King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella (1988)

This is the first original King's Quest game I played after first playing through the extremely well done AGDI remakes of King's Quest 1, 2, and 3. Unfortunately no remake of this has been made yet, so if you play this you'll need to get used to text commands, keyboard movement, limited sound and music, and old school graphics.

Some old games are worth revisiting despite their archaic look and feel. Either the story still holds up to this day, or it was ground breaking in its genre and deserves playing for the interesting historical context. I do not believe adventure gamers have much to gain by playing through this however...

If you just want an early King's Quest experience, I recommend the SCI remake of King's Quest 1. The puzzles and dead ends aren't too terrible. KQ4 follows a very similar formula, but many of the puzzles simply do not make much logical sense. There are quite a few dead man walking scenarios where you simply cannot complete the game because you did something wrong and the game gives you no indication of such. There are parts where you'll die on entering and most seasoned adventure gamers will interpret that as a clue that they need to explore to find another item, but really you were just supposed to keep reloading and trying again until the monster doesn't appear. But sometimes in these types of scenarios you actually do need to find a new item... You get the idea.

So if you're playing through this series, my recommendation is to save often under multiple slots and turn towards a guide or UHS when you begin to get frustrated. Don't feel bad about cheating, there are much better games to spend your time on. If you do play through this, you will be rewarded with more context in later, better King's Quest games when some characters reappear.