While there are other credible contenders (like Quest for Infamy) -- and more to come in the next couple years as Hero-U and Mage's Initiation wrap up development -- Heroine's Quest not only the best Quest for Glory game in the past 20+ years, but in some respects the superior of the games that inspired it.
First, let me get the shortcomings out of the way. The production values are not as strong as in the Sierra originals (the animations are a little choppy, the VO is a little amateurish, and the music is not as memorable) -- but those were commercial games made by seasoned veterans with a considerable budget. Heroine's Quest, unlike our Primordia or the majority of other AGS games you find on Steam -- is free, so it couldn't even theoretically recoup paying professional voice actors or the like. More fundamentally, the game seems to lack a little bit of the smoothness of the original QFGs: the grinding feels a little more grindy, the exploration a little too slow, the world somewhat less open and more driven by a linear plot. But to be clear, this is a *relative* comparison, and it is in relation to what I consider some of the best games of all time.
Having cleared that underbrush, let me now sing the game's praises. Most fundamentally, it achieves what I consider the game developer's greatest duty: generosity. That comes through not just through the price (i.e., free), but through the sheer quantity and variety of content. Everywhere the developers could give us more, they have, optional solutions and little Easter Eggs aplenty. That generosity is conveyed through the timeless and sadly underutilized QFG marriage of RPG and adventure game elements. The challenge of that kind of gameplay is that it requires a lot of art, a lot of alternate paths, and careful balance and testing. Heroine's Quest succeeds in all those things.
Earlier, I mentioned that the game exceeds QFG, and the way in which this is so (in my opinion) is the use of the Norse mythology and foklorica. It's not entirely consistent, and sometimes it mixes in modern fantasy elements or interpretations of the source material that don't quite work, but I found overall that it drew more deeply and broadly from this lore than did QFG, where individual elements were often cherry picked without their contextual elements. (For instance, QFG introduced a whole generation to Baba Yaga and her chicken-legged hut, and what a gift that was, but she is hardly surrounded by other Slavic elements -- instead you encounter a hodgepodge of Greek mythological creatures and D&D monsters in a quasi-German setting.) Heroine's Quest has greater consistency in this regard, though it suffers from the fact that Norse folk lore is more familiar so the characters feel less like "discoveries" than did, say, Baba Yaga.
Anyway, the bottom line is that this is a charming labor of love, shared for free, which leaves you with the warm, full feeling of a childhood feast, for those who grew up on QFG, or will serve as a pretty good entry point to genre to those unfamiliar with it. Three cheers for, and many thanks to, Crystal Shard!
