King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella

The Good
King's Quest IV was a truly breakthrough game for the IBM PC and compatibles. Before this game, people had absolutely no reason to upgrade from the already dated CGA graphics card and the PC Speaker. This was among the first games that convinced people to buy a fancy EGA graphics card and an Adlib sound card, the latter being especially untried on PCs.

This game laid the second foundation that Sierra was able to bring state of the art graphics to PC Games. The graphics in this game were drawn in the new 16 color 320x200 resolution, as opposed to the old 4 color 320x200 resolution. The increase in detail from their older, blocky games, was stunning at the time. The background screens are very fairy-tale like, the Disney influence is obvious. One of the unique features to this particular Quest game is that the designers have implemented a sense of scale. In outdoor screens, people are very small sprites on the screen. Indoors, they become proportionately larger. Also, the game takes place during the day and at night, and there is separate artwork for each outdoors screen.

The music in this game was a true step up from the PC Speaker or Tandy sound. Before this game, music in computer games generally was limited to a short opening theme and little ditties throughout. While there is less music than in later games, what is there is quite rousing and fits in well with the whimsical fantasy setting. They actually got a real musician to write the game's intro and his services were well worth it.

The story is basic fantasy, but it does have a nice twist or two in the plot. Some sequences, like the ogre's house, the witches' cave and the troll's cave are suspenseful. Lolotte makes for a second in a memorable series of King's Quest villains.

The Bad
This is a Sierra adventure game, and all the usual caveats apply. It is very easy to die in this game, fall off a cliff or down the stairs, swim too far, get killed by a random monster, etc. Sierra games let you wander willy-nilly, so if you forget to do something or get something before you enter an area that does not allow you to return, hope you have a good save ready. Maniac Mansion, a contemporary of this game, did not punish the player with instant death at the slip of a keystroke.

In the older games, random monsters would inhabit screens you could avoid, but in this game a random monster haunts an area you have to go through, twice. If you played the game you know the part I mean. Some parts of the game are timed, so if you don't figure out how to proceed, you will die or can't continue. Finally, a crucial item has a limited number of uses, so if you use it in the wrong place, you cannot win.

While the graphics were improved in detail over the older Quest-engine, some objects were difficult to clearly identify. Also, as this is a text parser game, many times you have to guess what the programmer wants you to type in order to proceed. Character interaction is one-sided and limited.

This game was the last game in which Sierra would support 16-color composite graphics or the Apple IIe/IIc series of computers. Unfortunately, both use the older engine and thus were hard to find back in the day, never mind today.

The Bottom Line
A very historically-important PC game, technologically, but very little new in terms of gameplay.