Police Quest: Open Season

Open Season uses point-and-click gameplay. Icons for "walking", "speaking, "using", and "looking" are used rather than the text-parsing system used in the first two games. The mouse is used to select and interact with objects from the game world and the player's inventory, as well as to direct the player character around the various environments.

Like previous Police Quest games, Open Season places emphasis on following proper police procedure, with penalties for failing to do so. These extend from actions to how the player treats certain characters; for example, the player choosing to harass female characters will eventually lead to a game over.

Most of the game uses full-motion video, with most characters being video recordings of actors and most background being edited photographs of real locations in Los Angeles, such as the interior of the Parker Center. Written text is replaced by audible narration and dialogue in the 1996 CD version.

In Los Angeles, LAPD Robbery-Homicide detective John Carey is dispatched to investigate a homicide in a South Central alley. There, Carey finds his best friend and ex-partner Bob Hickman dead, alongside an eight-year-old boy. The seemingly random string of gang-related murders continues along, which Carey continues to investigate. Five more people are murdered, mutilated, and found in public places, as Carey attempts to pursue the serial killer.

In his investigation, Carey questions the owner of a second-rate movie theater, who offers him tea and invites him into the theatre to watch a film. Carey passes out and hallucinates the theater owner as a cross-dresser at the Hickman homicide scene, before being woken up and thrown out. Carey finds the killer's house (led there by his dog), and finds a severed head in a fridge alongside a hidden passage that leads back to the theater. Investigating, Carey finds a woman passed out in the seats, and sees the theater owner dragging her into a back room, before being knocked unconscious. Waking up, Carey confirms the theater owner is the killer and scavenges hair spray and a lighter to arm himself with a makeshift flamethrower. Searching the theater, Carey finds the theater owner preparing to kill the woman and torches him with the flamethrower, killing him and saving the woman. For his efforts, the Mayor of Los Angeles presents Carey with the LAPD Medal of Valor.

Open Season was the first entry in the Police Quest series to be developed without former series designer Jim Walls, who left Sierra due to undisclosed "circumstances".[2] The game was developed in Sierra's SCI engine.

Sierra had three box designs in consideration for the game: A bloody hand reaching for the title, a file folder, and the Los Angeles city skyline. The company had a focus group vote on them, and the file folder design garnered almost no votes, with the other two covers splitting the majority. The final decision was reached because parents in the focus group often had a negative side comment about the bloody hand design, so the skyline cover eventually won. The game was released in November 1993.

There were no useable instructions that came with the game. Gates included the official procedure manual of the LAPD, and although it was full of information, none of it was relevant to the gameplay, focused much more on radio codes, uniform dress, and legal regulations than any detective work expected of Carey.

The 1996 CD release of the game included audio dialogue, a two-minute promotional video, and copies of official LAPD documents.[3]

The first four Police Quest games totaled 850,000 sales by late 1995. However, Markus Krichel of PC Games noted that "interest on the part of the gamer fell slightly" with Open Season(Mainly due to the absence of creator Jim Walls, and those who did play the game weren't happy playing as anyone besides the series's classic protagonist Sonny Bonds), which led Sierra On-Line to experiment with a new direction for the series with Police Quest: SWAT.[4] According to Sierra, combined sales of the Police Quest series—including SWAT—surpassed 1.2 million units by the end of March 1996.[5]

Computer Gaming World stated in February 1994 that "Police Quest: Open Season evinces a remarkable degree of work-a-day police realism as a result of Gates' contributions", with "marvelous digitized backgrounds".[6] A longer review in March 1994 stated that the game had succeeded "at so many levels", that its realism and "seemingly endless amounts of" police procedure offered "larger implications about our society and its struggle against the drug machine". The reviewer noted that treating NPCs with the same "lack of consideration" players do so in other games "seems incredibly damning—and heartrending—because it's true to life. We treat each other, the game implies, in our attempts merely to cope with the problems with which we are faced, like NPCs". The magazine concluded that "Open Season tells that story magnificently".[7]

Next Generation reviewed the Macintosh version of the game, rating it two stars out of five, and stated that "the ultimate Sierra police-based game is still a fond dream to look forward to; and in the meantime we can still keep ourselves amused with the Leisure Suit Larry series."[8]

• Blue Force

• Police Quest: Open Season at MobyGames