- Developed by: Sierra Online
- Published by: Sierra Online
- Released: 1993
- Reviewed by: Stoo
- Review written: Feb 2009
A grisly start.
You'll be coming back here to the morgue a lot.
Standing back a minute and thinking about it, Police Quest is a slightly ridiculous title for a game. It invokes images of a constable carrying a broadsword and venturing into a castle alongside some doughty dwarves, looking for treasure and a captured princess. Still I suppose Sierra called almost everything Quest, back when they were the ones inventing the graphical adventure genre in first place.
The PQ series was originally created by veteran cop Jim Walls, and followed the career of officer Sonny Bonds in a fictional small town. The emphasis was on a realistic depiction of police work. So you had situations adventures like chasing speeding motorists and dealing with rowdy bikers, leading to work in homicide investigations and narcotics Sonny's career progressed. Throughout you were expected to follow proper procedure - reading crooks their rights, booking them in under the right code, carefully hunting for evidence at murder scenes, doing research back at base and so on. And not just kicking down a drug dealer's door and shooting him in the head.
The formula didn't always work mind you, and sometimes the games could get tedious. Still, between us here we picked up a bit of a soft spot for the series. So, with me having covered the original (or VGA remake at least) a few years ago, we decided it was time to look at the rest. Rik set off with the next couple, covering the adventures of a promoted Sonny.
Now it's my turn again, looking at Open Season. Walls was no longer writing, and with him he took Sonny, Lytton and pics of himself in a tight uniform. So now we have a new character in the form of Detective Carey, working in the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles. At the helm of the project is Darryl F Gates, who was in fact chief of the real-life LAPD from 1978-1992. I'm not sure what his specific role was - the blurb just says "created by". So I'd guess he didn't write the specifics of the story the same way Walls did the first ones, but I'm sure he was heavily involved the overall structure.
He's a bit of a controversial figure - this is the guy who's career ended with the Rodney King riots. Looks like there were some questions over heavy handed treatment of gang members and... he once said casual drug use is treason. However this isn't a political site and I'm not claiming to be well-informed on his history.
So let's move on and do the obligatory "graphics bit". It's powered by Sierra's SCI parser, which had been standard prodecure since about 1992. The hand-drawn art of before has been replaced with digitised photographs for all the locations. What's more, apparently that's the real Parker center in LA that you're based in. Character sprites meanwhile are also based on recorded images of actors. They do suffer a bit from the low resolution and 256 colour pallette - Carey's shoes end up the same colour as his suit (nice shade of brown).
It's definitely not a style that's aged as well as the cartoony look that was becoming popular at the time. But then we wouldn't really expect cartoony for a story of this nature. At any rate, it's not offensively bad. One other improvement is dropping the old habit of drawing some locations in a window; they're now all fullscreen. If the game wants a tighter focus, it instead uses larger sprites, which I believe was a new feature for SCI.
The game kicks off to a pretty grim start, with a murder scene in South Central. Well, those are what Carey is supposed to look at for a living. Except it's the murder of an old friend of his, a fellow cop. To make matters worse, you pretty quickly find the body of a dead child in a nearby dumpster. As the game progresses, the killer strikes several more times. So we can quickly establish that this is going to be a dark and graphic business. I once likened the first Police Quest to an undemanding early 90s cop show; Rik felt at times he was watching an educational safety video. This however is much more post-watershed material. There's not actually much in the way of blood and guts onscreen. However the murderer you're chasing is a pretty sick individual and you're told in pretty great detail about how he's mutilated the victims. Oh and along the way you'll visit a neo-nazi and a strip club.
Anyway that first scene requires you to be quite thorough. You have to draw little chalk lines, get the SID officer to take pics, talk to the officers who first responded, and also question the shifty guys hanging around. You also take lots of notes, basically by clicking notebook on anyone and everything in sight. From here the rest of the game aims to continue as a realistic, by the book, investigation. That means trailing around the city talking to people, taking notes and picking up (potentially hidden) items. Also reporting back to base a lot to hand in potential clues to the experts and learn if any new information has arisen. Also to fill forms, hand them into your eternally deskbound partner, and occasionally use the firing range.
The events of the game take place over several days. Once you've discovered everything you're supposed to, some sort of plot-advancing event occurs that's usually a bit more dramatic than all the walking around. It might involve arresting a suspect, or a run in with reporters. The next day you should go see what forensic tests and autopsies have uncovered, and you're invariably told of another murder as well. Then it's back out into LA hopefully with something new to investigate.
The procedural stuff in of itself isn't as onorous as the series' reputation sometimes suggests. Rather than having to take specific correct actions in response to a situation, usually it's just a case of being observant and thorough. Click talk, look and notebook on everything in sight. Occasionally look stuff up on department PC. The admin details are a bit of a chore, but ultimately just a few clicks work.
Also you can't usually do anything wrong enough to either get a "GAME OVER", outside of "danger" situations (see below) or obviously inappropriate actions (the morgue assisstant is annoying but resist the urge to pull your gun on her). Perhaps even more importantly you can't get yourself in the kind of unwinnable situation that leaves you to blunder on in a futile manner for another half an hour. I tended to be paranoid of both situations in older sierra games, so the more forgiving approach is welcome.
What can be annoying is that sometimes a new item or event appears in a location you've already visited, but without any kind of announcement. Without even knowing you should be looking for it, you can only hit it by luck or a systematic search once you've run out of things to do. One example is receiving a phone call at your desk; I could only stumble across it when I returned to the office for a lack of better ideas. Another is an essential item, that turned up in a location that had last yielded something useful much earlier in the game and since then been irrelevant. And thus again i only really found it out of a blind search. Again though, the bright side is that the game won't let you miss that something and get stuck later on; the narrative is firmly paused until you stumble across it.
Apart from constant searches and questioning, there are some more immediate-action kind of moments - a couple of which constitute the few "use the otter on the pineapple" type actions we used to associate with adventures. Other times though it's just a case of having the quick wits to click gun (draw weapon), talk (hands in the air!), cuffs etc. Too slow in that situation and you'll end up stabbed. Oh and there's an actual shootout at one point, to justify those trips to the range. Any "dangerous" situation is always pretty clearly signposted though.
Anyway, over the course of events a reasonably competent thriller of a story arises. You do feel like you're getting an idea of what the killer is up to, along with the frustration of not knowing enough and the building pressure as more mutilated corpses are found. Eventually the clues build up towards pointing at a likely suspect, and there's a sense of satisfaction in feeling you're finally getting somewhere. There are a few oddities though; at one point you get a weird dream sequence, and events seem to heavily imply Carey has been drugged beforehand. Yet afterwards he just walks off without even challenging the person responsible or mentioning the event again. I think it was trying to be disturbing and surreal or something.
Carey himself is a weakness though. Sonny Bonds maybe didn't have a great amount of depth, but he was still likeable enough in his reliable side-parting manner. This guy though has little discernable personality. At one point his lieutenat chews out a colleague for visiting a bar in uniform, instead of showing any sympathy Carey just declares he admires the boss for being by-the-book. Which just made me think "what a jerk". There are one or two points where he does become more animated, snapping at colleagues. Which is great and makes sense. News reports are making people scared, the lieutenant is demanding results, and you've been hauled before city authorities to debrief them on progress, or lack of. Of course he'd be stressed. It's just that the sudden bursts of emotion seem so at odds with his usual dialogue. Given that he's supposed to be a proper character, and not a blank avatar for the player (as in say Quest for Glory), I really wanted to get more inside his head.
The game's tone might raise a few eyebrows also. Most of the black characters you meet are pretty negative; drunks and gangstas hanging around South Central, and a rapper out for publicity. Meanwhile the narration speaks in stern tones about a convenience store exploiting the poor with booze and unhealthy food, and it's staffed by a "me no speak good engrish" asian woman. Oh and there's an outrageously camp gay guy. Again I don't want to get too political, but this did bug me. Obviously lots of people matching the above stereotypes do exist in real life. Still do the police need to all be so white? Couldn't we have had a young black guy actually prove positive or helpful?
Oh, but before I wrap up, here's one point for us all to applaud: no sodding driving. Maybe the earlier games had a reason to attempt driving sequences what with Sonny being (at some points in his career) a uniformed cop on the beat, but the implementation usually had us spewing vile curses at Sierra. Here though, you just click a spot on the map.
So then another Police Quest, another moderately enthusiastic score. Open Season doesn't get enough right to be classified as a really essential adventure. Still if you want a gritty and authentic feeling experience, this one will serve you well. You might miss Sonny, but after three games of his small-town adventures i think the change of pace is quite welcome. It's not the compelling drama it could have been, but it's involving enough to keep you occupied for a weekend.
A missed opportunity for a lengthy monologue on the nature of the criminal mind.
The actual real life candy machine in the actual real life Parker Center!
Requirements: Dosbox, as ever.
Availability: A compilation of the series was in shops just a couple of years ago.