A little commentary:
The early KQ games (1 and 2 at least) can be beaten in less than an hour if you know what you are doing. The controls can be a slight issue in that being a pixel or two off on, say, a staircase can kill you, so save often. There's also elements in each that are designed to do nothing more than tell the player to eat shit, such as an enemy who randomly spawns and makes the game unwinnable in the first and a bridge that will dump your ass down a ravine if you walk across it too many times in the second game. In some ways, these are actually really hilarious, because there is NO WAY a modern developer would let these kinds of things slide. Roberta Williams is like the honey badger, she don't care.
The later games are of course much more elaborate, with more areas, better graphics, different interfaces (icon based mouse controls versus keyboard/text parsers), and are generally higher quality games as technology improved and budgets increased.
If you don't have the nostalgia for the early 16 color primitive titles, start around King's Quest 5/6/7. Avoid Mask of Eternity. 6 and 7 might be considered the best, with 6 being a solid example of the genre and 7 being a radical departure by going with an extremely cartoony Disney-esque aesthetic (which was popular at the time). The story in the first three games is barebones "king needs to save his realm" type stuff and peppered with a lot of typical fantasy elements (seriously, KQ2 has Dracula, The Big Bad Wolf/Little Red Riding Hood, AND Pegasus in it), so I wouldn't really worry about continuity. I haven't gotten around to playing KQ4 so I can't say much on that, but I want to say that was the first big step toward a more immersive take on the genre. Gog.com, you sly fox you, grouping 4-6 and 7/8 for the bundles, forcing you to buy both if you want the best KQ games.
Get ready for text parsers too, which I know has to be weird for some people. They aren't intricate by any means, so I doubt anyone would get stumped by not knowing what to type in. Use LOOK a lot, and have SWIM typed in before you jump in some water. Exploit saves as much as possible.
The unwinnable scenarios are ball bashing annoyances - there are times where you can be right at the end of the game and find that you cannot do anything else. KQV is especially known for this, and I ran into the same problem with KQVI yeaaaaaaaaaaaaars ago and never finished it since. If you hate this kind of thing, use a walkthrough. We're talking nonsense that NO ONE could see coming, and the only reason people would finish the games when no walkthroughs were available was by pure accident, until you got two nerds in a room and they finally hashed it out.
Want to die in Police Quest? Go into the locker room, remove your clothes for a shower, and then walk out into the lobby. Game over. This is seriously about all I remember from Police Quest, as I never really got into it.
Early Space Quest games can be especially brutal, with lots of guessing-and-checking and so forth. Still look pretty good though. I've only really played 4, where buildings tasted like wildberry. I tried out the earlier ones but never got very far. Geez, I swear the earlier games were asking me to pick things up that you'd have to guess were there, but maybe I just didn't give them enough chance.
As elcheapo mentions, there are some free fan-made VGA remakes that are surprisingly well made. Some replace the text parser with icons for accessibility, and the King's Quest 2 is a full on remake with new areas. So if you aren't looking to spend cash but want to play a few, that's the way to go.
You can test out your patience with these games by going to
Sarien.net and playing the first games of each series for free. There's a funny thing with the site in that technically the games are made as "multiplayer titles," so there are times where a second avatar (King Graham for example) will show up on the screen. At first I thought the game was lagging, and maybe it was showing a "shadow" version of myself doing something, but then the other Graham would go die in a lake. You can even chat with the other players, which can be kind of hilarious as well. The guy that runs the site seems like a cool dood, and apparently is working on free iOS versions of the games he's got available (which have been given Activision's blessing, as Activision now owns the IPs).
Too bad Leisure Suit Larry isn't included. Thank god Al Lowe is being consulted for a remake of the first one and some new titles in the series after those last two insufferable titles.
Also, King's Quest and Space Quest are on Steam if that's more your thing, and the prices are comparable since those are full collections versus smaller bundles. Granted, the Gog.com releases will not require active internet connections and have no other DRM.
Good luck adventurers.
