, there’s a built-in hack to get infinite money by  Like everything else in the game, the goal is to provide a stress-free experience and HoTK games certainly manage to achieve that.