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, ever 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 case 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 another day at the office for Carey.
The victim is a police officer.
He’s also Carey’s best friend.
This one’s personal.
The Game
Police Quest 4 marked a change in direction for the Sierra series. The first three Police Quest games were produced by former police officer Jim Walls, and followed the fictional adventures 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 actual locations around Los Angeles, with the full-motion video of actors on top. The CD-ROM version also featured voice acting.
You control Carey with a standard point-and-click set of commands: walk, talk to, look at, use.
As a police officer, you’ll also have access to the standard tools of the trade.
You’ll also pick up items and evidence along the way, which get added to your inventory.
Most of your time will be spent out and about Los Angeles, tracking down leads, investigating crime scenes, and conducting interviews. New locations are uncovered as you progress through the case.
The case plays out over a number of days, with each day having certain 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 dead body.
You join Detective John Carey in an alley behind a convenience store as he arrives on the scene of the murder of his best 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 body of Hickman, he’s just been laid out in the middle of the alley; there was no attempt to hide him.
The killer wanted Hickman to be found.
This opening scene in Police Quest 4 teaches you the importance of crime scene investigation. In particular, three actions that you will need frequently: identify yourself when wanting to interview someone, handle evidence correctly, and take notes. You won’t be able to complete 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 down anything important.
Like what’s in the dumpster.
It’s the body of a young boy, shot multiple times. More questions than answers at this stage.
It’s time to head back to Parker Center, (former) headquarters of the LAPD, while the Scientific Investigation Division (SID) finishes up with the scene, and the coroner gets the bodies off to the morgue. You’ll check in with them later.
It’s at Parker Center where you lead Carey through the behind the scenes administration 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 also 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, check out the video below:
Unfortunately for Carey, the media has caught wind of the murders already. A reporter is waiting outside Parker Center for Carey, and ambushes him. In what is a scripted moment, you can’t avoid 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 clash with the media scene (how was Carey not suspended or disciplined?), it increases the tension in Police Quest 4. The public is now demanding 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 also mourning his best friend. A friend who has left behind a wife and young daughter. It’s time to pay them a visit.
Like the altercation 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 almost interviews Hickman’s wife instead of being 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 back to the monotonous wandering around locations of interest, looking for leads. And there’s no shortage of that.
As I mentioned above, you need to check in with SID and the coroner to see what turned up at the crime scene and what the causes of death were.
It turns out Hickman was tortured and mutilated, with the official cause of death being poisoning. The young boy found in the dumpster died from the multiple gunshot wounds he took to the chest.
With two very different 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 back down to the scene of the crime chasing a lead. He ends up in a gang ambush.
So it looks like it was gang violence. And Carey also happened to interfere with an undercover unit that had been working the neighbourhood. Unfortunately, ending up in a firefight has blown this unit’s cover, and Carey is in hot water with the lieutenant.
However, another body has turned up. On the other side of town. And it’s a cop.
It’s going to be hard to start pulling the strings together on this one, with a dead cop dumped outside a rapper’s mansion during a party the night before.
Police Quest 4 also throws a few red herrings your way, though the pace of the game is so quick that it quickly leaves them behind before you have an opportunity to seriously consider them. For example, given how Carey ended up in a gang shootout on day one, this quickly closed down the young boy’s murder investigation with an arrest. That’s one down. Another example was a white supremacist who had been harassing Yo Money and his girlfriend. This ends up being a distraction for Carey, as this isn’t really his case, and it’s soon clear 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 body has also been tortured, mutilated, and poisoned.
The public wants answers too. That reporter that Carey pushed? That incident made the news.
Over the course of the next couple of days, Carey has to juggle solving these murders as well as answering to the public.
In between, he also has to make sure he passes his shooting test.
Oh, and three more bodies show up with the same MO.
It was time to rinse and repeat: canvas the scene, check in with your SID and coroner colleagues, and wait for the next body to show up.
I was getting a little over it all, as each day contains a certain number of fixed 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 around trying to find which item I’d missed picking up or which police procedure I’d forgotten to follow.
In the end, the case 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 again 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 look 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 aged 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 exciting opportunity. However, the dialogue seemed to be driven by very stereotypical character 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 also awkwardly walks in on her and the coroner at one stage.
With regard to gameplay, one aspect of point-and-click games I’ve never missed before is having a journal or quest log. But playing Police Quest 4, I really wish there was a record of the case progression. There’s a lot of information put to you (and with voice acting on, there are no subtitles), and no way of recalling it. Thankfully, Police Quest 4 doesn’t feature unwinnable situations (where you failed to do something earlier 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 book and follow standard procedure.
However, as the game progressed, I found the story to be an uneven balance between a personal drama and a mechanical police procedural. Police Quest 4 didn’t get this balance right. The personal episodes you experience with Carey feel out of place and tacked on, having no tangible impact on the overall story arc. At the other end, having to manually extract about a dozen bullets from a wall, or go through multiple rounds of shooting practice (when you never actually need your sidearm), is more than a bit tedious.
It’s like an episode of CSI: Crime 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 flash and no substance. It was a ridiculous ending, that made me feel as if all the hard 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 also had two opportunities to kill Carey and didn’t, with one of those situations being one Carey unbelievably puts himself into.
It tried to look gritty and real, with shock-value themes. But in the end, I felt this constant disconnect between being a detective and being in a Hollywood blockbuster. Actually, a B movie at best.
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