Play King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! (5) Online

King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! came out in 1990 from Sierra On-Line, a major name in the MS-DOS adventure scene. It was a time when games were moving away from simple text parsers and fully embracing the mouse, with detailed VGA graphics that felt like a big step up from the earlier EGA days. This installment put you back in the shoes of King Graham, but it felt less like a royal procession and more like a desperate scramble to get your family back.

You guide Graham through a series of interconnected screens, clicking to walk and interact with a world that is both charming and deeply hostile. The main goal is to rescue your family from the wizard Mordack, which involves a long chain of item-based puzzles, like using moldy cheese to power a machine or finding a way to pacify a hungry bear. The pacing is slow, deliberate, and often punishing; a single wrong move or missed item can leave you stranded hours later with no recourse but to restart. Navigating the desert or the witch's forest requires careful attention to landmarks, and the infamous catacombs maze will thoroughly test your sense of direction. Playing it is a mix of genuine wonder and sheer frustration, a constant negotiation between the joy of discovery and the agony of a dead end.

Each game uses different controls, most DOS games use the keyboard arrows. Some will use the mouse , "Alt" ,"Enter" and "Space bar".