Andrew Fisher (697) on 5/21/2023 12:22 AM · Permalink · Report

Missed my chance to play this back when I was playing any Sierra game I could get to run on my ancient CGA, zero-eight-six Taiwanese DTK PC. KQ4 would have run, I played through SQ3 and PQ2, my friend had KQ4, but not the manual. I bought a boxed KQ4 with the manual on TradeMe (NZ eBay) in 2006, got a little way through, guess I didn't like it much as I didn't press on, I think the first completion of the game I saw was a Youtube Let's Play by TakariFreak(MeowingKittens) and Lucahjin, which was very irreverent and (mostly) funny :)

At long last I've played through the game myself, actually the AGI version which has those two funny easter eggs in Lolotte's castle. Good thing I'd watched Takari's and Lucah's playthrough so many times, I remembered all the solutions to the puzzles, some of which are horrendous. There are 230 points in the AGI and I completed it with all but three at first, then I realized that the missing three came from returning the glass eye to the three witches after they've given you the magic scarab. I thought that was a nice touch, you actually get rewarded for showing kindness to "ugly, evil people".

So I can only really comment on the King's Quest series as far as KQ4, maybe KQ5 which I refused to play further after I discovered one of those "dead man walking" puzzles involving a mouse you have to catch before it leaves the game forever or something like that and that was only about a quarter way in. The AGI KQs always have graphics to show for themselves, the green, blue, brown, white and grey nature scenes in 16 colours and how ever few pixels still kind of transport me into a fantasy land or back in time to mid-late '80s when that was standard computer graphics. I think regardless of how I dislike the stories and puzzles, Roberta Williams had the idea of text-adventures you could immerse yourself in more, walk around the backgrounds and foregrounds and take things from them. To my tastes that idea was best used in Space Quest and Police Quest, well specifically SQ1 and PQ1 (EGA games), maybe Gold Rush! too and possibly The Colonel's Bequest.

So graphics aside, the first four KQ games had pretty childish and immature storytelling and anyone can see how unimaginative they are, at least for the first couple of games, grabbing a bunch of popular folk tales or myths and stringing them together, Hansel and Gretel, Jack and the Beanstalk, Three Billy Goats Gruff, Rumpelstiltskin, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, Neptune, Count Dracula etc. KQ4 is a Wizard of OZ concept, Rosella is transported to a strange land and meets a "good witch" then a "bad witch" who is green like the wicked witch in Oz and has winged servants who regularly grab Rosella to take her up to Lolotte's castle. There's even a joke when you kill Lolotte, something like "No no I'm melting.....wait wrong story!". There's also Cupid, Pandora's Box and a giant couple (or ogre couple) who have a "golden goose", a hen in this case that lays golden eggs, which I think comes from Jack and the Beanstalk, the Frog Prince, Rosella throws a golden ball into a pond, the frog retrieves it, Rosella kisses him and he becomes a prince and of course Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which has the stupid cliché of Rosella having to clean up the house of the sloppy dwarf miners to progress. I thought Roberta's narration was as cringeworthily immature and patronizing as ever. I mentioned the puzzles, were it not for the internet, I might have given up on some of them. With limited time and space, creating more game by making illogical, trial and error puzzles? Yeah right. Making good puzzles that make you think and grow and respect that game designers, THAT's creating more game, that's creating a game you might want to come back to years later, even if it only took you a month to complete it the first time around.

So the "KQ 4 rap" easter egg. Who were the "KQ four"? Four developers who quit the company over Roberta "The Bert" Williams' tyranny and planned to write a book about it? The guy "Rick" mentioned in the rap is probably Rick Cavin who joined Sierra in Apr. '88 as Sales VP according to his Linkedin, that was just before the game was first shipped (AGI of course). Were the KQ four among the staff who Rosella meet in the nearby easter egg where you beam aboard a spaceship and meet a group of about ten Sierra staff? I know, it's probably just a joke, there was no book on the "shit show that was the making of KQ4" right?