Game 18: King's Quest IV - Final Rating

There's more excitement than usual with this final rating. Not only will we see where King's Quest IV ends up on the leaderboard, we'll also find out who wins the 10 points for predicting the result. My gut feeling says the game will do pretty well, particularly as it has the advantage of being pioneering from a technological point of view.

Puzzles and Solvability
This is a tough category to rate for King’s Quest IV. The game is very difficult for numerous reasons. There are quite a few possible dead ends (entering the whale without the feather or the fish, leaving the ogre’s house without the axe). There are also a few particularly nasty puzzles, with the main culprit being everything to do with the whale. Finding the whale is hard enough! Knowing you’re supposed to and then managing to get inside it is next to impossible unless you’re really lucky (I can honestly say that I don’t think I would have managed it without reader assistance). Once you are inside the whale, the outrageous tongue maze merely adds to the frustration, particularly when you remember it’s quite possible a player could be there without either of the items they need once they do get through the maze. I’m deducting one point for the whale!

Even finding the whistle on the island after exiting the whale was difficult.

Some of the other puzzles in the game come with a high difficulty too, such as fishing off the pier (making you try the same thing numerous times before it is successful is just not cool) and the waterfall puzzle (although I’ll never know how long it would have taken me to solve this one unassisted). Even ignoring the difficulty of the above, the most challenging thing for me was that certain screens could only be solved at certain times. I wasted hours at screens such as the pool and the spooky house, trying everything I could think of when in fact nothing was going to work. Certain other actions needed to take place first, yet the player can’t know that. Despite everything I’ve just said, I really enjoyed the challenge that King’s Quest IV offered, and unlike some of the other games I’ve really criticised for being close to unsolvable (the ICOM games in particular), everything in King’s Quest IV makes total sense. Apart from the whale puzzle, I managed to avoid all the dead ends and solve everything thrown at me eventually, so it was far from unsolvable. I just had to persevere and learn the rules of the game, which are a bit different to the ones that came before it.
Rating: 5

I spent quite a bit of time on certain screens where nothing ever happened!

Interface and Inventory
Despite the new SCI engine being used for the game, the parser doesn’t appear any different to other recent Sierra attempts. In fact, the most suitable comparison would be Gold Rush! Typing “look” tells you pretty much everything you need to know about a location. If an item isn’t mentioned in the basic location description, there’s a high chance that it plays no role in any solution. This isn’t the case in every instance, but the exceptions are normally pretty damn obvious. On the downside, just as with Gold Rush, there are very few interesting or humorous descriptions to be found for items that are not of great importance, with most requests met with the defaults such as “you don’t need it” and “I do not understand the word grass”.

Typing "look" usually gives you enough information to get by

Movement is handled pretty well, but strangely Sierra still hasn’t managed to remove the difficulty their simulated 3D perspective gives to climbing stairs or walking across thin objects. Just as in Gold Rush, there are times where the game takes over control temporarily to move Rosella from point to point (this is totally welcome in my books), but there are other times where the player is forced to manoeuvre up spiral staircases through sections where the protagonist is not even visible. I died numerous times in the game either climbing up or down stairs or trying to cross something (such as the board to reach the fruit tree in the swamp). I could always slow down the speed of the game to make these sections easier, but I long for games where movement is not a concern so I can focus on solving puzzles.

It's hard enough when you can see yourself!

The inventory is expectedly adequate, but it seemed a small step backwards not to be able to request a description of each item I’d collected. Typing “look at pouch” just brought up a picture of the pouch with no description, stopping me from gaining any clues from item investigation. There are also times where you cannot get to your inventory, and they’re normally the times you really need to, such as when a bulldog is running at you. I get the idea that you wouldn’t have time in that instance to go through your items to find something of use, but this is an adventure game, and chances are you need to apply a unique item to each situation as it occurs. So, I’ve covered in detail the slight flaws that have been carried over to, or in some cases created in, Sierra’s new engine, but I should point out that in the overall scheme of things, King’s Quest IV feels extremely polished and professional. I’m merely nit-picking issues of little consequence in a perfectly usable and well established system. I guess I just expected more from SCI.
Rating: 5

I don't really understand why I couldn't see my inventory at certain times.

Story and Setting
The actual plot of King’s Quest IV is not very inspired. Basically it involves Rosella travelling to Tamir to find some magic fruit to save her dying father. To be able to get back home, she also needs to recover the fairy Genesta’s talisman, which is in the hands of the evil fairy Lolotte. To recover the talisman, Rosella gains the trust of Lolotte by fetching three items for her, before stealing the talisman back and saving Genesta, King Graham and all of Tamir. Roberta Williams hasn’t really ventured all that far from the first game’s fetch three magical items that have been stolen by an evil witch to save Daventry plot. However, there are lots of stories that sound stupid when summarised that are actually enjoyable for all the minor details on the way. As usual, Roberta picked snippets from fairy tales and mythologies to create the subquests and characters of Tamir, including the ogre from Jack and the Beanstalk, the prince frog, the seven dwarfs, Cupid, Satyr and even the whale that Jonah entered in the bible. It certainly helps to have some knowledge of the original stories to solve the puzzles that are associated with these characters, but it’s not essential. I probably should give the game a 5 here, but I’m going with a 6 for being the first to have a female main protagonist.
Rating: 6

It's the unpredictable mix of characters that makes an otherwise cliche story interesting

Sound and Graphics
While I’ve mentioned how the SCI engine failed to make any significant improvements from interface and parser points of view, it certainly did in the sound and graphics category. The visuals are substantially better than any game on the list so far, with a higher resolution, more colours and detail, and much more convincing animation. As soon as I saw Rosella swaying her way along the screen with her braids smoothly swinging from side to side, it was obvious that Sierra had once again raised the bar for graphics in the adventure genre. They did even more than that on the sound side, with King’s Quest IV being the very first game to make use of dedicated sound cards. After putting up with either PC speaker driven bleeps or bad quality digital recordings, the comparatively lush compositions are most welcome. The downside is that for the most part, the game is still silent, with effects and melodies utilised only occasionally. In fact, there are 75 different pieces of music that kick in at different times during King’s Quest IV, but none of them stick around long enough or form any sort of theme to be truly memorable. There’s no doubt that King’s Quest broke new ground in both the sound and graphics department, so I’m giving it the very first 6!
Rating: 6

The game looks, sounds and feels classier than any before it on the list

Environment and Atmosphere
Tamir is a reasonably varied place, but it always feels like a King’s Quest land. It follows a similar grid style to previous games, with borders to the east and west and wrapping screens to the north and south. It has all the typical fields, meadows and beaches that we’ve become accustomed to, occupied by cottages, caves and streams. Where the game differs from the first three games is that it offers a creepy element, mostly through the inclusion of the haunted house in the zombie infested cemetery (within which all the action occurs during the night), but also through the groves of evil looking trees and skull shaped witches’ cave. Adding this lightweight horror to the mythological and fantastic elements that are typical for the series makes it more to my taste. I initially thought the environment was too limited in scope, but once I broke through the ocean and mountain wall barriers to screens beyond, it was more than satisfactory.
Rating: 6

I'm sure Rosella didn't expect digging up graves in the middle of night to be on the adventurer job description

Dialogue and Acting
I don’t have much interesting stuff to say for this category. The narration and description are to the point and get the job down. There are very few attempts at humour, but then King’s Quest has never attempted to compete with the likes of Space Quest and Leisure Suit Larry. We’re still at a stage in the evolution of the genre where the protagonist has little to no voice (both literally and figuratively), so I’ll increase the rating I gave to the previous games by 1 for the simple fact that the dialogue is nowhere near as silly this time round.
Rating: 5

The game makes limited attempts to take the language far beyond the essential

Well there you have it! King's Quest IV gets a respectable 55. That means it comes in equal with Space Quest I and third overall. To be honest, I thought it would be higher than that after my first session and lower than that after my second, but the third session evened things out and I ended up thoroughly enjoying the game despite some obvious flaws. A score of 55 means that Nicolaj wins the prediction points! I'll be changing the prediction system for the next game which means more people will have a chance to win points. That game will be Leisure Suit Larry 2, another Sierra game I've not played before. Looking forward to it, despite the many dead end warnings I've received already.

Game 18: King's Quest IV - Won!

Rosella Journal Entry 3: “I’ve done it! Not only did I find the magic fruit I needed to save my father, I’ve also managed to retrieve Genesta’s talisman from Lolotte, simultaneously destroying that evil witch. After much searching, I found my way past the waterfall, which led me to a maze of caves and then swampland. It’s here that I found the magic fruit, but with no way to get home to my ailing father, I had to continue my quest to find the talisman. Thankfully I found an item behind the waterfall that allowed me to get past the bulldog in the ogre’s house. A bone! It wasn’t long afterwards that I had the golden egg laying hen in my possession, but Lolotte then demanded I find Pandora’s Box without giving me any hints as to its whereabouts. I spent the next night digging up coffins in the cemetery, finding items to return to the unsettled spirits in the spooky house. Once I’d returned all their items, I was rewarded with the key to the crypt, which is where I found Pandora’s Box. I reluctantly took this third item to Lolotte and she “rewarded” me by demanding I marry her son Edgar. Fortunately, Edgar doesn’t contain the evil heart of his mother and helped me escape. I shot the last of cupid’s arrow into her heart, took the talisman, saved Genesta, and then my father!”

The Ogre's House: At the end of my last post I kept being eaten by the bulldog inside.

At the end of my last post I had 76 points out of 230 so it might seem surprising that I’ve now finished the game. There are two reasons why that came to pass. Firstly, I played the game for five hours over the weekend, taking my total time spent on the game to ten and a half hours, by far the longest I’ve spent on a Sierra adventure game so far. In fact, the only game I’ve required more time to complete was Mortville Manor and it’s safe to say that the hours I spent on King’s Quest IV were far more enjoyable than the ones I spent on that French mystery. The second reason I was able to complete the game is because the majority of the remaining puzzles were fairly straight forward. Not all of them mind you, but none came close to the sheer difficulty of the whale puzzle. Also, with only a few remaining locations left in the game that hadn’t played much of a role, the screens of focus became more and more obvious. There’s much to get through, so let’s begin…

 

 

It doesn't help that the game doesn't let you look at your inventory at times when you really need it

At the beginning of this session, I was trying to find a way to get past the bulldog in the ogre’s house to get my hands on the hen that lays golden eggs for Lolotte. Unfortunately, we’ll never know how long it might have taken me to figure out the solution to this puzzle, as a reader left me a comment (not in ROT13) saying “There’s one thing in your inventory you haven’t found a use for yet. Once you do, and use it in the right place (think edges), you’ll find a way to get past the bulldog.” I don’t want to point fingers at Cinnabar here as he’s by no means the only commenter that has put spoilers in the comments without using code, but I’m currently having to pretty much avoid reading comments on my posts until I finish games so as not to read unwanted spoilers. This would obviously limit my ability to interact with you guys, so I’m working on a very specific spoiler system for future. Stay tuned!

 

I know you're all eager to help, but sometimes your comments reveal more than you might realize

As it turned out, even knowing what Cinnabar said, I still struggled to figure out what I was supposed to do next. When looking at my inventory, the two items that had been in there the longest without any use were the flute and the golden crown I got from the frog in the pond. I’d played the flute at every single screen I could get to, so I doubted that was involved in the solution. I thought about what the crown might be for and when combined with Cinnabar’s suggestion to “think edges”, all of a sudden the waterfall seemed to be the place where something might happen. I went to the waterfall, typed “put on crown” and watched as Rosella turned into a frog, swam underneath the waterfall and came up in a cave on the other side. For some reason I just never expected that the crown would turn me into a frog, despite the fact I retrieved it from a prince who had undergone the same transformation. Is that what happens in the fairy tale?

 

Suddenly the game world didn't look quite as small as it did before.

Once behind the waterfall, I picked up a plank of wood then made my way through an impenetrably dark cave system. To get through the caves, you have to have the lantern from the dwarfs, but lighting it doesn’t actually reveal anything around you. I basically had to feel my way through the darkness while avoiding a nasty troll that kills you on contact. It’s one of those annoying Sierra adventure standards where whether or not a creature or character is on a screen is totally random. If the troll was there, there was no way to avoid him and I had to restore. If he wasn’t there, then nothing else stood in my path. Nothing except a nastily placed crevice that is! Once I knew exactly where the crevice was, I had to type “lay down board” to create a small bridge across it in the darkness. This might sound difficult, but it took me only a few minutes to get through the caves and out the other side to the swamp.

 

Either this cave is supernaturally dark or this lantern is really, really shit!

The swamp was reasonably straightforward. I say reasonably because I did get stuck for about ten minutes at the very beginning. If I walked into the swamp I would sink within just a couple of steps. If I put the crown back on, I did turn into a frog and dove into the swamp, but a swamp monster ate me within a couple of seconds. I’d noticed when first entering the screen that there were mounds of grass across the swamp which could possibly be used as stepping stones, but had given up on the idea after trying to use the plank of wood to reach them. When I focussed my attention back on them, the first thing I tried turned out to be correct. “Jump”! I jumped from tuft to tuft all the way across the swamp until I was confronted by a gap I couldn’t jump across. On the other side of the gap were a vicious cobra and a tree containing the fruit I needed to save my father!

 

Those damn French swamp monsters are always after me legs!

My immediate thought was to use the board again and this time it was correct, but I needed to do something about the cobra. The solution was obvious, so I typed “play flute”. Finally the use of the flute was revealed and I quickly plucked the fruit from the tree while the cobra was hypnotised and made my way back through both the swamp and the cave system. It was only on my way out of the caves that I noticed the bones sitting at the entrance. Remembering that Cinnabar had told me what I needed to pass the bulldog would be on the other side of the waterfall, it suddenly occurred to me that I might need to pick one of them up. I was able to pick up a bone, and once again I have no idea whether I would have seen it had I not had his words in my mind.

 

I'm not sure whether it was Rosella's playing or the way she sways from side to side that hypnotized the snake

I headed straight back to the ogre’s house with my bone and threw it as soon as the dog approached me. It worked, and he happily chewed on the bone while I explored the house. Upstairs was the ogre’s bedroom where I found an axe, but couldn’t see anything else to do there. Downstairs was a kitchen and a pantry, but entering the kitchen caused the ogre’s wife to attack and kill me. The pantry was empty, but I noticed I could look through the keyhole in the door. While I was playing around in the house, I received a message telling me the ogre was arriving home, and quickly hid myself in the pantry. While I watched him sitting at the table through the keyhole, his wife brought him the hen, and he fell asleep. I was then able to walk out, pick up the hen, and leave.

 

Here it comes. Oh yes! It's a gold egg!!! I'll just take this egg and...and...zzzzzzz

I immediately took the hen to Lolotte, fully expecting her to give me yet another fetch task. She didn’t disappoint, and sent me on my way to find the mysterious Pandora’s Box. I had a fair idea of where to start my quest. Now I had the axe from the ogre’s house, I figured I might be able to get past the creepy trees in the groves to the east. By typing “use axe” on any of the three screens containing the trees results in them cowering in fear, so I no longer had to worry about them picking me up and killing me. I was then able to reach a screen I hadn’t accessed before…the witches cave. Inside were three witches, all sharing one glass eye to see. The witches were pretty easy to avoid as only one of them can chase you at a time, but I couldn’t see anything around the room that was of use to me. Eventually I focused my energy on the witches themselves and in particular, the glass eye. I simply walked up to the witch that was holding the eye and typed “get eye”!

 

 After numerous defeats at the hands of Skeletor, He-Man was finally forced to downsize Castle Grayskull

The witches were obviously not very pleased that I’d pinched their only form of sight and begged me to return it to them. I saved my game so I could see what happened if I did return it, but the answer was not to my liking (they killed me). I wandered around the room a bit longer, but in the end had to assume that the eye had a use elsewhere in the game, so I left. Standing outside the cave, I pondered what I might be able to do with a glass eye. I looked at my map, but could find no screen where an eye might do anything. Before I went walkabout to see whether getting the eye had set something else into motion elsewhere (which wouldn’t be strange for King’s Quest IV), I decided to go back into the cave one more time to see if I could find something else I’d missed. To my surprise, as soon as I re-entered the cave, the witches begged me for the eye and offered to give me a gift if I returned it (you have to leave with the eye and then come back). I agreed, and the witches gave me a scarab that would ward off the undead. Interestingly I could have walked out with the eye, but I noticed I got points for returning it to them.

 

We spy with our little glass eye, something beginning with...

This particular solution isn’t all that painful as you’re likely to wander back to the cave at some point out of desperation if nothing else, but I wonder how many players got the eye and then wandered around aimlessly for an hour trying to find something to do. It’s a perfect example of how King’s Quest IV has a tendency to make things that are fairly simple much more challenging than they might have been (fishing off the pier is another example that relies on timing and perseverance rather than logic).  Moving on, as soon as I left the cave with the scarab, I received a message telling me it was now night time. There was really only one place left on the map where nothing had happened, and that particular place seemed an ideal place to visit after dark. The cemetery!

 

 ...m

On my arrival to the cemetery, I was shocked to find zombies lumbering about! Thankfully, the witches promise held true and the scarab protected me from them, causing them to bury themselves back in the graves from whence they came. Other than the walking dead, there was nothing else of note in the cemetery, so I re-entered the spooky house next to it. As soon as I did, I was informed that there was a baby crying upstairs. I followed the sound and found a very creepy sight indeed. The crib in the nursery was rocking and I could hear crying from within it, but there was no baby to be seen. A ghost baby! I tried soothing the baby, picking up the baby, singing a lullaby to the baby, but nothing worked. It was then that I had a “eureka” moment! If the baby is a ghost, then it must be dead. If it’s dead, then it’s likely to be buried in the cemetery. If the baby won’t stop crying, maybe I need to find its grave and use the shovel to retrieve an item?

 

No good story is complete without zombies!

My thought was bang on the money, but it did take me quite a while to find the right grave. You’d think solving the puzzle held enough challenge for the player, but they placed the baby’s grave in the far distance, partially covered by the tree. Add to this that if you use the shovel too many times it breaks, causing a dead end. Long story short, I retrieved a rattle from the grave and took it to the baby. It took it and stopped crying. I was then alerted to the sound of chains downstairs. Basically I spent the next thirty minutes moving between the house and cemetery, digging up graves to collect items needed by the numerous dead in the house. On each occasion I had to wander around the two cemetery screens, reading tombstones to try to find the one that matched the requesting ghost. It was reasonably enjoyable, but became repetitive after I’d satisfied three spectral inhabitants out of five.

 

Yeah, the stone right at the very back that you can hardly see!

Eventually I found out what the trapdoor I saw in one of the bedrooms was all about. I followed the ghost of a little boy up a ladder into the attic, where he sat on a chest. He disappeared after I retrieved a toy horse for him from his grave, so I was free to open the chest. Inside was some sheet music, which I took up to the organ I'd played on earlier and put to use. When I finished the piece, a little drawer appeared from out of the organ and in it was a key! I knew straight away what door that key was going to unlock, and quickly made my way out of the house and straight to the crypt in the eastern cemetery. I unlocked the door and entered, finding myself on a ledge overlooking an Egyptian looking crypt.

 

So many things that baffled me earlier in the game had relevance later on

I could see Pandora’s Box on the ground, but I assumed I was going to have some difficulty getting down to the ground to pick it up, and would probably face some sort of trap on the way. To my surprise, there was a rope ladder sitting on the ledge, just waiting for me to use it. I climbed down the rope and a mummy came out of a tomb and attacked me. As with the undead in the cemetery, he was scared off by the scarab, so I was able to walk across the room, pick up the box, and then walk out. I can only assume any difficulty people face here would be because they don’t have the scarab, but I can’t see how anyone could get the crypt key without it as the zombies would kill them before they could dig anything up. Oh well, I can hardly complain about an easy puzzle can I!

 

This is surely a trap of some sort right? Well...no actually. It's piss easy!

 Alright, so I had Pandora’s Box. Surely Lolotte couldn’t send me on another item retrieval quest! Well, she didn’t, but she did decide that now that I’d proved my innocence, she wished me to marry her son Edgar. I was locked away in his room (he was sent to sleep elsewhere) and would have been married to him the very next morning had he not helped me to escape. He left a rose with a key attached under the door so I could get out of the room. As long as I kept my distance from the winged demon guards that all happened to be sleeping on the job, I was free to wander the castle. It didn’t take me long to find my possessions and to make my way up the ridiculously awkward staircases to Lolotte’s bedroom. I tried taking the talisman from around her neck, but she woke up and incinerated me. One look at my inventory and the last of cupid’s arrows stood out as a possible solution. I fired it at her and apparently the love it contained was too much for her!

 

You cringe, as you watch the final scene unravel and find that LOVE truly does conquer all

 I picked up the talisman and accepted Edgar’s thanks for killing his evil mother. I then collected the hen and Pandora’s Box from the storage room and let the unicorn go free before leaving Lolotte’s castle once and for all. The only thing left to do was to swim back to Genesta’s Palace, where the fairy gladly accepted her talisman back and thanked me for saving Tamir. Strangely, Edgar then proposed to me, but only after Genesta transformed him into a charming prince to match his brave persona (apparently ugly people can’t be nice). I declined and instead had Genesta send me back to my father to give him the magic fruit. The game ends with King Graham deciding the fruit had given him back enough energy to go adventuring again. I guess that explains why Graham becomes the protagonist once again in King’s Quest V. That’s it! King’s Quest IV is finished, and I earned 226 points out of a possible 230. Gotta be happy with that!

 

From what I can tell, the four points I missed were for not returning Pandora's box to the crypt.

Session Time: 5 hours 00 minutes

Total Time: 10 hours 30 minutes

Game 18: King's Quest IV - Grand Theft Arrow

Rosella Journal Entry 2: “Oh I hope I’ve done the right thing! After accidentally coming across Lolotte’s castle, I was captured by her winged demons and imprisoned in a cell. I thought that I’d failed in my quest and therefore ended any chance of either my father or Genesta surviving. I was extremely surprised when Lolotte decided to release me, but of course there was a condition for her leniency. She demanded I bring her the unicorn I’d seen in the meadows to prove my innocence! With no other option available to me (I need Genesta’s talisman that Lolotte has), I set out trying to capture the unicorn. This turned out to be extremely difficult and involved stealing Cupid’s bow and arrow to charm the unicorn and finding a bridle on a deserted island to ride it. I feel terrible about it, but I’ve given the unicorn to Lolotte now. It’s such a beautiful creature and I fear for its safety, but I could see no other choice. To make matters worse, the evil fairy has merely followed up her demand with another. Now I must retrieve the hen that lays golden eggs from a terrifying giant! Oh…I never knew how hard this adventuring thing was for my father and brother!”

My main quest at the end of my last post

Seriously, King’s Quest IV is hard! Much harder than I expected! At the end of my last post, I’d finished mapping out the screens and collecting items, and solved some of the more obvious puzzles (got the fishing pole from the fisherman, the crown from the frog, the lute from the guy in the meadow and the flute from Pan). I wasn't particularly worried, but I was wondering what on earth I was going to do next. Many readers left comments, but I wanted to give the game my all before resorting to hints. So it was that I wandered around Tamir trying to find something I’d missed. I tried playing the flute just about everywhere, I tried getting through the waterfall, I tried to get past the creepy trees in the groves, I tried all sorts of things with the swimming pool and in the cemetery, but I couldn’t get anywhere.

There doesn't seem to be anything to do here...yet.

In the end, I decided to try swimming off the beach, hoping to find another piece of land to explore. Clearly I was missing something! Previous King’s Quest games had taught me that swimming out to sea would likely end in my death, but you never know if you never go! I started swimming directly out to sea from a random beach screen. Within a couple of screens I was attacked and killed by a shark. Hmmm…not looking good! I had another go and this time managed to get another screen further before the shark attacked me. I quickly avoided him by going down to the next screen and to my absolute elation found land ahead of me! I gave myself a deserved “facepalm” for not trying this earlier, but then it did seem like a futile thing to try. There were no hints on the mainland that there might be an island out to sea, unless I simply missed them.

I wonder how many King's Quest IV players never found this island

My excitement at finding a whole new area to explore didn’t last long however. The island was made up of only a handful of screens, with Genesta’s palace being the central focus. The only item I found in the palace’s surroundings was a peacock feather, which I didn’t feel I would be able to apply to any of the screens on the mainland. Entering the palace led me up a flight of stairs to Genesta’s bedroom, where she lays ill in her bed surrounded by small flying fairies. She wouldn’t respond to me in any way, nor would the fairies or the leopard resting in the corner of the room. Basically, despite putting quite a bit of thought into it, I could see nothing that I could do in Genesta’s Palace, and was therefore forced to head back to the mainland with only a feather to show for my discovery.

I'm curious as to why all the fairies are small and unable to speak while Genesta and Lolotte are human size

I did take a brief swim around to see whether there was anything else out at sea, but other than seeing a whale in the distance that I didn’t seem to be able to reach, nothing came of it. Since Rosella can only swim for around three screens before drowning, it seemed safe to assume the island was the only place of interest off the mainland. I hit the mainland right near the pier, and decided that I would spend some more time fishing. My previous attempts to catch a fish with the pole and worm had failed, but why else would I have a fishing pole and a worm if not to catch something with it? I cast out again and once again was met with disappointment. I tried again and the same thing happened. I tried one last time and…I caught a fish!!!!!!!

Bass Quest is Sierra's most realistic fishing simulator thus far!

I’ve done my share of fishing over the years. It’s not something I do regularly, but I’ve done it enough to know that catching a fish isn’t easy. You have to be patient and prepared to cast out many times before having any success. With this in mind, King’s Quest IV works quite well as a fishing simulator, but surely realism doesn’t play a role in a puzzle based adventure game! Particularly not in one based entirely on fantasy. I watched the fisherman fish with no success. He then gave me his pole and I tried fishing, with no success. I then found a worm, attached it to the hook, and tried fishing with no success. Why should I try again? Clearly I was just missing some other item that would make the fish bite or perhaps there was another location that I was supposed to fish from? This sort of puzzle (ie. one that makes you repeatedly try to the same task until it somehow randomly works) is just not welcome in the adventure genre in my opinion (does anyone disagree?).

So I gave this guy a pouch of diamonds because there were no fish to catch...don't I feel stupid!

Moving on…now I had a dead fish! Like the feather, I couldn’t see how that would assist me anywhere, but I decided to visit every screen to see if a “eureka” moment might occur. Moving from west to east, it didn’t take me long to arrive at the swimming pool to find cupid flying around the screen, placing his bow and arrow on the ground, and then taking a swim. WTF? Cupid had never been there before, just as the lute player hadn’t originally been in the meadow. I know that some of you had tried to warn me about King’s Quest IV and in particular, how certain things only happen at certain times, but I kind of thought they might be more obvious. I don’t have a major issue with triggered events, but having spent about thirty minutes trying to make something happen at the swimming pool earlier, finding out that I was wasting my time kind of hurt. I don’t yet completely know how I feel about this, but it sure highlights why King’s Quest IV is so difficult. I’ve wasted hours trying to figure out things that simply can’t be figured out…yet!

Oh look! It's cupid taking a bath. How adorable! Quick...let's steal all his stuff! Mwahaha...

My immediate reaction on finding cupid flying around was to approach him and try to communicate. He freaked out and flew away. I re-entered the screen, let him put his bow and arrow on the ground and dive into the pool, and then walked towards his equipment. Once again he freaked out, but this time he flew away without getting the bow and arrow, leaving them there for me to pick up. I was happy to add them to my inventory, but I couldn’t help feeling sorry for cupid and thinking that this little scene goes against the normal approach necessary in King’s Quest games. Now poor little cupid is flying around without his bow and arrow! Ah screw him! Let’s go shoot some stuff! Thankfully I saved my game because I quickly found out that I only had two arrows to shoot. I tried shooting them at the giant that chases you near his home, but missed. After figuring there must be two places where you are required to fire the arrows, I restored and set about finding one of them. The most obvious answer was the unicorn!

Headshot!

That worked perfectly. I typed “shoot arrow at unicorn” and watched as my arrow hit the mark and the unicorn immediately became my friend. Unfortunately, no matter what I tried, I could find no way of leading the unicorn to Lolotte. I tried riding it, dragging it, pushing it, talking to it, feeding it, nothing worked! Eventually I was resigned to the fact that I needed some other item to make the unicorn come with me, but what might it be?! Long story short, I travelled far and wide looking for the answer but didn’t find it. It was time to resort to the user comments! There were stacks of ROT13 comments to choose from (thanks everyone), but one of Andy_Panthro’s was titled “Major spoilers regarding the unicorn”. I translated it and read: “Getting the unicorn requires two things, cupids bow/arrow (which has been discussed above) and the bridle, which requires a bit of a swim and a trip through a whale.” The whale!!??

At least the game left me in no doubt that I was screwed.

Wow! That’s brutal! I saw the whale in the distance while I was swimming, but it continually dived beneath the water and no matter what I’d typed, it appeared the game didn’t recognise that it was even there. I’d typed “look at whale” and “touch whale”, but the game had responded with something like “there’s nothing there”. If I swam towards it, I’d just appear on the next screen and there was no sign of the whale. I just figured it was an “extra”, like the jumping fish. With the knowledge that I somehow had to get inside the whale, I rushed back to the sea and jumped in, wondering why on earth I would find a bridle inside a whale. It wasn’t hard to find the whale as it appears regularly on a few different screens, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to get to it. I typed all sorts of things and tried going from screen to screen, hoping that something different would happen. Nothing did. Eventually I just sat there in the water, thinking of anything I could possibly do to get inside the whale. Suddenly I was sucked beneath the water and found myself exactly where I wanted to be!

Apparently this whale's tongue is bigger than its stomach!

To get into the whale, you have to go to a screen where it is, watch it emerge and then submerge in the distance, then stay very still for about ten seconds until it sucks you down into its stomach. If you move at all it doesn’t happen! Seriously, the only reason this happened at all for me is because I knew for a fact that I had to do something with the whale. I was still extremely lucky! My feelings towards the game were starting to slide at this point, but I was determined to go on with an open mind. Right, so I was inside the whale…what now? I found a bottle in there, inside which I found a note. Disappointingly, albeit humorously, the note was merely a reference to Space Quest and not at all useful in finding the bridle I needed. I could find nothing else in the stomach and so all that was left to do was to try and get out. The game made a point of describing the massive uvula hanging down when describing the mouth, so I immediately thought I would need to do something with that. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any way to climb up the whale’s tongue to get to it, and kept sliding down.

Another clever marketing ploy by the geniuses at Sierra

I tried and tried and tried again…but couldn’t climb that tongue to reach the uvula. Several times I gave up and tried other ways to get out, but it seemed certain that I was supposed to climb the tongue somehow, otherwise why was I able to reach different heights depending on where I began climbing? I had a terrible feeling that there might be an item I’d missed on the mainland or the island that would assist me in climbing, but I thought I’d been pretty thorough. I began climbing a little bit then moving left or right, then climbing a bit more, and seeing how far I could get. Suddenly Rosella stood up at one point of the tongue, and I saved my game immediately. So just when I was losing faith in the game, it throws a ridiculous maze puzzle at me! Luckily, from this point it didn’t take long to find the right way to reach the highest point of the tongue to be able reach the uvula, but I still had to do something with it. Looking at my inventory, the answer became obvious. The feather!

If you enter the whale before getting the feather from Genesta's island, there's no way out!

I tickled the whale’s uvula and was spat out into the ocean. At this point I was starting to panic a bit. I’d got nothing out of the whale other than a silly note in a bottle. Surely there was something else I was supposed to have discovered in there! It was then that I noticed the island in the distance. Apparently the whale had swum further out to sea and I’d emerged from its depths right next to a deserted island. The island contained nothing more than a palm tree, a couple of shipwrecks and a pelican. When I investigated the wrecks I was informed that something was glinting in one of the boats. On further investigation I found it was the bridle I needed, half buried in the sand! Right, so how to get off this island back to the mainland? Assuming I would need to do something with the pelican, I gave it the dead fish that I’d caught off the pier. It accepted it and in return dropped a whistle. Blowing the whistle caused a dolphin to come to the island which I then rode back to the mainland. This whole island section was logical from an adventure puzzle point of view, but completely ridiculous when you think about it. I guess you can get away with anything in the fantasy world of King’s Quest.

Hmmm...a deserted island...that bridle has got to be around here somewhere!

I used the bridle on the unicorn and was then able to ride it to Lolotte’s castle. On arrival, the winged demons took me to Lolotte and she eagerly accepted my offering of the unicorn. Once again, handing over the unicorn, whose trust you have gained, to an evil fairy seems out of the normal moral code of the King’s Quest series. I can only assume that the unicorn will be released from captivity later in the game so that all is well in the world, but still, Rosella is far more ruthless than her father or brother. As expected, Lolotte didn’t just hand over the talisman I need to save Genesta, and instead gave me another task to complete. I now need to retrieve the hen that lays golden eggs from the giant’s house. Given that my only contact with the giant so far was to be captured and killed time and time again, I’m not sure how I’m going to achieve that. I’m now able to enter the house, which I couldn’t prior to giving the unicorn to Lolotte, but as soon as I do so I’m eaten by a vicious bulldog. I don’t think I have anything in my inventory that will help (shooting the other arrow failed), so I think it’s time to wander the map again, hoping that something else has been triggered by my progress.

I might have to read Jack and the Beanstalk again to figure out how to get the hen

Session Time: 2 hours 30 minutes

Total Time: 5 hours 30 minutes



Game 18: King's Quest IV - Exchanging Peasantries

Rosella Journal Entry 1: “I’m so afraid! My father, the King, is so very close to death, and I am his only hope! A fairy named Genesta spoke to me through the magic mirror and told me about a tree that bears fruit in the land of Tamir. Apparently this fruit, if eaten by my father, would give him good health and well-being for many years! Genesta offered to transport me to Tamir, but unfortunately she would not be able to send me back to Daventry unless I helped her to recover her full powers. An evil fairy named Lolotte stole her magic talisman, and only if I get it back will she be able to send me home, regardless of whether I find the fruit or not. I had no other choice other than to accept her offer, and have spent the last few hours exploring Tamir. It is a magical land not unlike Daventry, but Lolotte’s castle casts a dark shadow across the land. I have covered a lot of ground since my arrival and collected a few items of use, but I fear it will be some time before I find the tree I need or retrieve Genesta’s talisman from Lolotte!”

King's Quest IV certainly has the longest intro of any game on the list so far

Apparently I’ve already spent three hours in Tamir! It might seem odd, but I don’t actually look at the clock when I start and stop playing a game to figure out how much time I’ve spent in a session. I take so many screenshots on the way that I only have to look at the time I captured them to get a fairly accurate idea. I was pretty surprised to see how many hours I’d already racked up, which I guess is a sign of how much I’ve enjoyed King’s Quest IV so far. That being said, it’s perhaps a bit embarrassing that I’ve only managed to earn 37 points out of a possible 230, but that probably has more to do with the way I approach Sierra games than it does the difficulty level.

The last thing Genesta did was magically change my princess clothes to those of a peasant girl

I quickly realised that King’s Quest IV uses the same grid approach found in the previous games in the series. It’s very similar to King’s Quest II in this way in that the west and east borders of the gameworld are blocked by natural obstacles (in both games it’s ocean in the west and mountains in the east) while the north and south directions wrap around (meaning if you continue in either direction you eventually arrive where you started). I therefore approached the game the way I always have, by mapping the entire environment in excel, noting landmarks and collecting items on the way. Interestingly, Tamir is made up of a comparatively small 5 x 6 grid, meaning there were only 30 screens for me to map, but I assume more will open up past the mountains at some point.

I haven't been able to access that one white screen yet as I'm blocked by evil trees or rocks.

Not only are there less screens to explore than I was expecting, the majority of them had very little of interest to investigate. The first thing I did come across was a small shanty where a fisherman and his wife lived. They complained that there were no fish biting off the pier and that if their luck didn’t change soon, they would not be able to eat. I could see the fisherman’s pole in the corner, but could find nothing to do, so I moved on. Shortly afterwards I came across a unicorn in a meadow. I’ve since come across it several times, but it trots away before I can make any movement towards it. Similarly I ran into a satyr (the god Pan) playing a flute on numerous screens, but he paid me no attention no matter what I tried.

I've come to talk to you about global warming...

The next location of interest I came across was a swimming pool, but once again I could see nothing that I could do there. Apparently there’s nothing in it and it's too shallow to even swim in, so I was once again forced to note it on my map and move on. This pattern continued when I came across a pond filled with frogs. After being informed that one of the frogs had a small crown on its head, my immediate thought was to kiss it to transform it into a prince. Unfortunately, I couldn’t reach it without stepping in the water, and entering the pond caused the frog to jump off the lily pad and swim away. So far the game had given me nothing but questions and I hadn’t gained a single point!

It's fairly odd to have a swimming pool in the middle of nowhere. I'm intrigued!

Thankfully, on the screen just to the south of the pond, I found a gold ball under a bridge, giving me my first two points. The pattern of finding locations that clearly play a role in the game, only for there to be nothing obvious to achieve there, continued when I came across a mine (where the seven dwarfs sent me out as soon as I tried to enter), an apparently foreboding house (that was locked) and a cemetery (with lots of tombstones to read but nothing to do or collect). I only really started to make progress when I found a house built under large tree on a stream. On entering the house I was informed that it belonged to the seven dwarfs, and the game made a point of making it clear just how messy it was.

I thought Rosella was supposed to be a good role model for women. The first thing she does is clean up after the boys!

The first thing that entered my head was “clean house” which resulted in Rosella rushing around the two rooms with a broom, putting everything away and cleaning the dishes. As soon as everything was tidy, the dwarfs arrived home from the mine and, delighted with the fact a stranger had broken into their house and cleaned it, invited me to have soup with them. Once the bowls were empty, the dwarfs hopped up and left, leaving me to clean up once again (chauvinistic bastards!) and to pick up the pouch of diamonds one of them had left on the table. I decided to follow my instincts, which were telling me to return the pouch to the dwarfs at the mine. I don’t see how this is any different to leaving them on the table in the first place, but since the mine was only one screen north, that’s what I did.

Is there anything else I can get for you boys? A beer? Maybe I can bake you a pie?

It worked too as not only did the dwarfs now let me into the mine, the head dwarf was impressed with my honesty and told me to keep the diamonds. Not only that, he then gave me a lantern for my trouble (crime does pay!). I continued my journey to the east of Tamir, coming across a spooky grove where the trees attacked and killed me if I got too close, a stream where I picked up a live worm and most importantly a large spooky house covered in spider webs. I couldn’t find anything to do in the dining room, the nursery or the bedrooms (although I did notice a trapdoor in the ceiling of one of the bedrooms), but the parlour did offer up some intrigue. I found a book of Shakespear (for some reason called The Compleat Works of Williams Shakespeare) and a secret doorway leading to a staircase.

The obligatory spooky house of the neighborhood

At the bottom of the staircase was a shovel, which I eagerly added to my inventory. I was pretty excited to find the secret door and fully expected to find something of importance up the staircase, so I was surprised to discover nothing more than an organ at the top of the tower. I sat down and played the organ (very well I might add), but could see no reason why I was there or what I might be able to achieve. Deciding the leave the house for now and investigate what screens were still left, I soon found myself in the second part of the cemetery, with a crypt in the mountainside to the east. The door was locked, so once again I had to assume that I didn’t yet have what I needed to do anything on the screen.

The music quality in King's Quest IV is a huge step up from the PC speaker stuff that came before it

On the very last screen that I explored I found a path leading up into the mountains. Following it took me straight to Lolotte’s castle, but before I could proceed or retreat, I was captured by winged demons who took me to face the evil fairy. She temporarily imprisoned me, suspecting me of being a spy, before releasing me. Apparently her son Edgar liked me, and believed my story about having accidentally come across the castle. Not only did she let me go, she told me she would reward me greatly if I could bring her the unicorn. Her creatures then dumped me back down at the base of the mountain, unharmed and with my inventory fully intact. I can only assume that this whole scene was supposed to play out and I haven’t yet attempted to go back to the castle (I imagine it wouldn’t end well).

I foresee an ending where Edgar assists me once again

Right, so I’d explored all thirty of the screens available, mapped them in excel, collected everything obvious that I could find, and had 22 points to show for it. Time to start using my brain! After looking at all my items and the various locations on the map, I decided to head all the way back to the shanty. I figured the worm must have something to do with the fishing pole and intended to give it to the fisherman. After he rejected it, I then tried giving him the gold ball, thinking they were short on money. He rejected that too! I then grudgingly gave him the pouch full of diamonds, which he unsurprisingly accepted, responding to the gift by giving me the fishing pole. Worst trade ever if you ask me!

Husband, fetch it yourself you dirty pig!

I tried fishing off the pier after attaching the worm to the hook on the pole, but had no more luck than the fisherman was having. Giving up on that idea, I decided to go back to the pond of frogs to see if I could get myself a prince! On my way there, I was surprised to find a man playing the lute in one of the meadows that had previously been empty. I wonder whether this is just the first example of things occurring on a timer within King’s Quest IV! That would explain why so many of the screens are suspiciously vacant at the beginning of the game. Perhaps things will happen in them only once I’ve completed certain tasks. Anyway, the game described the man’s lute playing as pretty bad, so I offered him the book of Shakespeare to see what would happen. He accepted it, realising his new ambition was to be an actor, and gave me the lute to boot.

Hey, he wasn't there before! Although the vacant stump was suspicious.

I had a bit of a “eureka” moment once I had the lute in my possession, remembering something about Pan (the satyr that plays the flute) being fascinated by music in general. I’ve since looked it up on Wikipedia and apparently Pan had a contest with the lyre playing Apollo to see who was the best, but I guess my thought process was correct. Playing the lute in front of the wandering Pan caused him to stop in his tracks and stare at me in wonder. I offered him the lute which he accepting and gave me the flute in return. I had no idea, and still have no idea, what the flute is for, but I guess that was the right thing to do as Pan never appeared again from this point onwards.

Give me the flute or the lute gets it!

By this point it was getting pretty late, but I wanted to see if I could figure out the pond puzzle before heading to bed. I didn’t expect it to work, but I tried using the fishing pole to catch the frog anyway. It didn’t work! With nothing else in my inventory that might achieve my goal, I tried throwing the gold ball to the frog. I don’t really understand why this worked (perhaps there’s a fairytale that I don’t know or remember), but throwing the gold ball into the pond caused the frog to retrieve it and jump out of the pond to give it to me. I then picked up the frog and kissed it, immediately transferring it into a prince. Amusingly, the prince is horrified that I’m “nothing but a peasant girl!” and bids me good riddance. He did however leave the little gold crown that was on his head, so I took that, and the gold ball, and added them to my inventory.

King's Quest preceded Shrek's fairy tale parodying humour by over a decade!

That’s where I’m at people! Sorry for the longwinded description. These opening posts can be tiresome as I need to describe a high amount of locations and occurrences while trying to keep things interesting for the reader. As it stands right now, I’m enjoying King’s Quest IV quite a bit, but am already starting to wonder what I might try next. It’s certainly not as obvious as a lot of the other Sierra games I’ve played which will make for a decent challenge. As for the technical aspects of the game, there’s no doubt that it’s a step up in the graphics and sound department, and has an overall polish that surpasses anything on the list so far. Only time will tell whether the quality of the game matches the promise of its package!

I really thought this game was supposed to be groundbreaking for women. So far it sees to be prejudiced against them.

Session Time: 3 hours 00 minutes

Total Time: 3 hours 00 minutes