The Quest

As a fan of the first hour (The Quest 2014 blew me away!), I can't help to compare the old and the new. I'll be honest, as soon as the soundtrack set in, and I realised they had gotten the same composers from 2014 back, I was hooked, and a second later, I was fully emersed in Everealm.

Yes, the show has its flaws, that was to be expected.

Filming with underaged teenagers makes some things more difficult in general with limited filming hours per day and such. Some of the after-challenge-talks among the Paladins came across kind of staged and clumsy although I'm sure they were authentic. As soon as a scripted character was present and asked them questions, this awkward atmosphere was gone, so maybe to that more next season?

The scripted characters sometimes - very rarely though - acted incomprehensively, especially the castle's guards and also Prince Cederic. He drove me nuts with his actions.

Some of the challenges were well thought through, others were hard to grasp for the audience and the Paladins alike, and the fact that there was no elimination this time (Thank the Fates!) often made it hard to understand how the winner was chosen.

While most of the props and costumes were top notch (I SO appreciated that the royals wore different costumes every day as royals would.), a few props and costumes looked super cheap like bad LARP equipment, and the same goes for the creatures, which is very strange because some were SOOO lifelike and others looked like unconvincing Power Rangers villains. It was almost as if two different teams had worked on the make-up, props, and costume department.

Apart from these points of criticism, there's only good things to say.

The writers filled the story with so much lore and history, so much character development. The characters have depths, they have pasts, there is no black and white. The story starts off much darker and with an imminently menacing atmosphere. All actors were 100% convincing, I suffered with them, I cheered with them. The special effects (I know how difficult CGI fire is!) were fantastic, the music combined the old Quest soundtrack and also had new beautiful themes. The Paladins were a fantastic team, each of them super likeable, and they were 100% immersed in this world - as was I.

I can't wait to return to Castle Saenctum next season!

Continue the Quest.

A good effort, with some decent acting, creature make-up and some interesting sets, but sadly lacks any kind of humour, spontaneity and all the things that made TV series like Knightmare, The Crystal Maze and even Fort Boyard interesting and fun to watch. It's far too polished and controlled by the producers and is in no way "immersive" as they claim to be.

The stakes are so incredibly low. There is literally nothing to lose here other than the plot of the storyline. There are no prizes to be won. The contestants are therefore not much more than glorified actors that occasionally must solve puzzles - the rest of the time they're told what to say and do.

Plus there's far too much post-production work that further drives home that this is highly controlled, cheap way of getting a knock-off fantasy series that's disguised as some kind of real-life puzzle adventure game show. It doesn't know which genre it wants to be in.

The biggest challenge of this show was to actually sit through it.

Hammy, wooden acting.

Tropes and jokes that never land.

A mish mash and rehash of tales already told with better direction and effects.

I'm sorry but i can't recommend, i wanted to like this so much, as i'm a huge fan of the Fantasy genre, but this was unwatchable.

Get a different director and try again is about all i can say.

The bad reviews are likely grown adults. I could see this as a positive show for young children. Not scary, positive messaging (team work, wisdom, perseverance). Lots of fun makeup and corny characters.

Low budget where all the money went into costumes.

Acting is really awful, specially the teen heroes. Excuse me, Paladins. They are unproven yet.

As others said, I haver seen high school plays that were much much better.

Plot is thin as the hope of a snowball in hell.

There is almost no world building. We know nothing about the 8 teens that were summoned to boring world. At the end of episode 1 we still do not anything. There is no character building.

And it is boring. Eye glazing boring.

I am a geek who love all things fantasy. This ain't it.