The goal of the game is to navigate the various rooms of the castle, until the princess is freed, by pressing the right key at the right time. This is the first use of the QTE principle in a video game. However, the reaction time is extremely short, and the game rarely indicates when and how to respond.
The player has five lives and a number of lives. When they lose a life, they are returned to the beginning of the screen. When they have no more lives, they are returned several screens (depending on the number of times the player has failed), even at the beginning of the game.
Thus, Dragon's Lair is a die -hard game , and retrying is extremely difficult, as there are approximately 50 different screens, and many possibilities for each screen, but only one allows progress, while the others result in the player's death, so the game is purely an interactive movie .
