Revisiting Sierra’s King’s Quest Series: Part 4 – The Perils of Rosella Retold

Head back to Part 3 – To Heir is Human Redux

Well, King’s Quest 4: you’re up. I’ll be honest, I’ve been putting this one off. The other games in the series are simply the better play. Unfortunately, I think the fourth game suffers from Roberta Williams and co. experimenting with their new game engine, Sierra Creative Interpreter (or SCI) and the broader technological advances at the time. The Perils of Rosella also doesn’t hit me in the nostalgia like the other games, I never really played it back in the day. I did play the originals early on and I played the VGA remakes of 1-3 on release in the 2000s when AGD Interactive still called themselves Tierra. But the nostalgia really starts to hit for me in the fifth and sixth games. I’m committed to playing them all so here goes with number four…

King’s Quest 4 was released in 1988 by Sierra On-Line and sticks to the same text-parser format as the original three games. The shift to the SCI engine brings sharper detail, better animation and for the time it had some genuinely impressive presentation. I do wish it received the same fan-remake VGA treatment the earlier titles got, but every fan-made project unfortunately ran into major setbacks (both personal and professional) and never released. But thankfully, we do have the Retold version of the game. Developed in Adventure Game Studio by user DrSlash, it modernises the game with a point-and-click interface and becomes far more enjoyable. I’ve finished my fair share of text-parsers, but it’s clear they’re just not for me.

The core story is very much King’s Quest. We follow Princess Rosella as she races to save her dying father, King Graham. Through the ever convenient Magic Mirror, the ‘good fairy’ Genesta from the far away land of Tamir offers Rosella a deal. Rosella’s help in exchange for a magic fruit to save her father. After taking on this opportunity, which sounds to me like ‘I’ve got magic fruit, get in the mirror’, Rosella agrees while paying little attention to the fine print. After being whisked away to the land of Tamir, Rosella learns that Genesta is also near death as the evil fairy Lolette has stolen her magic talisman. Without it, she will die within 24 hours. Conveniently without the talisman, Genesta is unable to send Rosella back to Daventry either. Disguised as a peasant, Rosella searches for both the magical fruit and the fairy’s talisman but is captured by Lolette and forced to complete three dangerous tasks to fuel her dark power. Rosella escapes with help from Lolette’s kind-hearted son, Edgar. Rosella inevitably defeats Lolette, restores Genesta’s power and returns home, fruit in hand, just in the nick of time. The story I feel is fine, but the writing really feels like it’s secondary to Sierra showing off their new engine. Some of Rosella’s actions and behaviours don’t make sense either. For example, this a princess who casually resorts to grave-robbing in a foreign land. I get she’s disguised as a peasant, but this is hardly a shining example of diplomatic finesse.

There’s an obvious step forward graphically with the SCI engine, it undeniably looks better than the first three games. The added detail, smoother animations and sharper backgrounds made it feel like Sierra had some serious horsepower to work with at the time. The engine was tweaked over the years and adapted to many other Sierra titles through to the mid ’90s. If you were lucky enough to own a dedicated sound card, The Perils of Rosella was the first King’s Quest game to support it which was huge at the time. The difference between simple beeps and boops from the PC Speaker and actual music and sound effects was a massive jump. Sierra clearly wanted to push the technology as far as they could, while it may not hold up as well today it’s still easy to appreciate the effort and ambition. Unfortunately, the story and puzzles clearly suffered for it and we were still stuck with a text-parser interface. We also got to experience some masterful game logic, like the cave puzzle where Rosella crosses a chasm with a single plank of wood that likely wouldn’t handle a slight breeze let alone the Princess of Daventry. Even with those mind-boggling moments, there’s no denying this was a major technical leap forward for the series.

The Retold version of the game definitely makes it more playable, for me at least. You still get the SCI visuals, but with a King’s Quest 5-esque point-and-click interface that feels much more natural. Like the original three, there’s no voice acting. But the music and sound are much improved and the engine overall feels a lot less clunky. I’ve seen plenty of people call The Perils of Rosella a “masterpiece” and while I could agree in a technological sense for the time, the writing really doesn’t hold up. Rosella has just survived nearly being sacrificed to a dragon, then immediately takes a mysterious fairy up on a deal with no attention to the finer details. From there, her behaviour only becomes more questionable. She tries her hand at grave-robbing in Tamir, which kinda makes you wonder how Daventry handles international relations. She steals from the Seven Dwarfs and even kidnaps a unicorn, a literal symbol of purity, only to hand it over to a cackling, evil fairy. Yes, swiping items is a staple in any adventure game, but still Rosella seems to help herself to anything not nailed down. She swipes a hen that lays golden eggs, breaks into a crypt to steal Pandora’s Box and almost hands it to the evil fairy on a platter. Sure, some of her actions may be justified. But, Rosella leaves behind a clear trail of morally grey decisions which unintentionally paint her as one of the more chaotic heroes in the series.

King’s Quest 4 is a weird entry in the series. It’s an important game, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. But, not for the story. The ending absolutely matters, sure, but everything in the lead-up feels oddly inconsequential. It did help push the series into a new era and you can feel Sierra leaning HARD to the future with its visuals, animation and sound. Unfortunately, the same thing that pushes them forward ends up holding them back. The technical leaps overshadow almost everything else, especially the writing which just isn’t up to standard. It’s hard not to compare it, unfavourably, to the AGD Interactive remakes which really are the benchmark, after King’s Quest 6 of course. Rosella’s story has all the right elements for a classic King’s Quest adventure, but I feel they blew the execution. Rosella’s behaviour swings from heroic to morally questionable depending on what problem she needs to solve. The fan-made Retold version absolutely helps modernise the experience and I think it makes it much easier to appreciate the game’s strengths. Even then, it’s hard not to see the The Perils of Rosella as more of a technological milestone than good storytelling. I’m glad I ticked it off the list and I do respect what it accomplished for the series. But looking at the rest of the lineup, King’s Quest 4 slots itself in as the undisputed worst in series.