King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella

"A half-step in the right direction"

I know, I know, how can I claim to like the King's Quest series if I keep ragging on it? After all, isn't it the most famous and longest-lived of all graphic adventure game series? Don't I love that kind of video game more than any other in the world? Yes, and yes. But there are some blemishes on the crown in any of its installments, and I'm here to talk about the ups and downs of The Perils of Rosella.

In the not very aptly titled King's Quest IV, you actually control Rosella, Graham's daughter and the princess of Daventry. Seems her brother's homecoming after eighteen years in the last game was a little too much for the old monarch's heart to take, and he now lies at death's door. Fortunately, salvation is only a handy plot device away, and the fairy Genesta, ruler of the land of Tamir, transports Rosella to her kingdom (or fairydom, or whatever). There's a magic fruit somewhere in the land that can save Graham's life, she explains. Unfortunately, Genesta is at death's door herself, mortally wounded by her archenemy Lolotte. Unless Rosella can also recover the magic amulet Lolotte stole in 24 hours, Genesta will die and Rosella will have no way to deliver the fruit in time. So in Princess, er, King's Quest IV, our blonde bombshell has the fate of two kingdoms riding on her delicate shoulders...

Graphics-8/10
More effort was going into rendering the world of King's Quest than before. Rather than the blocky and barely recognizable fixtures and characters of the previous games, some appreciable detail is evident in Tamir and the characters that inhabit it. Rosella looks a lot more like a person than a sculpture made out of Legos like her father and brother before her. Nobody looks like they're about to jump off the screen and into your living room of whatever, but it is a major leap forward from the previous three games nonetheless.

Sound-4/10
Still the same beeps coming out of an ancient internal PC speaker. Often there's no sound at all. Not as much emphasis was placed on this back during the early days of computer games.

Gameplay-6/10
As this is an adventure game, the game revolves around Rosella's exploration of Tamir, picking up anything that's not nailed down, and using her bizarre inventory in order to accomplish a series of errands (or "quests" if you're not as nitpicky as I am). And to stay alive long enough to accomplish them, she needs to avoid hazards like ogres, witches, murderous trees, a poisonous snake, the living dead, and the time limit. There's lots of places to explore, and Tamir offers a lot more interesting locales and creatures than any of the kingdoms explored in the previous games. That much was done very well.

The time limit I thought was an interesting feature for a game of the time, as things change in Tamir after night falls. Namely, the dead walk again, and it's the only time in which Rosella can solve the haunted house puzzles. But that brings us to the puzzles. There are a lot of creatures wandering around Tamir that Rosella needs to interact with to achieve success. A unicorn, Pan, Cupid, a minstrel, a whale...but when and where they appear is entirely up to fate. You might run into one of them, but not have the item you need, and when you do have it you may need to wander around for minutes on end looking for them. Given how Rosella's greatest enemy is ultimately time itself, I really didn't think that was cool.

And then there's the waiting. You have to wait while you're hiding in the closet (and if you're waiting to hear a tasteless joke about Rosella coming out of the closet you'll have to look for it in a different review). You have to wait for the peacock to drop a feather. You have to wait for night to fall so you can accomplish your next goal. Watching Rosella clean the dwarves' house, and then watching them come in ONE BY ONE, serve themselves soup and take a seat at the table, have their meal, and then get up and leave one by one seemed to last forever. And there's no way to skip past all that, or any of the other cinema-type sequences, if you've seen it already. The random placing of important creatures and the waiting for cinemas to end slows an otherwise good adventure game down to a crawl. Somehow this is worse than in the previous game, and there was a lot of time spent waiting in that. And exactly why do I need to make Rosella "jump" over a dozen times in succession at one point in the game? Didn't anybody say how monotonous this made what could've been a stellar game?

Sometimes the gameplay just wanders into the ridiculous, too. Ever hear of that legend of the witches who all shared one eye, and the hero who stole it to make them tell him what he wanted? Well, they're in this game. But strangely, although they supposedly only have one eye, they're all drawn with an eye in their head, and the one chasing you around the cave, who hasn't got the eye, moves around as if...she can see. How come I noticed this and the designers didn't?

It's not to imply that the gameplay is horrible, however. I liked a fair few of the puzzles, the whale in particular, and Tamir was much more fun to explore than Kolyma or Llewdor. But there are bad spots on this apple for sure.

Replay value-3/10
Except for the placement and appearances of the random elements of the game, the experience is exactly the same no matter how many times you play it through. Sorry, on those grounds I can't give this a high score.

Overall-7/10
King's Quest IV was so much more advanced than its predecessors it's really, really a shame that they let it get bogged down in so many monotonous elements. It could've been one of the top five Sierra games ever made, but languishes somewhere around the middle instead. But I'll take this game over Rosella's only other time in the spotlight any day.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 02/15/05, Updated 12/19/05