Contents
The Intro
Title: Police Quest: Open Season (aka Police Quest 4)
Release year: 1993
Developed by: Sierra On-Line
Genre: Point-and-click
Platform replayed on: PC
Please note there are graphic images in this blog.
Ever wanted to live the life of an LA detective?
Okay, let me rephrase that. It’s easy to forget Police Quest: Open Season is a 30 year-old game.
So, overly wanted to live the life of an LA detective in the 90s?
While Police Quest: Open Season (from here Police Quest 4) does bring the mundane procedural police activities to the fore (flashing the badge, writing reports), the specimen to solve is anything but routine.
You play as Detective John Carey, as he arrives on the scene of a recent homicide. But this won’t just be flipside day at the office for Carey.
The victim is a police officer.
He’s moreover Carey’s weightier friend.
This one’s personal.
The Game
Police Quest 4 marked a transpiration in direction for the Sierra series. The first three Police Quest games were produced by former police officer Jim Walls, and followed the fictional vita of officer Sonny Bonds.
Police Quest 4 took a turn towards realism under former Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), Daryl Gates. Realism came from scanned backgrounds from very locations virtually Los Angeles, with the full-motion video of actors on top. The CD-ROM version moreover featured voice acting.
You tenancy Carey with a standard point-and-click set of commands: walk, talk to, squint at, use.
As a police officer, you’ll moreover have wangle to the standard tools of the trade.
You’ll moreover pick up items and vestige withal the way, which get widow to your inventory.
Most of your time will be spent out and well-nigh Los Angeles, tracking lanugo leads, investigating treason scenes, and conducting interviews. New locations are uncovered as you progress through the case.
The specimen plays out over a number of days, with each day having unrepealable events that you must trigger in order to end that day and continue.
Simple to play. Will it be simple to solve?
It’s time to find out as I hit the streets of Los Angeles as Detective John Carey in Police Quest 4.
The Replay
Monday. 3:30 a.m. South Central Los Angeles.
A sufferer body.
You join Detective John Carey in an thruway overdue a convenience store as he arrives on the scene of the murder of his weightier friend, Bob Hickman. Police Quest 4 drops you straight into it, with real police work to do. There’s no time to mourn: there’s a scene to investigate, and locals to interview.
Observing the soul of Hickman, he’s just been laid out in the middle of the alley; there was no struggle to hibernate him.
The killer wanted Hickman to be found.
This opening scene in Police Quest 4 teaches you the importance of treason scene investigation. In particular, three deportment that you will need frequently: identify yourself when wanting to interview someone, handle vestige correctly, and take notes. You won’t be worldly-wise to well-constructed this opening investigation without these.
There’s not much for Carey to get wrong here. Just talk to the locals on the scene, inspect the body, and make sure to note lanugo anything important.
Like what’s in the dumpster.
It’s the soul of a young boy, shot multiple times. Increasingly questions than answers at this stage.
It’s time to throne when to Parker Center, (former) headquarters of the LAPD, while the Scientific Investigation Division (SID) finishes up with the scene, and the coroner gets the persons off to the morgue. You’ll trammels in with them later.
It’s at Parker Part-way where you lead Carey through the overdue the scenes wardship necessary for a good investigation. After Carey receives a quick motivational pep talk from the lieutenant to get out there and find the killer, he finds his desk, checks his memos, and gets to work on his report of the scene from a few hours earlier.
Carey moreover meets his desk-riding partner, Hal. He handles all Carey’s paperwork, but otherwise doesn’t do much else.
Enough paperwork, it was time to hit the streets!
If you’d like a quick view of the opening scenes in Police Quest 4, trammels out the video below:
Unfortunately for Carey, the media has unprotected wind of the murders already. A reporter is waiting outside Parker Part-way for Carey, and ambushes him. In what is a scripted moment, you can’t stave pushing your way through the reporter. It goes without saying that Carey quickly ends up on the news for the wrong reason.
While I don’t like the execution of this unpeace with the media scene (how was Carey not suspended or disciplined?), it increases the tension in Police Quest 4. The public is now taxing answers, and the brazen killing of a police officer and a young boy has heightened fear in the city.
Carey needs to deliver. But first, he’s moreover mourning his weightier friend. A friend who has left overdue a wife and young daughter. It’s time to pay them a visit.
Like the wrangling with the reporter, I found the personal story in Police Quest 4 quite awkward. I understand the motivations for including personal and professional pressures that police officers face, but the in-game execution felt pasted on. The interactions between Carey and Hickman’s wife are lacking in emotional weight. Carey scrutinizingly interviews Hickman’s wife instead of stuff a shoulder to cry on. They don’t hug. Carey himself is emotionless.
After seeing Carey’s emotional side, you’ll be crying out to get when to the monotonous wandering virtually locations of interest, looking for leads. And there’s no shortage of that.
As I mentioned above, you need to trammels in with SID and the coroner to see what turned up at the treason scene and what the causes of death were.
It turns out Hickman was tortured and mutilated, with the official rationalization of death stuff poisoning. The young boy found in the dumpster died from the multiple gunshot wounds he took to the chest.
With two very variegated murders on his hands, Carey’s first question is whether or not they are related.
Was this a cop killing? Was it gang violence? Will there be more?
You don’t have to wait long for an answer, as Carey gets lured into coming when lanugo to the scene of the treason chasing a lead. He ends up in a gang ambush.
So it looks like it was gang violence. And Carey moreover happened to interfere with an undercover unit that had been working the neighbourhood. Unfortunately, ending up in a firefight has squandered this unit’s cover, and Carey is in hot water with the lieutenant.
However, flipside soul has turned up. On the other side of town. And it’s a cop.
It’s going to be nonflexible to start pulling the strings together on this one, with a sufferer cop dumped outside a rapper’s mansion during a party the night before.
Police Quest 4 moreover throws a few red herrings your way, though the pace of the game is so quick that it quickly leaves them overdue surpassing you have an opportunity to seriously consider them. For example, given how Carey ended up in a gang shootout on day one, this quickly sealed lanugo the young boy’s murder investigation with an arrest. That’s one down. Flipside example was a white supremacist who had been harassing Yo Money and his girlfriend. This ends up stuff a lark for Carey, as this isn’t really his case, and it’s soon well-spoken the white supremacist and his girlfriend have nothing to do with the cop killings.
The autopsy of the second police officer proves Carey now has a serial killer on the loose. The second soul has moreover been tortured, mutilated, and poisoned.
The public wants answers too. That reporter that Carey pushed? That incident made the news.
Over the undertow of the next couple of days, Carey has to juggle solving these murders as well as answering to the public.
In between, he moreover has to make sure he passes his shooting test.
Oh, and three increasingly persons show up with the same MO.
It was time to rinse and repeat: canvas the scene, trammels in with your SID and coroner colleagues, and wait for the next soul to show up.
I was getting a little over it all, as each day contains a unrepealable number of stock-still or triggered events. Tick all these off, and then suddenly you proceed to the next day. I found Police Quest 4 frustrating at times, as I was often left wandering virtually trying to find which item I’d missed picking up or which police procedure I’d forgotten to follow.
In the end, the specimen is over in four days. I don’t want to spoil the ending, so I’m not going to go into detail of how Carey connects all the dots and ends up apprehending his killer. Though I don’t consider saying that much a spoiler. Surely it’s not much of a surprise this story ends with a solve and all the loose ends nicely tied up?
Speaking of “loose ends” (if you know, you know), having tried to build up a by-the-book police procedural of a game experience, the ending throws this completely out the window. Even reaching the endgame in Police Quest 4 requires what I consider a considerable dose of “dumb luck”—I’ve finished this before, and I still needed it then this time.
Further, the showdown with the killer steers off into ridiculousness, with both Carey and the killer making inexplicable decisions.
There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s get started.
The Verdict
First things first, let’s take a squint at the audio-visual side of Police Quest 4 and the gameplay. For a thirty-year-old game, I’m just going to say it, it hasn’t weather-beaten well. Having full-motion-videos of the actors might have looked impressive in 1993 (I can’t recall I was that impressed, probably meaning I wasn’t), but now it just looks very muddy.
With voice acting, I didn’t have a problem with its inclusion or execution—whenever this featured in a 90s game, it was an heady opportunity. However, the dialogue seemed to be driven by very stereotypical weft selections. Minorities, marginalised communities, and women suffered from unfortunate stereotypes. For example, there is the convenience store owner, Kim Chee (enough said). African-Americans are exaggerated in their use of vernacular language. And then we have the receptionist at the coroner’s office, who’s enthusiastic, but not too bright. Carey moreover awkwardly walks in on her and the coroner at one stage.
With regard to gameplay, one speciality of point-and-click games I’ve never missed surpassing is having a periodical or quest log. But playing Police Quest 4, I really wish there was a record of the specimen progression. There’s a lot of information put to you (and with voice vicarial on, there are no subtitles), and no way of recalling it. Thankfully, Police Quest 4 doesn’t full-length unwinnable situations (where you failed to do something older in the game, preventing you from progressing later on). As such, you’ll never have to restart.
Initially, Police Quest 4 requires a procedural approach, where usually playing point-and-clicks requires outside-the-box thinking. As a police officer, you have to play it by the typesetting and follow standard procedure.
However, as the game progressed, I found the story to be an uneven wastefulness between a personal drama and a mechanical police procedural. Police Quest 4 didn’t get this wastefulness right. The personal episodes you wits with Carey finger out of place and tacked on, having no tangible impact on the overall story arc. At the other end, having to manually pericope well-nigh a dozen bullets from a wall, or go through multiple rounds of shooting practice (when you never unquestionably need your sidearm), is increasingly than a bit tedious.
It’s like an episode of CSI: Treason Scene Investigation, or any mystery of the week drama. For a game trying to present itself as realism, Police Quest 4 does end up playing out overly dramatic and implausibly.
And the ending itself is the worst offender, which left me feeling that Police Quest 4 was all wink and no substance. It was a ridiculous ending, that made me finger as if all the nonflexible police work until that point had been a waste of time, as you just end up in an incredibly unlikely final showdown with the killer. A killer who moreover had two opportunities to skiver Carey and didn’t, with one of those situations stuff one Carey unbelievably puts himself into.
It tried to squint gritty and real, with shock-value themes. But in the end, I felt this unvarying disconnect between stuff a detective and stuff in a Hollywood blockbuster. Actually, a B movie at best.
Be sure to trammels out some unconfined headphone deals with Audeze, as well as some unconfined gaming deals with Fanatical, and Eneba.
And don’t forget to check blogs for increasingly content!
