King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella

King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella from 1988 was a milestone for Sierra in several respects at once – it was the first game to run on the new SCI engine, which brought smoother animation, a day-night cycle, and more elaborate sound, and at the same time the first installment in the series with a playable heroine, Princess Rosella, who sets out to save her dying father King Graham using a magic potion from the enchanted land of Tamir. Her journey takes her, among other places, beneath the surface of the sea, where she must deal with a mermaid – an unusually varied setting for adventures of that time – and further into darker corners of the realm, where the evil Lolotte and her servants lie in wait.

The gameplay sticks to the formula of previous installments – arrow-key movement, a text parser for interaction, and plenty of puzzles built around collecting and combining items – but the world is visually richer and more atmospheric, with a good fairy, the evil witch Lolotte, and a mermaid as key characters in the side plotlines. The day-night cycle also changes the behavior of some enemies and opens up different paths through the game, an unusual dynamic layer for an adventure of this type in 1988 that gave the experience a distinct sense of passing time. The game also introduced more elaborate character animations and smoother transitions between scenes, which made the world of Tamir feel more alive than the flat locations of previous installments.

King's Quest IV is often ranked among the highlights of the series' early era thanks to the combination of a stronger story, a playable female heroine, and technical improvements from the SCI engine, which Sierra later used in its other adventure games as well, including later King's Quest installments and other series of its own. Even years later, the game shows well how quickly the graphic adventure genre evolved in the second half of the 1980s, and fans of classic Sierra games still rank it among the titles worth rediscovering.

Why play: The combination of a stronger story, playable heroine Rosella, and technical improvements from the SCI engine makes King's Quest IV one of the highlights of the series' early era, well worth rediscovering.