Written by: Stoo
Date posted: February 27, 2026

Back in this site’s earlier days Rik reviewed the first installment in Sierra On-Line’s series of scifi parody adventures, Space Quest (or more accurately, he looked at the VGA remake). He wasn’t especially impressed and vowed never to return to the series. Many years later I thought to myself, maybe the later games improved on the original? So I decided to step in and thus began a journey through the adventures of Roger Wilco, Space Janitor.

I had intended to complete the series over the course of a year. Should be doable, right? Actually it was a terrible idea because at the time I was just a few months away from welcoming my new baby daughter to the world. Even before they arrive there’s plenty to do instead of gaming (memories of piles of flat-pack baby furniture). So anyway instead of a coherent, structured process, “project Space Quest” became a more typical FFG affair – slow, erratic and fitted in between other gaming, frequently abandoned and restarted.

Anyway that’s my lameass excuse for taking so long to reach game five, despite the fact I even skipped the second entry. I confess We’ve never looked at those really ancient AGI keyboard-driven installments (yes yes, we will turn in our retro-gamer cards immediately). So I started with SQ3 which I got on ok with, partially because I had mentally steeled myself to have a dreadful time of it. That meant I was pleasantly surprised when it wasn’t ridiculously tough and unfair. Although I definitely looked at gamefaqs more than I admitted at the time.

SQ4 then was actually dreadful for multiple reasons. Such as a chaotic, frustrating action segment that brings no satisfaction when you finally beat it, just relief you’ll never in your life have to do it again. Or parts where I didn’t even understand what I was meant to be doing, and only blundered into triggering the next event by pure chance. Basically those stupid “time pods” confused me more than once.

Then I fell into a dreaded “unwinnable state”, where after blundering around uselessly for a while I realized that it was impossible to make further progress because of an earlier mistake. I have a particular hate for unwinnable states, one being that you may have to go replay a chunk of game. Ok so just keep a lot of save fames, right? But also you can waste so much time trapped in them before you even realise they are unwinnable. That leads to paranoia when I get stuck on anything does a solution even exist at this point? So for all we complain about death in sierra games, it’s the dead ends that really grind my gears.

So I might have abandoned SQ for good, but I’m an old-school DOS gamer who can never quite resist that Sierra intro with its stirring music. You know what I mean, right? The jangly adlib fanfare that promises to take you back to the 386 days and bring you heroics and adventures in detailed, colourful worlds (be they fantasy, scifi or small-town california). Rationally I know that give it a couple of hours I may just be sat there fuming in frustration, yet every time that tune calls to me. So I resolved to give the series one more shot which brings us to Space Quest V: The Next Mutation.

Up to this point the series had been designed by “Two Guys from Andromeda”, but this time only one of them returned, Mark Crowe. Also, interestingly enough, this time he wasn’t working directly for Sierra. Instead SQ5 was created by their subsidiary Dynamix, better known for simulations like Aces of The Pacific. That said, this is still entirely a Sierra game, made clear from the start with presence of that intro.

It also has the same interface as all their other VGA adventures of that era with the drop-down menu for look, use, inventory etc. Which, now I think about it, is something that I’ve not given Sierra enough credit for. In Lucasarts adventures of the time you still had a big list of verbs and items permanently occupying the lowermost 25% of the screen. We’d rather look at the game’s world and character’s, yes? Sierra’s system was a lot less obtrusive, disappearing when not in use.

Anyway we begin with our intrepid hero having decided he can accomplish more in life than pushing a mop around. So he’s enrolled at Starcon Academy, with dreams of commanding his own starship. That doesn’t seem a likely prospect at first, due to his lack of ability and generally hapless nature. Also he’s managed to annoy one of the fleet’s most dashing heroes, Captain Quirk (good grief). So then one of the first puzzles involves Roger being returned to Janitor duties and heroically… polishing the floor.

However his grand ambitions are achieved just a short way into the game, thanks to random luck and also cheating on a test. Newly promoted to Captain, Roger proudly takes his place on the bridge of the SCS Eureka, ready to launch into missions in deep space. To boldly go, you might even say. I’m not actually sure the game does say that – yeh yeh, take better notes next time. However, it does shift from the general-purpose scifi parody of other installments to narrowing its focus, and closely mimicking the structure and tropes of Star Trek. Which makes sense when you consider Trek was, at the time, pretty much at the peak of its popularity.

So then, from here on you’ll be spending your time commanding the ship – staring at a big viewscreen of course, with your bridge officers sat beside you. You’ll also be going down below decks occasionally to work on problems around the ship with the Mr Scott or Commander Data stand-ins. Then roughly half the time you’re beaming down in an Away team to face dangers on some distant world.

SQ5 does convey the idea of captaining a starship pretty well, considering we’re in a game engine built for point-and-click adventures. You’re not directly flying it the Eureka, because Captain Picard didn’t either. Instead, this part of the game is all about you making command decisions. if you need to travel somewhere you give co-ordinates to the navigation officer then tell him to engage the warp drive. If a problem arises you can give orders to activate shields or fire weapons, and if you’re not sure how to proceed you can ask the science officer for their input.

This is meant to be a parody though, so Dynamix had to mess with the formula as well as copying it. That starts with the fact that your ship is not bold vessel of exploration but… a garbage scow. Also, the crew think that their square-jawed new captain is actually a monumental idiot. Which is not entirely unreasonable but they’re hardly the elite of Starcon themselves, which is why they are sharing this dead-end posting with him. Your sarcastic tactical officer is in disgrace after a major blunder in his last posting, and the communications officer is some sort of dreadful caricature of a multiply divorced middle aged woman.

That said, your relationship with them does improve over the course of the game. Which brings me, I think, to a welcome improvement in SQ5. There’s a lot more actual dialogue compared to earlier games, where it felt like characters would just announce something, stop talking then probably disappear from the narrative. Here, several characters have a sustained presence and multiple opportunities for conversations (with little talking head images). After a while, they start to open up and talk about themselves. Eventually, after you lead them through several deadly situations, they even have some respect for Roger.

As for our hero himself, I’d never been quite sure if he was meant to be a well-meaning goof who’s a bit out of his depth, or a less sympathetic Zapf Brannigan-esque parody of a hero. I’m glad to say after this installment the first interpretation seems more clear. Again, a bit of proper dialogue helps establish his character.

Anyway, once we’re out of Starcon HQ the game has you going on routine cleanup jobs, before discovering an illegal toxic waste dumping operation. It’s gone rather horribly wrong, resulting in a virus that creates lethal and deranged mutants. Of course, your motely crew are the only ones that can stop this hideous foe. Along the way you also run into a love interest for Roger, who has links to events we saw in the previous game – there is more actual continuity between the installments than I had originally realised.

The layout of the game is based around missions to various worlds that you travel between on the Eureakah. Each has its own threats and resolutions and is fairly self contained – in other words, each is like an episode of Trek. However, they eventually build towards a confrontation with the final enemy – like a more seraliased show I guess, DS9 leaned that way. So then one mission involves figuring out what happened at a colony world that’s eerily deserted – I’d forgotten how SQ can be quite ominous and atmospheric when it’s not goofing around. Another mission has some R&R time at a space bar complete with your ornery engineer getting in a fight.

You’ll also find yourself on a deserted world being chased by a killer robot, which is a follow-up to a similar sequence back in SQ3 (continuity again!) This is one of the most action heavy parts of SQ5 and you’ll probably see Game Over a bunch of times as you take the wrong path and get zapped. Still, it’s nothing so horrendous as the mall shootout in SQ4. You just have to be thorough in finding every path through the area, and eventually you will out-maneuver and disable the android.

Later on in the endgame stages I was definitely thinking here we go, brace myself for immediate death every time I make the slightest mistake. Indeed, I was reloading a bunch of times until I realised what I was actually meant to do instead of blundering into baddies at every corner. At that point it just became a case of navigating a maze for a while.

So there was some frustration but nothing that tempted me to ragequit. On one or two occasions I realised I’d missed something from earlier in the game, but backtracking is manageable enough. You just go back to your ship, warp to the right planet, beam down and then walk across a few screens. Also, I didn’t find myself stuck in any Unwinnable Situations. I can see where some could have arisen, so maybe I just got lucky? In most cases though they look like they can be avoided as long as you don’t ignore anything obviously worth grabbing or investigating.

(So I will just say, kind of cryptically, if an enemy ship has a piece of tech that looks useful, and the away mission ends abruptly before you have a chance to take it, maaaaybe beam back down there and have another look.)

I realise that my tone so far is coming across as “well, this time I didn’t want to put my fist through the monitor” which doesn’t sound like the most uenthusiastic of commendations. So let me try and reframe my thoughts, because I did come away from this one with largely positive impressions. The level of challenge is about right, the story is amiably goofy Trek parody while still managing to give some sense of real jeopardy and personally important goals for our hero.

I understand that some folks see the previous installment as a high point of the series, all I can say is that they must have sharper minds than I do. Or at least, greater reserves of patience. For me SQ4 was a chore, something you finish just to say you’ve done it like some sort of endurance test. Which some might look for in gaming, but that’s not how I want to burn my limited free time. SQ5 however actually delivered the sort of experience I’d actually want from this series. It’s the first SQ that actually lives up to the potential I envisage every time I hear the Sierra jingle. It’s also the only one so far I’d consider replaying.

So then that’s quite a leap in our rating between the two installments. SQ4 had me wishing I could delete games from my gog account, but this one comes with our solid recommendation. I’d even say if you’re a newcomer then, unless you really need to see the story in order, play this one first. You can always go back to the older ones if you feel up to the challenge – or just really like text parsers. As for me, well, with my enthusiasm renewed I will play the last installment sometime soon. Probably. Maybe in 2027.