“The last thing that you remember is standing before the wizard Lakmir as he waved his hands.” How many hours of fun and frustration began with these simple words? I still remember spending many sleepless nights creeping through the twisted depths of the living castle Shadowgate back in 1989 when this game first dropped as a PC port for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Now nearly thirty years later I’ll take a look at seeing if the modern PC remake can stand up to the test of time and still hold on to what made Shadowgate such a charming and challenging game.
Firstly I want to say that I was a huge fan of the original and as such will do my best to give you an unbiased review. Shadowgate first appeared as a graphic point-and-click adventure game for the Apple Macintosh in 1987 and was later ported to various PC and console platforms. It featured an immersive story, interactive environments, challenging puzzles, and for the NES port an epic and haunting chip tune soundtrack. Think of it as an animated choose your own adventure book and just like those books, life and death hangs in the balance with every choice you make. It became an instant classic and would go on to help define the First person adventure genre as we know it today.
Shadowgate 2014, as it is informally known, originally appeared as a Kickstarter back in 2012 and is a faithful remake of the original by Zojoi LLC., a small game developer located in central Virginia. It includes gorgeous hand drawn artwork, a beautifully orchestrated soundtrack by gaming composer Rich Douglas, all the challenging puzzles of the original game, and then some. For those of you familiar with the original this will bring back all the nostalgia as well as provide many new surprises. If you beat the original and think you’re going to breeze through this game you are in for a rude awakening because you are going to get personally acquainted with Death…a lot. For new players of the game a healthy dose of patience will serve you well and the quick save feature will serve you even better.
Shadowgate retains much of the original’s formula – mostly static imagery, point and click controls, and a steep learning curve, while including enough new material to keep the game fresh for seasoned adventurers. It has 3 different difficulty settings that increase the number and complexity of the game’s puzzles while decreasing the duration of your only source of light, the torch. Oh the torch. When the music changes to reflect the fact that your torch is about to burn out my pulse still speeds up. If your torch dies then so do you. It’s like your life meter in a game where any other mistake often means your instant demise. It now also has a customizable UI that can be hidden to increase the cinematic feel of the game, dramatic cut scenes that elaborate on the games already wonderful story, ambient sounds to increase the games immersion, voice-over narrations, a map feature to help keep you from getting lost, a retro mode that emulates the NES’s chipset music, pixilated transitions and text fonts, and most forgivingly, a help and hint system in the form Yorrick the talking skull. This may or may not be a good thing as he often makes wise cracks at the expense of the player. You can disable him by hitting him if he get on your nerves too much or would rather go it alone.
On the down side it also retains the very clunky nature of the original’s point and click interface which at times left me a bit annoyed at how many clicks have to be made to get something as simple as opening a locked door done but that is in line with the original and a small price to pay to relive the experience of exploring Shadowgate although new players may find it annoying at times. One piece of advice for whatever kind of player you are – resist the temptation to find a walkthrough. It will kill anything and everything that makes Shadowgate the thrilling and rewarding experience it is.
All in all I found Shadowgate to be a “blast” from the past in every sense of the word. It truly delivers on its promise to live up to the original. If you’re the kind of gamer that prefers high polygon counts and lots of flashy special effects however then you may want skip this one as I feel you may be a bit let down by the game’s high degree of difficulty and even higher level of frustration. If you’re patient person looking for something a bit less fast paced and more cerebral then I highly recommend this outstanding game.
View the screenshots here.
