Space Quest II: Vohaul's Revenge

Space Quest II: Vohaul's Revenge puts you right back in the space boots of Roger Wilco, the galaxy's least qualified janitor, who gets kidnapped, crash-lands on a death-trap jungle planet, and has to foil a plot involving millions of cloned insurance salesmen. It is pure 1987 Sierra design at its most hilarious and maddeningly unforgiving.

The Two Guys from Andromeda built a trap, not a tutorial

Designers Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe, calling themselves the Two Guys from Andromeda, knew exactly what their audience wanted after the first adventure. They delivered more animation, sharper dialogue, and a ridiculous sci-fi plot that kicks off when Roger Wilco gets snatched from Xenon Orbital Station 4 and dumped onto the jungle planet Labion. The premise of Sludge Vohaul unleashing hordes of genetically engineered door-to-door insurance salesmen to destroy Xenon sets a lightweight, goofy tone, but the gameplay underneath is brutally strict.

You begin the journey in captivity, but a sudden shuttle crash leaves you stranded in the Labion wilderness as the sole survivor. From that moment, every screen in this Sierra On-Line, Inc. release wants to kill you. Walk too close to a tree, and a alien predator drops onto your face. Step near a patch of roots, and a root monster drags you underground. The 1987 parser requires you to type exact verbs and nouns while making sure your low-resolution character sprite is standing on the precise pixel necessary to interact with the environment.

Surviving Labion requires pixel positioning and a whole lot of trial and error

The core loop of this adventure game revolves around collecting seemingly useless survival odds and ends before you leave an area behind. You need to grab a plunger, scoop up glowing berries, gather mysterious spores, and secure a glass cutter long before you ever reach the locations where they are required. If you miss a single item on the forest floor, the game will happily let you play on for another two hours before slamming the door in your face.

Computer Gaming World pointed out that while the animation and scope were huge leaps forward, unclear item descriptions made specific puzzles an absolute headache. That issue was especially nasty if you were running the game on a standard CGA monitor where key objects blurred directly into the background geometry. Finding the opening to an underwater cave or figuring out how to pass an ape-like beast often felt like guessing what the designers were thinking rather than applying basic logic.

Later player retrospectives have rightfully hammered the title for these soft-locks, where going backward is impossible once you take a transport or fall down a chute. You learn very quickly to keep multiple save files active at every step. One wrong turn into a dark cavern without your glowing berries lit, and Roger ends up as alien feed with a snarky death screen mocking your lack of foresight.

Space Quest II: Vohaul's Revenge hides its best jokes behind dead ends

What keeps you typing commands into the parser is the writing. The Two Guys from Andromeda packed the game with physical slapstick and sight gags, starting right from the opening sequence where Roger floats his broom out into deep space. The physical game manual even came with a printed comic book that explained Roger's backstory and how Sludge Vohaul was driven mad in the first place, giving physical context to the digital chaos on screen.

The game also shipped with a few weird secrets buried in the code. Typing CHEAT at any point instantly ends the game while awarding you 255 points out of the maximum 250 point score. If you want to poke around the internals of the Adventure Game Interpreter engine, typing backstage or dbg opens up a hidden developer mode that lets you teleport between room numbers or spawn any inventory item you need.

Once you finally breach Vohaul's Asteroid Base, the climax subverts expectations entirely. Instead of an epic laser showdown, Vohaul traps Roger inside a tiny glass jar. Defeating the villain requires using your glass cutter to break out, shrinking down, and crawling directly inside Vohaul's life-support machinery to turn it off from the inside. It is weird, inventive, and completely in line with the rest of the adventure.

Solving Sludge Vohaul's schemes on the PC speaker

Built using Sierra's 16-color EGA engine, the visual presentation relies heavily on fixed screens that swap as soon as Roger touches the boundary edge. Compared to other games on the market that year, the detailed sprite animations for Roger's endless death animations gave the world a cartoon feel. Watching Roger get eaten, dissolved, or crushed was half the entertainment value for players sitting in front of an MS-DOS monitor.

Sound design was limited by the hardware of the era, pushing simple bleeps and boops through the internal PC speaker unless you owned high-end expansion gear. Even with those technical limits, the audio cues for creeping monsters or sudden explosions added real tension to the puzzle solving. The title moved roughly 100,000 standalone units upon release, contributing to over 1.2 million total sales for the series over the following decade.

You can play Space Quest II: Vohaul's Revenge online in your browser today

If you want to experience classic parser-based design without messing around with disk images, you can play Space Quest II: Vohaul's Revenge online free in your browser right now. The original text parser, low-res EGA graphics, and unforgiving traps are preserved exactly as they functioned on standard desktop hardware in 1987. You have nothing to install, meaning you can jump straight into the Labion jungle within seconds.

Before you take your first steps onto the alien surface, remember the golden rule of 16-color adventures: save early and save often in separate slots. Save before entering a new screen, save before picking up an unknown object, and save before typing any command that looks risky. If you keep your eyes peeled for small pixel details on the ground and save constantly, you can enjoy the full Space Quest II: Vohaul's Revenge MS-DOS game directly in your browser tab without losing hours of progress to a single missed item.