Shadowgate
Year Purchased: 2000 (I think…)
Publisher: Kemco
Gameboy Version Reviewed
There are spoilers for a thirty year old game in this review.
I’m not entirely sure why I remember playing Shadowgate on the NES at my uncle’s house. I was probably four or five, and I didn’t have my own NES. The chance to play an NES was still a special experience, and for whatever reason, the visuals in this particular game stuck out amidst playing the Mario games to death, and that one time I got to try out Vice: Project Doom. I think that was what it was…
Regardless, memory is a strange thing. Finding out that there was a Shadowgate port on the NES was an exciting prospect, one that paralleled my hunt for Metal Gear Solid for Game Boy (otherwise known as Ghost Babel), and it joined my collection at the height of my handheld gaming on the Game Boy Color. I put a lot of time into trying to figure the game out at the time, but the constant death screens due to running out of torches and finding all of the numerous death traps meant that impatient thirteen year old me wasn’t going to go the distance with Shadowgate. Of course, young me couldn’t beat Riven either, and I finally bested that glorious monster last year.
This wasn’t a random attempt to finish the game. Shadowgate met my lovely NES themed GBA SP thanks to the Challenge segment of the Z-Trigger Live Show (which goes live on Friday nights). So, I picked up an existing save, and tried to find my footing in the game once again.
This was a weird and stupid decision. But I’ll get to that.
Shadowgate is a point and click adventure designed by ICOM Simulations for the MacVenture series. It was ported to the NES and Game Boy Color, and was recently remade by the original creators for PC and PS4, featuring new graphics and other updates. Players venture into a devilish castle to hunt down the Warlock Lord who is summoning the Behemoth, a creature capable of wiping out the entire world. It’s a stock story line, right down to the Chosen One protagonist and rewards of a kingdom and your very own arranged marriage to someone’s daughter. It’s as bland as fantasy gets. The real meat of Shadowgate is the puzzle design, riddles, and fact that you die more in this game than in any other point and click adventure game that I’ve ever played.
Players are given a series of options on the bottom of the screen, joined by a movement grid (which is a genuinely helpful navigation tool for quickly backtracking through areas), an image of the room, and the inventory. Players can Look, Hit, Use, Open and Close objects. They can even do things to themselves using these options, which is mostly used to equip items like a cloak and magic glasses. Torches have to be kept lit, or the death screen doth come forth to give you the skeletal finger. The most useful skill in the game is the Look function. I say this because, otherwise, the game tells you nothing about how to achieve your goals.
Shadowgate isn’t a particularly special game. It’s not even one of the best point and click games available. However, my personal, oddly misplaced nostalgia for it kept its memory alive for me long enough to buy it in my teens and finally finish it as an adult. So, given that I don’t have a lot to say about the overall quality of the game (read: it’s alright), I decided that I’d give a little attention to the way this game is built. Not in regards to code, but rather, how it flows for the player.
Shadowgate is divided into hubs, divided by a series of bridges and a courtyard at the middle of the game. Items collected in the first hub are used in coordination with one another in the various rooms to reach the courtyard, which features a few “battles” (use thing on monster), before reaching the second hub. I’ve prepared a few visual treats for this review, and God help your miserable eyeballs if you try to decipher my chicken scratch.
The first hub is made up of around twenty-five rooms, split off at forks. The first leg of the game is made up of a mere two rooms. In a way, the first ten minutes of Shadowgate make for an effective tutorial about the way that this game operates. The first screen shows the front door of the castle. Screen two has two doors, both of which are locked, and the first torches of the game. Collect the torches, light a second one up to keep the timer under control, and then players are left with the question: how do we proceed? The answer is fairly simple, of course. The key is hidden on the very first screen of the game, requiring players to use the Open function. Screen three reveals the first death trap, a device of which there are over a dozen spread across more than forty-five screens. More keys are added, and the path splits for the first time in the game.
Upon reaching the first fork in the path, we are introduced to the very reason why the Look function is vital to progress. Behind a not-so-hidden door in the back wall of the third screen, there is a room where an arrow is hanging on a wall. Taking the arrow, it is added to the inventory with the bland labeling Arrow. Using the Look function, players learn that it is a Silver Arrow, though the name doesn’t change. Cut to the second half of the game, where our nameless hero climbs to the top of one of the two towers of Shadowgate itself, and finds a woman chained to the wall. This woman isn’t what she appears; she is a werewolf. This puzzle moment could be easily solved if the tag on the time said Silver Arrow, and isn’t complicated as is. But the reality is that I cycled through the weapon items in my inventory. This process can often lead to the death screen, as most things in this game do.
There are also bizarre leaps in logic that required to finish the game. There is a laboratory in the second half of the game that are only slightly hinted at in their item descriptions. For example, a rickety bridge back in the first half of the game can not be crossed on foot. The hero has to levitate to the door. This feat isn’t achieved using any of the five magic spells. Instead, the hero has to use an item called Bottle2, which is described as being incredibly light.’
A bottle is described as being light, and it makes the hero levitate.
This marks the only part of the game that I actually looked up the solution to. Most of the other riddles are spelled out so long as you’re reading the scrolls and books throughout and taking notes. Even the silly serpent puzzle on the other side of the Bottle Chasm makes a degree of sense when you examine the magic wand that is described as being inscribed with a snake, and then discovering that the snake is made of stone. It’s not clear what will take place, but the entire game is predicated on the simple process of Using Things on Things. Rubbing various objects on other objects until something works is usually how progress takes place.
My other complaint about the bridge puzzle is its placement in the flow of the game. Actually mapping out the game in my notebook made navigating the castle much more manageable than attempting to play from memory. Noting incomplete rooms along the way allowed me to go back to those rooms when I thought I might have an object that would help push the game forward. The Bottle Chasm is given a solution in the second half of the game, which means that players can be left completely in the dark if they’d written off the wooden bridge as a mere death trap rather than the location where one of the five key items is located. It adds a layer of messy and unnecessary backtracking to what, in a way, is an otherwise smooth traversal of the games map.
Otherwise, Shadowgate flows well throughout its run time. It’s a short game, made shorter by experience and a knowledge of the way that the game operates. The only other problems I see in this game are just indicators of its age, like the clunky inventory system and lack of buttons on the Game Boy. I can imagine that the Mac original would be an easier experience thanks to hot keys for the functions. Not to mention that point and click games on a D-Pad will never feel as good as using a mouse.
More than anything, Shadowgate helped me relive a time I never really experienced properly in my youth. Video games weren’t entirely something that happened on the console and computer exclusively. The activity of playing a game in that time extended from the screen onto a pad of paper. It was part of the experience, drawing maps, writing down riddles from the in-game lore, and jotting down quick notes about progress. I have been trying to indulge myself when playing games from this era when the time comes to play them. For example, I wrote about seven or eight pages of notes when doing my run through Riven last summer, and I actually dedicated a Moleskine notebook to my last run of Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (a game I have to restart thanks to Windows 10 trying to murder my laptop a couple of years ago). I am fully aware how pretentious this sounds, but the technological restrictions on some games of the time made for gameplay experiences that are now gone, passed into history with no fanfare at all. I’m not saying that games are worse without, but the level of involvement required in some of these games feels woefully absent in modern games. We’ve traded it out for simplicity, and that’s not always a good thing.
Recommending Shadowgate thirty years past its release is an interesting prospect. Aside from That One Dumb Puzzle, it’s still a solid experience despite the weak narrative. It’s definitely a product of the era, with its windowed gameplay and trial-and-demand execution, but I personally find the entire experience charming. I have a copy of Deja Vu at the house, a game that runs on the same engine. Now that I’ve toppled the Behemoth, and saved the world from the evils of Shadowgate, I find myself willing to take on that mystery a little bit sooner.
And for a final note, I would love to find a box for my copy. That shiny GBC box design was something to behold at the time.
WordsThing 