YMMV / Police Quest 4: Open Season

• Diagnosed by the Audience:
  • Sherry seems like she has a learning disability of some kind leading to her stupidity. She talks about very simple things like water being usable in multiple ways and the phrase "raining cats and dogs" being just a phrase being some amazing facts, plus there's her childish voice. Other characters tend to treat her like a developmentally delayed child, as shown by how Sam tries to justify her talking to the press and accidentally revealing details about a dead body while John explains to her how bad it is.
  • Mitchell lacks confidence and stutters a lot, showing signs of anxiety. Additionally, he is obsessed with and dresses up as his dead mother while killing.
• Good Bad Bugs: It is possible to question the first witness on the scene right before he walks away. The conversation will carry on, even when he leaves the screen.
  • You can point your gun at people for a game over. However, you can aim away from the person and open fire and the game still implies that you shot them. Sometimes your gun will go to the side of the person's face, over their head, or even just bang the gun up the door.
• Ho Yay: Implied with Carey and Nobiles if you click the hand icon on Nobiles in certain screens.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Police Quest IV: Open Season is mostly remembered today for its creative direction being heavily influenced by the input of disgraced former LAPD Chief Daryl Gates, who many players and critics blame for the game's content taking a noticeably dim view of marginalised communities and minorities. While Gates was still involved with SWAT and SWAT 2, those games aren't as linked to him due to his creative input being reduced.
• Values Dissonance: Open Season easily takes the cake in this department, being full of material that takes a fundamentally deeply unsympathetic and even outright bigoted view on racial and sexual minorities, and poor people in general, portraying them as freaks and deviants at best and violent, mentally unstable threats to "normal" (e.i. predominantly white, straight and middle-class) citizens and police officers at worst. This stuff was already at least a bit problematic even back in the early 1990s, when the game was released, but in hindsight and knowing much of it was a result of the retired and infamous Police Chief Daryl F. Gates' input on the game, it paints an especially bleak and even damning view of how an older, White, conservative police officer views the world and the people he is policing, which is undoubtedly going to rub a lot more people the wrong way in the late 2010s and 2020s, where there is generally greater awareness and condemnation of Police Brutality and overreach.

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