King's Quest: The Perils of Rosella

The fourth instalment in the King’s Quest series feels like a natural follow-up to its predecessor. If King’s Quest III made former protagonist King Graham’s son Alexander its playable character, it makes perfect sense for King’s Quest IV to focus on his daughter, Princess Rosella, introduced at the very end of the previous game in which she's rescued from a three-headed, fire-breathing dragon by her long-lost twin brother.

Indeed, it’s such a no-brainer for the focus to move to Rosella, that The Perils of Rosella literally picks up seconds after the previous game’s conclusion, with Graham deciding to give up his adventurer’s cap (a symbol of his glory days) and pass it onto his children, flinging it through the air towards them as his wife Valanice looks on.

The twins reach up to snatch it from the air, when all of a sudden Graham grabs his chest and lurches over in pain, the victim of an apparent heart attack. He’s taken to his bedchamber, and overcome with grief, Rosella flees back into the throne room, where a voice from the magic mirror tells her there might be a way to save him. In the glass, Rosella can see a beautiful fairy, who tells her of a magical fruit in the faraway land of Tamir which could restore her father to full heath.

But there are some conditions, and the fairy doesn’t have time to explain them now – Rosella has only seconds to decide whether to be magically transported to Tamir or not. Obviously, she says yes, and moments later she’s standing on a lonely shore.

From the sea flies the fairy, who introduces herself as Genesta and explains the full scope of the situation. The previous day, her magical talisman was stolen from around her neck by another fairy known as Lolotte, the evil to Genesta’s good, who lives in the mountains to the east. Without the talisman's power, Genesta is dying, and she no longer has the ability to return Rosella home: this was a one-way trip. If she ever wants to see her family again, she’ll have to find a way to infiltrate Lolotte’s citadel and retrieve the talisman.

Oh, and she only has twenty-four hours to do so. Genesta is fading quickly, and doesn’t think she’ll live to see another day.

As for the healing fruit, Genesta knows little about it beyond the fact it grows on a tiny tree in the midst of a vast swamp on the other side of the mountains.

Naturally, a lot of questions arise from this scenario. If her powers are waning, how did Genesta manage to hear Rosella through the magic mirror from another country? And at precisely the same moment Rosella was weeping over her father in the throne room? With specific knowledge of the magic fruit that effectively coaxes Rosella into travelling to Tamir, no less.

And isn’t it convenient that she has enough power to transport Rosella to Tamir, but not back again? A little too convenient some might say. If her powers are waning by the second, how did she have the strength to fly across the ocean to speak to Rosella? Or bring her there in the first place? Shouldn’t she be more careful with her talisman if losing it leads to her death? Why are powerful beings still funneling their life force into bits of jewellery? Did we learn nothing from Sauron?

On that note, how did Lolotte manage to steal the talisman in the first place? Did she just run up and snatch it, like it was some run-of-the-mill mugging? And at the end of the game, Genesta is well-aware of another important character's contribution to the plot and how he helped Rosella complete her quest – you’d think with that level of omniscience, Genesta would have known not to go walking in the woods that day.

So many questions. But the premise remains: that Rosella has twenty-four hours to find the fruit that will save her father’s life, and to penetrate Lolotte’s domain in order to find Genesta’s talisman and return it to her. As a final favour before she leaves, Genesta disguises Rosella as a peasant girl, which leads to the iconic braids and red dress Rosella wears throughout the game (yeah, Genesta’s powers and what they’re capable of are incredibly arbitrary). Is a peasant girl somehow less of a threat than a princess? Not sure, but it’s a reasonably effective disguise, enough to make Lolotte doubt that she’s truly Genesta’s agent when the two characters eventually come face-to-face.

Then the textbox at the end of the introduction says: “Well, you’re on your own, Rosella” and the game begins.

The quest to find the magic fruit is fairly straightforward: Rosella has to gather the tools she needs to traverse a cave network through the mountains and then a swamp on the other side, in order to pluck the fruit itself from its tree. This can be achieved at any point during the game, and almost comes across as a side-quest in comparison to the more complex Homeward Journey narrative.

Unlike her brother, whose journey home was a physical one, involving the crossing of oceans and mountain ranges, Rosella’s objective is to get close to Lolotte (and the talisman) by earning her trust. It’s actually quite easy to approach Lolotte for the first time: the player merely has to climb the first few steps up the mountain path that leads to her fortress, and Lolotte’s goons (think flying monkeys but with bat wings and skull faces) will swoop down and carry Rosella off to the fairy’s throne room.

She’s initially thrown into a dungeon cell, having been identified as a spy for Genesta, but is soon released and brought back to Lolotte. The fairy tells her that her son Edgar (who has been witness to this entire exchange from beside Lolotte’s throne) has taken a liking to Rosella, and so Lolotte is prepared to give the “peasant girl” a chance to prove her loyalty.

This manifests as a threefold set of tasks: to bring Lolotte the unicorn that roams the meadowlands, the hen that lays golden eggs, and finally Pandora’s Box. If she achieves these things, Lolotte will set her free, and bestow upon Rosella a great reward.

Yeah, it’s a little difficult to get your head around the logic and motivations of this, from both characters. If Rosella is a spy, why barter with her? If Genesta is close to death, why does it even matter? And from Rosella’s perspective – why help Lolotte? Why not try to get into the castle some other way? The mechanics of the game make this impossible (if you attempt to gain access to Lolotte's castle before completing any of the tasks she's set you, the goons will simply pick you up and deposit you back at the base of the mountain) rendering the fulfilment of Lolotte’s demands a But Thou Must situation. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but you have to do her bidding to finish the game.

I suppose on some level, you can say the entire thing is designed to win Lolotte’s trust and hopefully get closer to her (and the talisman). Sure, that works. In any case, it’s not a particularly tight plot, but high emotional stakes are baked into story. In an interview, designer/creator Roberta Williams mentions that word got out King Graham might die during the course of this game, leading to fans writing in and asking her to spare him – so clearly, an emotional investment was there.

Even Genesta, who we have less reason to care about, is tied to Graham’s fate, as without her, Rosella cannot get home to administer the fruit to her father. You’re saving two lives in a single quest, which is incentive enough, even if the moving parts of the paper-thin plot can grate a little.

But of course, as a child I didn’t care about any of this. The whole thing is an Excuse Plot to transport Rosella into a new realm and to give the player a chance to explore it. And also as a child, I was ignorant as to just how special this game was – specifically that it showcased a female lead navigating an adventure in an immersive fantasy world completely on her own.

For the record, Rosella was not the first playable female character in a computer game. That honour goes to the mother kangaroo in the arcade game Kangaroo, which was released in 1982, or Billie Sue from Atari’s Wabbit which was released that same year. But – and let me chose my words carefully here – Princess Rosella was the first female protagonist in an adventure computer game, debuting in 1988. This sort of milestone isn’t something you grasp or even think about when you’re little. You’re just playing a game, and children are fairly renowned for taking things for granted.

It wasn’t until years later and getting up to speed with the importance of inclusion and representation and diversity and so on (concepts that simply didn’t exist, at least not in mainstream discussion, back in the eighties) that I realized just how major The Perils of Rosella was – all the more so for not being treated as a big deal.

Replaying it as an adult, I’m hugely grateful that it was part of my childhood, and cognizant now of the subconscious effect it may have had on me: I had a game that provided me with an imaginary virtual space that I could navigate by projecting upon a girl character; one which allowed me to be the heroine of a fantasy story that in many ways was very female-coded.

It wasn’t just Rosella herself as a protagonist, but the fact that the main villain and the Big Good are also women: Genesta and Lolotte, who are clearly modelled on Glinda the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz (down to the latter’s green skin and the fact she literally yells “I’m melting... melting!” if Rosella successfully kills her at the climax of the game).

There are also more female characters in periphery roles than in any of the other games so far: the fisherman’s wife, the ogress, the three crones, the fairies, the broken-hearted ghost of the young woman in the manor... many of which have distinct characterization despite their limited screentime.

And much like the Wachowskis described Jupiter Ascending as a “female power fantasy,” which unashamedly showered its female protagonist with stunning outfits, hot love interests, and assurances that she was the most important person in the entire universe, there are elements of The Perils of Rosella that seem designed to cater to girls specifically (not that boys can’t enjoy them too). You’re a princess in disguise! A beautiful fairy needs your help! You get to ride a unicorn! And a dolphin! A monstrous beast (who is actually a handsome prince) falls in love with you and defies his upbringing to help you! Fairies! Lots of them!

Roberta Williams had some interesting things to say about Rosella: that she had to walk and fall differently from the male characters, and that “having the woman die bothered me more than I expected.” She also credits the game as the inspiration for the Laura Bow mysteries, stating: “I was on a roll with Rosella as the female lead in King’s Quest IV; my next game had to try this again, but with a different theme. The night scenes in King’s Quest IV pointed the way: The Colonel’s Bequest had to be one of those wonderful murder-mystery classics.”

Rather poignantly, she also stated: “I knew the female lead is just fine for women and girls who play the game, but I wasn’t sure how it would go over with some of the men. And you know what? It wasn’t as controversial as I expected.” Apparently, everyone handled it just fine. The world didn’t end because men had to play as a female character. 

It’s kind of a sad indictment of how the culture wars have affected everyone’s ability to just enjoy things at face value without accusing them of having an agenda, as you only need to look at the dire state of the gaming world these days and its hostility toward women to recognize the bittersweetness of Roberta Williams’s observations back in the eighties.

I’m getting off-track, and one day I’d like to speak further about the perceived “right and wrong” way to include minorities in fiction (till then, this thread is food for thought) but for now, let’s just acknowledge the fact that Princess Rosella was more of a big deal than anyone gave her credit for at the time. A stealth feminist icon and stepping stone toward more female representation in gaming that most people don’t even know about, who went from a quintessential damsel in distress to headlining her own adventure.

I was unaware as a child just how special this was: a girl on her own in a fantasy land designed especially for her.

With that in mind, I’m left wondering just how much of the game was informed by the fact Rosella was a female character. Obviously, Rosella herself is very feminine. She spends the entire game with long fair braids and an equally long dress, and her walk cycle and way of falling and swimming looks different from how Graham and Gwydion did such things.

But one of the puzzles involves you having to clean the house of the seven dwarfs, which could be construed as a very gendered task (that said, Gwydion had to do a lot of housework for Manannan in the previous game, and in adapting the story of the seven dwarfs for this game, you’re naturally following in the footsteps of Snow White by tidying up the place).

Then there’s the taming of the unicorn, something which traditionally can only be achieved by virgin girls, and not something that’s easy to picture with either Graham or Gwydion as the game’s protagonist. 

The game is also tinged with some romance. Not just Rosella kissing the frog prince in order to change him back into a human (though with a funny twist on expectations) but with the character of Edgar, Lolotte’s son, who falls in love with Rosella at first sight and attempts to help her – first by advocating her innocence to his mother, and later in giving her the means to escape the locked room in Lolotte’s tower. More on him later.

And perhaps it’s just me, but there’s more of a Fetch Quest quality to The Perils of Rosella than in prior games. Yes, they've involved acts of kindness being rewarded. But here, Rosella must perform many acts of service for other people in order to move forward (it’s an interesting comparison to Graham in the first two games, who would often get more points simply for taking a more merciful approach to foes instead of resorting to violence).

Rosella has to clean the dwarfs’ house. She gives a pouch of diamonds to the fisherfolk. She saves the frog prince. She gives the minstrel a new lease on life. She puts the ghosts of the manor house to rest.

Heck, the game in its entirety is trying to save two lives: that of her father and of Genesta; a noble but rather more passive mission than Graham’s “find three treasures to becoming king” and Gwydion’s “escape captivity and save a princess.” 

With that in mind, there’s a nasty subversion to the whole “help people to get ahead” mentality in that most of the gameplay requires Rosella to help Lolotte by bringing her two innocent creatures and the source of all evil in the world (which Lolotte specifically states will help her rule the world). There’s a murky moral conundrum there: how much can you assist in an individual’s evil plans to get a chance to serve the greater good before the risk becomes too great? If Rosella had failed in her quest to get the talisman back, she would have left the world a much darker place than if she’d never tried at all.

All this is me speculating for the fun of it. Despite everything I’ve mentioned, nothing in the wider scope of the game feels hugely gendered, and in fact, a lot of the most gripping or terrifying moments have nothing whatsoever to do with Rosella being a girl: searching a haunted house, traversing a forest of living trees, digging in a zombie-infested graveyard, getting swallowed by a whale, escaping a man-eating ogre... this is pretty intense – and entirely gender-neutral – stuff.

In short, The Perils of Rosella manages a perfect balance between overtly feminine content, and straightforward adventure.

***

I was looking forward to replaying and reviewing this game for a particular reason: unlike its predecessors, I was under the impression there was only one version of it. No fan remakes or official updates, which makes for a much easier write-up. Or does it?

Turns out, there are actually two versions of this game: one that uses the AGI (Adventure Game Interpreter) engine, and the other the SCI (Sierra Creative Interpreter). As it turns out, this game ended up being the turning point for the two technologies – the former engine was used in all of Sierra’s games up until this point, and the latter used in all the ones afterwards. These days, the AGI version is hard to come by as it was withdrawn due to low sales, and only released in the first place because the company feared that their consumers wouldn’t have the computer technology required to play the higher-quality version.

In this they were wrong, and it was the SCI release that ended up being a hit. It was also the version that I played in anticipation of this review, though I was one of the few that grew up with the AGI version.

The differences between the two are miniscule and mostly to be found in the graphics: slightly different looking sprites, fonts and range of colour. The game’s introduction is a good example of the visual differences between the games; not only the font, but the detail of the image and the fineness of the lines:

The SCI engine also allowed for the gameplay to “freeze” whenever the player typed in a command, which was helpful if you had to do something quickly and weren’t a fast typer (there’s one particular puzzle in which you enter a house and are attacked by a giant bulldog – to save yourself you have to throw it a bone, and there’s almost no chance of typing this out quickly enough while you’re on the screen itself).

But as it happens, I grew up with the AGI version, and I definitely prefer it. And not just because of nostalgia! For me, the most important difference is in the design of the Rosella sprite. In the AGI version she walks normally and has a cool little braid-swish as she does so. In the SCI version she looks awful: a walk cycle with ridiculously exaggerated arm-swings and high-steps – it’s like the little girl’s march in this viral video.

Then there’s just some cosmetic stuff: in both games, whenever Rosella enters a building the sprite will change to a much larger version of the character (except in the ogre’s house, where she has to look diminutive beside everything else). And yet for some reason, the SCI version will have her remain small when she enters Lolotte’s stables to free the unicorn at the end of the game, while in the AGI version she converts to her larger self – which has the unfortunate side-effect of making her look larger than the unicorn.

Bodies of water also get much deeper, much faster with the SCI engine, and not always to good effect – sometimes Rosella is up to her waist in a stream that only looks to be ankle-deep. And though I only have my memory to ascertain this, I’m sure that Rosella turns away from the bedroom window with tears on her face if she’s forced to marry Edgar, and that opening Pandora’s Box leads to a cutscene with its own frame in the AGI version.

The AGI also contains two Easter eggs: one in which Rosella is beamed up to a Star Trek-esque spaceship to meet the game’s programmers, and another in which she breakdances in Lolotte’s dungeons. Neither one exists in the SCI game, and although I’ve seen both of them on YouTube, I’ve never been able to play a version of the game where I can do either one myself.

***

As well as the female protagonist and the pronounced upgrade in graphics from the previous games, The Perils of Rosella is a pioneer in two other ways. Firstly, this is a game with a timer. When Rosella arrives in Tamir it’s seven o’clock in the morning, and as the game progresses, so too does the time. It can be ascertained via the grandfather clock in the manor house, and when it reaches nine o’clock, the day ends and it becomes night (which leads to several terrifying appearances in both the haunted manor and the graveyards outside).

So Rosella essentially has twenty-four hours to complete her quest, and if she doesn’t do it quickly enough (though granted, it’s very difficult for a player to run out the clock) then she’ll be stranded in Tamir forever.

The other notable innovation is the game’s sound design, what with technology advancing far enough to allow a full musical score composed by William Goldstein (which amounted to seventy-five distinctive pieces), not to mention more complex sound-effects (a far cry from the bloopy noises of the older games). Music is a big deal in creating the ambiance of The Perils of Rosella, with musical cues given to things such as a unicorn sighting, the transformation of the frog prince, the rise of the zombies, the chase around the cauldron with the three witches – even the minstrel gets several butchered “songs” that demonstrate how bad he is at playing his lute.

Oh, and there’s a very rewarding “da, da-da, DA!” noise every time you win some points. It’s amazing how much atmosphere the music adds to the game in its entirety.

As for my own experiences playing the game, I have to admit that I never got very far on my own. Heck, I didn’t even get as far as cleaning the seven dwarfs’ house, which is somewhat embarrassing considering that if you know the story of Snow White (and who doesn’t?) the solution to the puzzle is glaringly obvious.

And yet, as a child, I was intoxicated by The Perils of Rosella. I spent hours wandering around Tamir, in both the game and my own imagination. I wrote stories about it, I recreated scenes from it with my Barbies, I made it part of my own mental landscape.

I even remember staring for ages at the cover art of the box. I mean, what an image! The funny thing is, this scene never actually takes place at any point of the game (Rosella is in the wrong clothes, and she ends up taking the unicorn to the goons, not galloping away from them) but the drama! The danger! I wanted to be in that story so very badly.

Even the back cover is pretty gorgeous:

And Tamir itself captivated me. To this day it feels very different from the previous settings of Daventry, Kolyma and Llewdor. It’s a forgotten place, a dangerous place, and feels more remote somehow. Rosella is a long way from home – and sure, so was Gwydion, but the entire point of his story is that he travels back there on foot. Rosella has no such option – she’s completely stranded, and her only way home is a dying fairy.

It's very removed from civilization, as aside from the fisherman and his wife on the shoreline, this country is bereft of human habitation (I suppose there’s the minstrel, but he’s just passing through, and as a kid I always assumed he was an elf for some reason). This is a world of dwarfs and ogres and fairies and living trees. And sure, there was once an entire household full of people – but they’ve long since turned to dust.

It lends the place a certain deserted, mystical ambiance that the other games lacked. And I’m going to go out on a limb and say this was the most frightening game in the series. The westernmost screens, which encompass the meadowlands, are green and sunlit and filled with trees, flowers and streams. There’s the quaintness of the dwarfs’ house in the tree roots, the lilypond, the old stone bridge...

But the further inland you go, the darker and more ominous things become: trees that snatch you right off the ground, man-eating ogres, haunted mansions surrounded by graveyards filled with zombies – it was quite harrowing experiencing this as a child, and that didn’t change much into adulthood! I mean, check out the shape of the branches that surround the manor house:

Or this ancient tree with a hole in the middle, smackdab in the centre of the graveyard:

Or the terrifyingly malevolent trees that surround the skull cave:

It culminates in the obsidian-like rock formations that make up the cliffs to the east, where Lolotte’s fortress is situated. In fact, following the river makes for a nice thoroughfare through the geography of the game and is the perfect way to experience the gradual shift of tone in the land – from the gentle stream in the meadows, to the deeper and swifter river later on, and finally the glittering waterfall that plummets from the darkened cliffs. 

The designers deserve credit for being exceptionally good at creating both a light and a dark ambiance, in marked contrast to the previous games, in which dangerous screens weren’t all that different in colour or mood from the safe ones.

And perhaps after stinting on the fairy tale and mythological references in the previous game (which only featured the Three Bears and Medusa), The Perils of Rosella goes all-out on the cameos: there’s Pan and Cupid and Pandora’s Box and the Three Graeae from Greek mythology, as well as the seven dwarfs, the frog prince and the ogre from Jack and the Beanstalk (Rosella’s father has already climbed the beanstalk; Rosella herself gets to play out the part of the story where she steals the hen that laid golden eggs right out from under the giant's nose).

Even things like the unicorn and the poor fisherman and the old stone bridge, though they’re not derived from any singular fairy tale, feel as though they are. As ever, the player gets points by playing along with the beats of the old stories: the dwarfs’ house must be cleaned, the frog with the crown on his head must be kissed – and yet after that, they take on their own life within the context of this new story: the dwarfs can give you some intel about Lolotte, and the golden crown gives Rosella herself the power to transform into a frog.

And even Shakespeare has something of a role to play: Rosella finds a book of his plays in the manor house and can read passages from it at will.

In short, there is a mystery and romance to Tamir that doesn’t exist to the same extent in any of the other lands visited in this game series. So many of the screens are imprinted on my mind: the stone bridge, the Roman pool, the dwarfs’ house, the lily-strewn frog pond, the haunted manor, the cave behind the waterfall... man, I wish this was a place I could visit in real life.

***

But what about the actual gameplay? It’s generally pretty good in its threefold + one quest structure, though there are (par for the Sierra course) several Moon Logic Puzzles and more Dead Man Walking scenarios than you can shake a stick at. There’s also at least one awful case of They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot (or Puzzle). If you’ve played this game, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

There’s also a significant reliance on lengthy cutscenes. Not only does this game have the longest introduction in the series, which actually tells a story rather than merely laying out the premise, but unskippable scenes such as all the encounters with Lolotte, the ogre coming home and eating his meal, and the dwarfs arriving back for their dinner. You have to watch them enter the house one-by-one to get their bowl of soup, sit at the table, eat their meals, and then leave again – one-by-one.

As with Llewdor, it’s a fairly limited land, only five screens (north to south) by six (east to west). As in the first three games, there’s a wraparound effect to this world – if you travel north or south long enough, you’ll end up back on the screen where you started), but here that only lasts for the westernmost screens: after that, natural barriers like the malevolent forest prevent you from pulling this trick.

The initial gathering of inventory is pretty straightforward: the golden ball under the bridge, the book of Shakespeare in the manor house, the bow and two arrows that Cupid leaves beside the Roman pool – and from these come a lot of exchanges. You give the book to the minstrel in exchange for his lute, and then the lute to Pan in exchange for his flute. 

You give the pouch of diamonds to the fisherman in exchange for his fishing rod, in order to catch a fish that you throw to the pelican in order to retrieve the whistle to call the dolphin. And of course, the entirety of the ghost sequence involves bringing the restless spirits their most prized possessions: the locket for the weeping woman, the medal of honour for the soldier, the toy horse for the little boy and so on.

The three missions that Lolotte sends you on, along with the search for the magic fruit, also makes for more linear gameplay than usual. Lolotte’s demands must be done in order: bridling the unicorn, stealing the hen that lays golden eggs, and finding Pandora’s Box. 

But the reason Rosella was brought to Tamir in the first place – finding the magic fruit – can be achieved at any time, including the morning after the first day and night spent in Tamir (though you have to be quick!) Still, getting the fruit is the most straightforward of the quests, and it’s best to do it first. Having obtained the flute, a lantern and the golden crown, Rosella turns herself into a frog to swim beneath the waterfall, traverses the cave network through the mountain, and then hypnotizes the cobra guarding the fruit on its island in the middle of the swamp with flute music.

Of course, that aforementioned cave network is not only pitch-black (the lantern does nothing but create a halo of light around you; I’ve no idea why it’s necessary) but contains a chasm that you have to cross to reach the tiny opening in the cliffside that leads to the swamp. There is no indication that a chasm is there, you’ll probably fall into it half a dozen times before figuring out its exact location, and you have to balance a plank of wood over it (still in complete darkness) to cross, then pick it up again once you’ve reached the other side, since you’ll be needing it in the swamp. Which naturally means that you’ll have to negotiate this crevasse again on the return journey.

Oh, and just to cap things off, there’s a troll in there as well. If he appears on the same screen as you, there’s virtually no chance you’ll escape.

It’s this sort of trial-and-error gameplay that frustrates the Lolotte-mandated missions as well. The actual taming the unicorn is easy: Cupid’s bow and arrows are easy to obtain, and then it’s just a matter of entering a screen with the unicorn and shooting it. Easy! The complications are that you need a bridle in order to ride the unicorn to Lolotte’s castle, and that requires Rosella to swim out to Genesta’s island to fetch a peacock feather (despite the beauty of this locale, that’s literally the only thing you need to do there until the end of the game, and going there feels a tad counter-productive in-universe) and then get deliberately swallowed by a whale.

From there, you have to climb up the whale’s tongue to its uvula and tickle it with the peacock feather, which will result in you getting sneezed out onto a deserted island where the bridle is to be found. It’s convoluted to say the least.

The quest for the hen that lays golden eggs is more logical, and perhaps even the best part of the game. The puzzles make sense: of course you’re going to throw a bone at the hungry dog, of course you’re going to find an axe in the upstairs bedroom (though I’m not sure why it’s human-sized), of course you’re going to hide in the cupboard and see the ogre come home and fall asleep at the table and give you the opportunity to steal the hen that lays golden eggs.

And of COURSE the ogre wakes up and chases you as you’re making your escape. I have memories of screaming my head off every time I played this part as a child.

Finally, the mission for Pandora’s Box brings into play the landmarks that have been sitting there quietly for the entirety of the game: the manor, the graveyards and the mausoleum. It was a clever design idea to make sure the player had to enter the manor house (for the book on Shakespeare) early in the game, encouraging any first-time player to explore. And once the sun goes down, the undead rise and the ghosts come out to haunt the halls and rooms.

Rosella’s goal throughout this sequence is to identify a ghost, match them with the right epitaph on a tombstone outside, and dig into the grave to retrieve a token that will lay each ghost to rest. It’s all rather Dickensian, especially since one of them is literally a miser in chains, though one has to wonder several things – such as why the ghosts are unsettled despite being buried with the items they want most, or how the key to the Egyptian-style crypt outside (which is home to an actual mummy) ended up concealed in a Victorian-style manse.

Because that’s what all this culminates in: getting the key to the crypt that holds Pandora’s Box.

The sequence is disappointing in a couple of ways. Once the sun goes down, the graveyards are deadly if you don’t have the scarab acquired from the three blind witches in the forest. The zombies will flee from it instantly – which means after a while the fear factor goes down and they just get kind of annoying. Even worse, once you open the crypt and descend down into it, a sarcophagus opens and a mummy lurches out... but before you can do anything, it’s repelled by the scarab and turns tail back to where it came from. I mean, what a waste of a puzzle!

And OH the difficulties in navigating some of these areas. I’ve already mentioned the cave network through the mountains, but to reach the pipe organ at the top of the manor house you have to climb a monstrous spiral staircase. To descend from Lolotte’s fortress you have to walk a narrow zig-zagging mountain path. To escape the whale, you have to inch across its slippery tongue in order to reach its uvula. There’s a least one beachside cliff that turns out to be a fatal drop. And there’s not one, but two more spiral staircases that you have to ascend (and then descend) in Lolotte’s castle.

You will be left tearing out your hair in frustration.

As stated, there are also plenty of Dead Man Walking scenarios. If you linger too long in the seven dwarfs’ house without cleaning it, one will turn up to kick you out and lock the door behind you. You cannot re-enter the house and therefore cannot win the game. If you get swallowed by the whale without the feather or ejected onto the deserted island without the fish – game over. If you shoot Cupid's arrows randomly or leave the island without the bridle – game over. If you dig into the wrong grave, the shovel will break in half and – you guessed it! – game over.

If you eat the magic fruit yourself (though I’ve no idea why you’d do so) you’ve lost, even though you can keep playing the game to its end.

Yet for all of that, this is the most linear game since Romancing the Throne. As mentioned, you can retrieve the fruit at any point, but you have to complete Lolotte’s commands in their proper order; the gameplay ensures it (for example, the door to the ogre's house is locked until Lolotte sets that specific request; if you get to the witches' skull cave too early, they simply won't be there; and the crypt cannot be opened until nightfall).

For the very first time, there are no superfluous “treasure” points that you can accumulate through discovering random jewels or coins strewn throughout the countryside, and only a few opportunities to miss out on extra points while still reaching the end of the game. This leads to at least one alternate Downer Ending, in which Rosella successfully saves Genesta’s life, but has either eaten the magical fruit herself, or simply neglected to obtain it. In which case, she’s transported home, only to watch her father succumb to his illness.

You can also run out of time to return to Genesta’s island on the morning of the second day, in which case a textbox will appear to inform you that both she and your father have perished.

 There’s also a fairly elaborate cutscene if you are caught creeping around Lolotte’s castle at night, which involves Rosella being forced to marry Edgar in a surprisingly long sequence that includes Rosella in a black wedding dress, a goon officiating the ceremony, and Edgar giving you a kiss at the altar – after which Rosella immediately faints. And I can tell you, this alternative ending spawned no end to the imaginary “what happened next” scenarios I came up with as a child – as I recall, most of them involved Rosella overthrowing Lolotte and becoming the next Queen of Darkness. I may have also been very into Ridley Scott’s Legend at the time.

Finally, you can miss out on a few points at the end of the game if you chose not to free the unicorn from the stables, take the hen back to Genesta, or return Pandora’s Box to the crypt. You also get extra points if you take pity on the three witches and throw them back their eye instead of keeping it for yourself – not that they’re grateful for your mercy, as they’ll immediately come after you again.

In short, there’s very little wriggle room when it comes to achieving a perfect score.

Miscellaneous Observations:

It’s eye-opening to realize that since this game starts where King’s Quest III leaves off, poor Rosella has been sacrificed to a fire-breathing dragon, rescued by her long-lost twin brother, watched her father have a heart attack, and then get transported to another land to save his life on the same day. When she returns the talisman to Genesta, there’s every chance she was thinking: “this time yesterday I was getting tied to a stake.”

Speaking of, you can imagine how confused I was as a child to start this game before finishing To Heir is Human and noticing a character who looked exactly like Gwydion being introduced as Graham’s son Alexander? I remember having conversations with my father trying to explain how or why he could have been there, or if it was someone else entirety. It wasn’t until much later, when cheat sheets helped me finish both games, that I could put the pieces together.

As well there being two versions of The Perils of Rosella (AGI and SCI) there are two boxsets as well, each with distinctly different cover art. In fact, one of these images is something of a Holy Grail within Sierra circles, since (to my knowledge) it was never released, though it appeared frequently in promotional magazines. As preferable as the image of Rosella on the unicorn is, the other cover depicts the moment when Lolotte snatches Genesta’s necklace from around her neck.

Perhaps the promotional team felt it wasn’t relevant enough to the gameplay to work as cover art (it visualizes a scene from the backstory and doesn’t feature the protagonist) but I’d still love to get a better look at it. Alas, I’ve never been able to find a decent high-quality image. Fetch your reading glasses and have a squint at it.

There is a lot of Narrative Filigree in The Perils of Rosella, both in the gameplay itself and in some of the supplementary materials, such as the King’s Quest Companion, the mother of all guidebooks that was originally published in 1992. It reveals that the haunted house is called Whateley Manor (yes, after Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror) and that the minstrel is named Frankie of Avalon (get it?)

You’ll be unsurprised to learn that as a child, I was captivated by the mystery of Whateley Manor and the untold backstory of those that used to live there. Presumably all the ghosts were part of the same family, but how were they related? What happened to them? When did they die? How did the manor come to be bereft of all life?

I would have spent hours as a child wandering around that place, trying to investigate every nook and cranny, and there’s a good chance that it piqued my lasting interest in mysteries and ghost stories. Even now, I’m struck by the intrigue of the place.

For example, there is a secret door in the wall of the parlour that leads to a spiral staircase which in turn leads to a tower room containing a pipe organ that – on playing the right tune – opens a small compartment that holds a skeleton key to the mausoleum in the eastern graveyard outside the house. To access the secret passage, you first have to stare at the portrait of a girl above the fireplace, whose eyes gaze towards the wall where the latch is hidden.

Who is this girl? How does the line-of-sight trick work? Who set up this elaborate security system? The why is obvious, as it was clearly to protect the world from the dangers of Pandora’s Box, but we learn nothing of the particulars behind why a Greek artefact is kept in an Egyptian-style crypt adjacent to a Victorian mansion. Obviously the mausoleum must significant predate the house, but damn I’d like to know how the box got into the crypt and the key into the house!

Furthermore, the crypt has a stone lion atop it that is described as “interesting.” Within the manor there are portraits on the wall that the game also describes as “interesting,” though they don’t match up with any of the ghosts that we see. The game is rather notorious for describing a great many things as “interesting” and then providing no further elaboration. 

Of course, I love the fact that it all remains opaque. We will never know the mysteries behind this place, mostly because I doubt Roberta Williams herself knew. But to explain it or add unnecessary backstory would only destroy the ambiance and the intrigue.

And so the mystery remains unsolved and intoxicating, inviting you to come up with your own answers. I’m imagining the last surviving member of the Whateley family, beset by zombies and hauntings and isolation, desperately coming up with this mad scientist Rube Goldberg-esque sequence to protect the family’s dark secret... 

***

There are plenty of other notable details strewn throughout the game that are worth mentioning: if you knock on the door of the dwarfs’ house or the fisherman’s cottage after dark, you’ll hear them call out to come back tomorrow. 

The way Rosella’s skirts churn through the water whenever she crosses a stream, or the reflections of herself in the broken mirrors throughout the manor house. Genesta’s palace is filled with fairy attendants, who accompany you through the place, though you can’t interact with them.

Also cool is that when night falls and Rosella enters the haunted house, all the lamps and candles are mysterious lit. Also, if you get the timing right, Rosella can actually walk through the ghosts (it’s easiest with the weeping woman since she’s the only one who stays in one place).

Lolotte’s fortress is pretty impressive, especially the black marble with the red veins in her throne room, and the birds – so many birds! Not only Lolotte’s raven and the little robin that’s pecking at a very important worm, but also the pelican on the deserted island, the seagull that gets startled on the pier, the cockatoo in the tree on Genesta’s island, and the swan that serenely glides around the lake on the same screen.

Most memorably, Genesta also has a peacock which struts around the island and occasionally comes to a halt in order to spread out its tail feathers. None of these birds have anything to do with the gameplay (well, except for the peacock’s feather) but are simply there to add colour and detail to the world.

Speaking of birds, I’ve already made mention of Lolotte’s raven, which has a strange role in the game, in that it seems significant, but never actually does anything important. As Rosella travels through Tamir, a black raven will sporadically fly across the screen in various directions. It doesn’t draw any attention to itself, it just flies back and forth. If you manage to “look” at it in time, the textbox will inform you: “the raven doesn't look to be a very friendly bird at all!”

Later, when you reach Lolotte’s throne room, the raven flies in from another room and settles on a perch by her throne. Obviously, Lolotte is using it in some capacity to spy on the residents of Tamir, and perhaps even Genesta herself – much like Manannan did with his telescope. And like Manannan’s implied connections with the bandits that lived in the forest, we never learn anything more about it. The raven is just there. 

To make matters even stranger, the raven reappears in the final stretch in the game, while Rosella is creeping around the castle at night. It flies between the throne room and dining room, where it has a second perch to land on. Again, you can’t interact with it in any way, and it never sounds the alarm. Like the mummy, there was an obvious puzzle here that the designers don’t take advantage of for whatever reason.

I feel like its inclusion might have been inspired by the raven that has a similar purpose as pet and spy in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, but it never becomes anything more than window dressing here.

***

Another thing I like about this game that sets it apart from its predecessors is that you get the sense that other characters are living their lives when Rosella isn’t around (the exception to this would be the Three Bears in King’s Quest III, who you do see going for walks and tending to their garden). The fisherman’s wife goes from washing clothing to sitting at the table; the fisherman moves from the pier to his home. 

The dwarfs travel from their home to the mines and back again. Lolotte’s raven flies back and forth. The ogress heads toward her house with a freshly killed deer, and later on (if you mistakenly enter her kitchen) prepares it for her husband’s dinner, which she then serves to him while Rosella is hiding in the cupboard. Even Cupid flutters in, splashes around in the waters of the Roman pool for a bit, and then (if you don’t frighten him) flies off again.

There’s a sense of vitality and forward momentum in these characters – they’re not just sitting around waiting for Rosella to interact with them.

The fisherman in this game is highly reminiscent of the woodsman in the very first game: an impoverished individual with a wife, living off the land (or sea in this case) who gives our protagonist an expensive thank you gift (in this case, his fishing rod, which is essentially his livelihood) in exchange for something precious.

The frog prince provides a fun subversion of expectations: Rosella drops the golden ball in the pond and the frog retrieves it for her. So far, so like the fairy tale. But then you get two choices: you can either simply take the crown from the frog’s head, or you can kiss him. (Or a third option, you can take back the ball and he’ll jump back into the pond, which achieves nothing). Kissing him gets you more points, but he’ll transform into a prince and have this to say:

So some might actually prefer to leave him in his froggy state.

My favourite area of gameplay was naturally Genesta’s island, and wow – talk about a dream come true for a little girl. Who wouldn’t want to live there? Palm trees, white sands, an ivory palace, exotic birdlike, a swan pond, a dolphin sculpture (I always wondered if this was meant to be foreshadowing for the real dolphin that turns up later).

The inside staircase blessedly had railings – that’s how you knew you were in the home of a good guy – though I was always frustrated that you couldn’t enter through any of the locked doors. I wanted to explore the rest of Genesta’s house, dammit!

Only a few screens of this location are relevant to the actual gameplay, and areas that contain things like the little bridge over the pool or the dolphin statue have no purpose at all – they just exist to add ambiance and beauty to the story. Likewise, there is a snow leopard that lies beside Genesta’s bed that is given no explanation at all. A pet? A transformed lover? We don’t know; it’s just there presumably because someone thought it would be cool.

Like Genesta’s clamshell bed! I tell you, I coveted that bed when I was a kid.

While inside the whale’s mouth, Rosella gave retrieve a bottle with a message inside, though it just ends up containing some in-jokes pertaining to the rest of the series – there’s one such Easter egg in every game.

And speaking of the whale, you have to laugh at the interior of this things. A uvula? Teeth?! What on earth?

There are more than a few references to The Wizard of Oz in this game, not just Lolotte’s green skin and the fact she literally cries “I’m melting, I’m melting!” when she’s hit by Cupid’s arrow, but that her skull-faced goons are essentially the flying monkeys who (like the soldiers in the MGM film) are grateful to Rosella when she frees them from Lolotte’s control.

And of course, the sentient trees in the forest are very much like the ones that Dorothy encounters early on in the film, though they’re much more deadly here. To this day, the sight of them gives me the creeps.

If you don’t have the scarab to deflect the zombies, then simply avoiding the graveyards won’t help you. Trying to enter the manor at night will see Rosella grabbed by a zombie hiding in the bushes by the front door.

Throughout the game, Rosella is required to play an elaborate tune on the pipe organ, a hypnotic melody on the flute, and a jaunty musical number on the lute, so it’s a good thing she can play all these instruments. I suppose it makes sense – she was raised as a princess, after all.

Lolotte’s castle makes for the game’s final obstacle course, in which Lolotte’s “reward” for Rosella’s demonstrations of loyalty is to marry her son Edgar. She’s locked in Edgar’s tower bedroom with no way to escape, only for a rose with a tiny key attached to be slipped under the door (only the player can see that its Edgar who does this). 

It’s a fairly nail-biting sequence when Rosella then has to move carefully and silently from one end of the castle to the other, from the westernmost tower to the easternmost where Lolotte sleeps, clinging to the walls so as not to wake any of the goons that are on sentry duty.

It all reminds me a bit of Legend, what with Rosella and Lily both having to sneak around a castle with little idea of where they’re going. On the way to Lolotte’s bedroom, Rosella has to retrieve her possessions, particularly Cupid’s bow, which she then uses to fire his final arrow into her enemy’s heart. Rosella is excused of murder since she believes that the arrow will have the same effect as it did on the unicorn (taming it without harm), but nope – Lolotte’s evil is so great that she’s killed by the love running through her veins.

After Rosella returns the talisman to Genesta, the fairy fills her in on the part that Edgar played in her liberation from Lolotte’s castle, transporting him to the beach and using her magic to make him tall and handsome. As she says: “you deserve to look like what you are.” In Rosella’s eyes, he’s now “a handsome hunk” and when he immediately proposes, she gives it serious consideration before telling him she must return to her home, only saying: “perhaps we’ll meet again someday.”

Edgar’s makeover is a somewhat dubious award to bestow on him given the whole “don’t judge people by their appearances” thing, but it’s a fitting allusion to Beauty and the Beast, and the more feminine ambiance that this game leans into. Not being remotely phased by the death of his mother, Edgar’s devotion to Rosella is rather touching, and he makes for an interesting contrast to the frog prince, who dismisses Rosella as “nothing but a peasant girl!” and strides off.

As it happens, a lot of Edgar’s backstory is retconned three games later in The Princeless Bride, in which it turns out that Edgar was kidnapped from his true parents by Lolotte as an infant, and that his handsome façade is actually his true self. Ah, sure – why not? It’s a shame we never get much more information on all this, especially since he’s gone through the exact same childhood as Gwydion (though as an heir and not a slave) but for now we’ll just say that Rosella and Edgar’s story isn’t over just yet.

As a final benediction to the player, there is no threat of a shark attack while you’re swimming back towards Genesta’s island at the end of the game. I mean, can you imagine getting to the finish line and then being chomped by a shark? On the other hand, the game doesn’t bother to explain how Rosella managed to swim the divide with a live hen in her possession.

And the one thing you can’t do is swim to Genesta’s island at night. I tried, and it’s just endless ocean screens until you tire and drown.

***

And that is King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella. This early in the history of computer gaming, it’s a game of firsts: cutting-edge graphics, sophisticated music, a timer that takes you from day to night, and – most importantly – a female protagonist.

As an Immediate Sequel to its predecessor, literally picking up at the precise moment King’s Quest III left off, it almost feels like the second half of a two-parter, focusing on one of the two twins in each one. Once again, the magic mirror provides a very useful tool in kicking a quest into gear (it’s how Graham discovered his wife, don’t forget) and the plot returns to the threefold structure of traditional fairy tales – that is, when it comes to outwitting Lolotte and saving Genesta’s life. That Graham’s life also hangs in the balance is just the cherry on top, essentially making this two life-saving quests in one.

It was a good idea to give this story more personal stakes, as well as a time limit to heighten the tension. As Roberta Williams once said, after it was leaked that Graham would suffer a heart attack, players wrote in to try and save his life. Clearly the incentive was there to build a game around trying to save him! Like To Heir is Human, it makes for a far more personal quest than finding treasure and rescuing a woman you’ve never met before – even if the gameplay is far more linear than Gwydion’s “search the countryside for ingredients” mode of play.

As with anything you experience as a child – a book, a movie, a game – certain images are indelibly printed onto your brain, merging with your imagination, in a way that no one could understand unless they too experienced them as a child. For me it’s the dwarfs’ house nestled within the roots of the tree, the mysterious ambiance of the old stone bridge (who dropped that golden ball beneath it?) the glittering waterfall tumbling from those obsidian-like mountains, the cobweb strewn rooms of the deserted manor...

And for me at least, I love that Rosella’s presence means the game in its entirety leans into a more feminine vibe: the juxtaposition of a good and wicked fairy/witch, the mission to tame and capture a unicorn, the frog prince gag, the beauty and the beast love story with Edgar, the unapologetic superfluous beauty of Genesta’s island; a fairy tale that only a female character could be at the heart of – and yet she still grapples with the most terrifying game yet: ghosts, zombies, witches, trolls, ogres...

It may start soft and romantic, but Rosella’s adventure becomes more frightening the deeper you get and the longer you play. I love that for her.