Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers

About

Space Quest IV drops Roger Wilco into a chaotic time-travel romp across the series’ own timeline. As always, he’s armed with a sewage-based weapon and a knack for getting into trouble. This time he’s dodging the Sequel Police, cyborg assassins determined to erase his entire career. The game leaps between past and future Space Quest entries, from a retro-80-bit version of the first game to a mock-epic sequel where aliens debate interstellar plumbing codes. You’ll interact with pixel-perfect parodies of sci-fi staples, solve puzzles with absurd logic, and avoid being vaporized by time-ripping enemies. The action skips over actual Space Quest IV, treating it as just another moment in Roger’s endless cycle of bureaucratic sci-fi farce. The game’s standout is its self-aware humor. It roasts genre tropes and its own convoluted lore with equal glee, like a biker gang in Space Quest I mocking Roger’s colorful palette as pretentious. The gameplay leans into classic point-and-click adventure mechanics, requiring precise timing and absurdity. While it’s part of a decades-old series, the jokes about corporate greed and intergalactic bureaucracy still land. Fans of the franchise’s irreverent tone will appreciate how it threads the needle between chaos and continuity, even if it spends more time in other games than its own.

Storyline

In this installment, Roger embarks on a time-travel adventure through Space Quest games both past and future. An infomorph of reborn Sludge Vohaul from Space Quest XII: Vohaul's Revenge II chases Roger through time in an attempt to finally kill him. Roger also visits Space Quest X: Latex Babes of Estros (whose title is a parody of Infocom's game Leather Goddesses of Phobos) and Space Quest I; in the latter, the graphics and music revert to the style of the original game and Roger is threatened by a group of monochromatic bikers who consider Roger's 256 colors pretentious. None of the gameplay takes place in Space Quest IV. In fact, the "actual" Space Quest IV is only seen briefly in the introduction.