When I've not been playing Atelier Firis — which, after what I wrote yesterday, I'm now starting to trigger ending flags for, so not much longer, I don't think! — I've been dipping into the fourth Police Quest game, Police Quest: Open Season. I'd been holding off on this one for a few reasons — primarily the fact that it stands somewhat apart from the previous three games, but also because I know it's not as well regarded as the rest of the series.
In true Pete tradition, I'm actually having a very enjoyable time with it so far. I find it quite interesting that despite it arguably being a bit more "realistic" than the Sonny Bonds adventures, it feels a bit more like a conventional adventure game. Yes, there's still a lot of having to make sure you follow proper police procedure — your notebook gets more use than pretty much any other inventory item in any other game, I reckon — but there's also a strong sense that the game wants you to "solve" it as a puzzle, if that makes sense.
Part of this comes from the fact that unlike previous Police Quest games, there don't appear to be too many opportunities to miss optional things; for the most part, the game's narrative and in-game time doesn't advance until you've done everything that you need to. Sure, you might have missed a few points here and there by not looking at absolutely everything or whatever, but I suspect in Open Season the difference between the minimum possible score and the maximum is considerably smaller than something like Police Quest II.
I was concerned that the game wouldn't have quite the same feel by lacking Sonny Bonds in the leading role, as well as the established cast of characters that had been built up around him over the course of his three games. But I've been pleasantly surprised so far; protagonist John doesn't have a ton of personality to him, but the people he interacts with are all interesting and colourful.
And while, for the most part, there's a definite sense that the game wants to feel more like a police procedural TV show than a somewhat exaggerated animated movie, there are definitely a few characters in there just for shits and giggles — and the Sierra snarky narrator is definitely present and correct.
Police Quest: Open Season is actually the first full "talkie" in the series, but I actually found myself switching the speech off pretty quickly; there are no subtitles while speech is turned on, for some reason, and that can make some lines of dialogue a little hard to parse given the fairly low sound quality they were recorded at — particularly if street slang, dialect and accents start to get involved. Besides, something just feels "right" about playing adventure games with text-only dialogue — tell that to '90s Pete, who was massively excited about playing any CD-ROM version of a favourite adventure!
Anyway, I'm onto the game's second "day" so far — I think there's five? — and enjoying myself so far. There will, of course, be a writeup on Retrounite when I've beaten it to go along with the previous Police Quest games I've covered — if you happen to have missed those articles, here are some handy links for you to go enjoy!
https://retrounite.wordpress.com/police-quest-and-the-art-of-procedural-puzzling/
https://retrounite.wordpress.com/police-quest-ii-investigation-is-its-own-reward/
https://retrounite.wordpress.com/police-quest-iii-a-thoroughly-compelling-mess/
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