Craft tip #12: You Are Allowed to Be Absurd. You Are Not Allowed to Be Arbitrary

(What Sierra Games Taught Me About Fairytale Retellings)

May 15, 2026

As you may recall—an opening phrase writers hate seeing in actual prose—I grew up on video games. Games that politely asked me to save a kingdom and then immediately punished me for touching a pie. Games where an alien invasion is apparently hunting the only janitor in the galaxy confident enough and stupid enough to stop it.

This was my real introduction to storytelling. Not through books. Not through films, although I have seen every Star Wars and love a good campy horror movie on the Sci-Fi Channel. It was through the deeply unhinged logic of LucasArts and Sierra On-Line, where problem-solving often required:

picking up an object that looked irrelevant
using it in a way no sane person would predict
and then dying anyway because you forgot to type “look under rock” three screens ago

Specifically, King’s Quest, Quest for Glory, and later Space Quest continued to shape how I think about sci-fi and fantasy storytelling. We are going to skip Police Quest and Leisure Suit Larry for now because A) they are not relevant to this article, and B) I cannot currently foresee much craft advice coming from them unless you are writing either a gritty police procedural or erotica. Neither is really my wheelhouse. Though if you want me to try, feel free to leave a comment and watch me suffer.

In hindsight, these were not just games. King’s Quest and Quest for Glory were masterclasses in how to retell a fairytale without making it boring.

The Lie of the “Retelling”

Most writers say they want to retell a fairytale.

What they usually mean is:

keep the aesthetic
keep the plot beats
update the dialogue
maybe make the protagonist hotter and emotionally literate. You know. Fuckable.

That is not a retelling. That is someone cosplaying as a cardboard box at Comic-Con and insisting they are Solid Snake.

A real retelling takes the original idea and stretches it until something dangerous shows. It asks: what happens if Snow White does not eat the apple? What part of the story still holds under pressure, and what breaks immediately?

Sierra understood this instinctively.

King’s Quest: Respect the Fairytale, Then Ruin It Slightly

On the surface, King’s Quest looks like a classic fairytale: a noble hero, a magical kingdom, witches, giants, curses, and a quest that feels morally straightforward. The kind of story I can absolutely imagine influencing something like The Witcher later on.

But the moment you actually play it, the stakes shift.

The world is not safe. The logic is not clean. The story does not hold your hand and reassure you that everything will work out if you are sincere enough. You can die constantly. You can fail permanently. You can make a mistake that only reveals itself hours later.

Which, if we are being honest, is deeply funny.

But more importantly, it does something critical for retellings:

It removes the illusion that fairytales are simple.

Older fairytales are full of brutal, arbitrary consequences. Sierra did not modernize that away. They leaned into it and raised the stakes.

The craft lesson:

A good retelling does not sand down the danger. It restores it.

Quest for Glory: Change the Hero, Change the Story

If King’s Quest asks, “What if fairytales were less forgiving?” then Quest for Glory asks something more interesting:

What if the hero is not one thing?

In this series, you can be:

a fighter
a magic user
a thief

And the story changes depending on who you are.

Not just cosmetically. Structurally.

A fighter solves problems with strength.

A mage rewrites the rules.

A thief bypasses the problem entirely and hopes no one notices.

Same world.

Same threats.

Different narrative.

This is where a lot of retellings fail.

They keep the events the same but swap the aesthetic.

Sierra did the opposite. They kept the world and changed the method of survival.

The craft lesson:

If you change the protagonist meaningfully, you must change how the story resolves—not just how it looks.

Absurdity Is Not the Enemy. It Is the Point.

Let us be adults and address the elephant in the phone booth.

These games are ridiculous. Charming, infuriating, occasionally deranged—but ridiculous.

In them, you can:

bribe trolls with pastries
solve life-threatening problems with random inventory items
die because you did not look at something properly

And yet they work.

Because the absurdity is not random. It is structured.

It follows an internal logic the player learns over time.

This is exactly how fairytales work.

A frog turns into a prince.

A girl survives in a house made of candy.

A spinning wheel becomes a death sentence.

None of this is realistic.

All of it is internally consistent.

The problem with modern retellings is not that they are unrealistic.

It is that they are inconsistently unrealistic.

The craft lesson:

You are allowed to be absurd. You are not allowed to be arbitrary.

Failure Is Part of the Narrative

Modern storytelling is weirdly afraid of failure.

Characters are allowed to struggle, but only in ways that are narratively efficient and emotionally respectable.

Sierra did not care about your dignity.

You failed constantly.

And failure was not just punishment. It was information.

You learned:

what mattered
what did not
what the story considered important

That is the hidden mechanic.

In a good retelling, failure reveals the rules of the world—not just the stakes.

The rules.

The craft lesson:

If your character cannot fail in an interesting way, your retelling has no teeth.

What Writers Get Wrong About Fairytales

A lot of writers think fairytales are about:

magic
romance
destiny

They are not.

They are about:

consequence
transformation
survival under strange rules

Sierra did not just retell fairytales. They turned them into systems.

And systems are harder to fake. Go ask Brandon Sanderson.

The Real Craft Rule

If you are retelling a fairytale, ask yourself:

What are the rules of this world?
What happens if those rules are followed too literally?
What happens if they are broken?
Who benefits from them?
Who gets punished by them?

And most importantly:

What would actually kill your protagonist here?

Not metaphorically.

Literally.

Because once you know that, you know what the story is really about.

Final Thought

A fairytale retelling is not an aesthetic exercise.

It is an interrogation.

You are taking a story that survived generations and asking:

Is this still true?

If the answer is yes, prove it.

If the answer is no, break it properly.

And if you are doing it right, your protagonist should occasionally feel like they just used the wrong item in the wrong place at the worst possible time—

and now the story is watching to see what they do next.

If you made it this far, you clearly enjoy stories where logic is optional but consequences are not.

Bonus points if you tell me the most ridiculous puzzle you have ever solved in a game or a story.

Until next time,

Alex 🧋