Now here's a game I have a lot of history with. I couldn't have been any older then 8 years old when I saw a guide and maps to to start you off in Nintendo Power, and I don't think I poured over any magazine page as much as this. And by my next birthday, my parents came through and I had a new game to play. I absolutely loved every moment of my adventures. So when I found out that getting the 2014 remake at launch included this version as a bonus, I was definitely interested in giving it a shot. After all, this is where the NES version got all its awesomeness!
And while that may be true, it did not come without some very rough edges the NES version spared me of back in the day.
Story:
The last thing you remember is standing before the wizard Lakmir as he gestured wildly and chanted in an archaic tongue. Now you find yourself staring at an entryway which lies at the edge of a forest. The Druid's words still ring in your ears: "Within the walls of Castle Shadowgate lies your quest. If the prophacies are true, the dreaded Warlock Lord will use his dark magic to raise the Behemoth, the deadliest of the Titans, from the depths of the earth. You are the seed of prophecy, the last of the line of kings, and only you can stop the Warlock Lord from darkening our world FOREVER. Fare the well."
With these words in the very first room of the game, you will set you on your way to explore the castle... and sadly you will get little else in the way of plot. Being a very early point and click adventure, the game was designed more about putting puzzles in your way to figure out rather then telling a deep and riveting tail. There are no twists to find as you play at all, but what is here is exactly what a game of the time usually gave you: just enough to explain why you are there and what's at stake should you fail/succeed. It's nothing special.
5/10
Graphics: The graphics of this game are perhaps the most di-polar of anything I have ever played... and that is the case by design. When you start up this game, you have a choice of playing this as it appeared on either the black and white (no grey tones), but high resolution (for the time) Macintosh, or the lower resolution but color Apple IIg. In either case, however, what you see before you holds up pretty well all things considered.
Clicking the version you decide to play will open up a small window containing the interface. The window can be expanded to the full size of your monitor, but there is no actual fullscreen mode for this game. And sadly, this does hurt the game's look because expanding the screen like this makes it look incredibly bulky as everything is magnified and pixelized short of the text of the game... including the edges of the macintosh style windows within it!
And that screen will be made of 4 of these with a panel of interaction buttons and one button on it's own labeled "thyself" laid out so that you can quickly review the contents of everything and reach all the controls you will need with ease. The windows making up the majority of this view will be for your inventory items, a view of the room, a map of the room and it's exits, and a text window displaying results to what you do. All of these windows can be moved around and the size changed at will if you like a different configuration better, but the only one I found a need to adjust is the inventory, which I expanded as large as the default space it was in would allow before overlapping the scene window.
The reasons for this were both I found it looked better this way, and the fact that your inventory has no rhyme or reason at all. When you put something into it, you literally just drag it there and wherever in the window you put it, it's there. You can easily lose items by them just overlapping each other in a massive mess of images, so the more space you can give this, the better.
The scenes themselves will be in a small-ish window, but again, holds up surprisingly well considering the age of this game. From the first door you open to the defeat of the evil warlock, everything here speaks of pixel art that was done more then well enough to stand up over 30 years later. True some of it does have that "early days of computer" simplicity and color schemes, but each version uses what it had available to the absolute maximum, resulting in some great looking scenes all the same. The only real oddity here is much like the inventory, you can drag and drop items wherever you desire, but the items remain in their original images, so you can easily ruin the picture yourself depending on what you drop where.
6/10
Sound: This is probably the most bare-bones game I have played in the sound department since sitting at my Dad's old Mac-Plus as a child and in fact shares the same limitation there most of those do. The sounds in this game are actually pretty crisp and clear, but they are also very rare, reserved for a few specific places or actions (like hitting things, which you won't do very often). Without any music or speech to back this up, you will play most of this game in absolute silence... which will remind you why most games today do not do that.
4/10
Gameplay: As mentioned before, Shadowgate is a point-and-click adventure game that launched on apple's current hardware in the 1980s, taking full advantage of the interface design of the OSs these two machines offered. This rendition of the game rebuilds this by taking a window on your desktop to emulate the feel of these machines. As a result the entire game is designed around clicks and drags. To this end moving things between the scene your inventory, or any given container you can open up is as easy as dragging the object you desire between their respective windows.
Most of the commands in this game are just as easy to do. Click a command and click what you want to do it on... and if you want to do it to yourself, the "Thyself" button represents you. However, there are a few exceptions to this, and sadly one of them will be the most common command you use in the game: the Operate button. This is effectively the use button, and makes enough sense when using an object with or on something else. You click operate, the object you want to use, and what you want to use it on. However, it is a little less obvious to just use the item on it's own... but not hard. Basically you just double-click the object instead of clicking something new with the second click. Once you understand this, the controls become easy to use. They are fairly clunky, but that doesn't really matter too much as the game is "turn based" so the game only moves forward when you do something.
You will use this interactivity with the world to explore "the living castle," figure out the puzzles within to progress, and do your best to not die. This is in fact where most of the challenge comes from because this castle would like nothing more then to kill you with it's many traps, monsters, or even just stupid moves of your own which will do the dirty work for it. But just about every death in this game is completely fair, so while the developers clearly enjoyed themselves in finding new and interesting ways to kill a gamer, it will always be your fault and there is always a way to avoid it... almost.
And I have to say almost in this case due to two parts of the game coming together to in such a way that you can way too easily enter a dead-man-walking scenario if you do not know the game in advance inside and out: torches and inventory space.
Most of the castle you are about to explore is dark without any light sources, and trying to move in complete darkness is a quick way to die in this game, so more often then not, you need to keep a lit torch on you. But a torch only lasts so long, and unfortunately this game does not always tell you when one is about to go out so you can use it to light another before it's too late. Most of the time it does but in case the warning fails to arrive, saving often is basically mandatory, as is carrying an extra torch or three... which is half of why the inventory is pure evil in this game.
As I explained in the graphic section, the inventory is very free-form with you dragging pictures of everything you want to take or remove from it. And without so much as a grid to organize it, this quickly becomes a mess requiring manual labor to sift through, which costs you turns as you move things around. In addition, you also have a limit of what you can carry which is never clearly explained, but can be fairly tight, limiting your ability to carry the torches you need to not be a dead-man-walking. This means you now have the most mechanically broken inventory I have ever seen in any adventure game and one that is very likely to kill you several times before you figure this game out. Whether it's because you literally can not carry enough torches cause you don't know what else you will need or because you reach a room where if you don't collect the right item you will die, but without warning you find out you don't have the room to do it, this inventory is going to kill you.
5/10
Bugs: Sadly I can not call this game a bug free experience, as I hit two before the game was over:
- Weird pause: This bug hit twice in the game, once when I intentionally set off a death, and once near the end of the game. In both cases, the game just "stopped" for a moment before continuing like nothing happened. I would call it random, but I was able to repeat the one with the death at will, suggesting this is actually an issue at that point in the game itself. Why did I recreate it? Well....
- Take the money and run (right out of the game): I repeated it because at the death a SECOND issue happened at the same time (also repeatable). Spoiler ahead:
There is a scene in the game with a balcony in the castle where on one side is a bag and the other a pot of gold. If you take the pot of gold, the game is supposed to have the edge it's on fall apart under you and you die... but that did not happen right away. Instead, the game froze for a moment, before giving that scene, but still letting me move the pot of gold! From this point on until you quit and restart your game, the pot of gold is now stuck on your screen wherever it landed and sitting over anything else.
Both effects were repeatable, and while more hilarious then anything else, definitely a bug to be noted.
Overall: I wish I could recommend this game, I really do. After all, I loved the NES version as a kid and have nothing but fond memories of the entire franchise. But that NES version is leagues better then what was here. And it isn't even like that judgement is content based. If anything this version has more to play with (if only by a little bit). But that cut-down version doesn't have issues with an inventory that could kill you needlessly... it actually relies on the game itself to do that, and is much better for it. Add to it an existing (and frankly amazing) 8-bit soundtrack and that version is just the plain best way to play this game, short of the 2014 remake, anyway. If you have no other way to try the source of that remake, it might be worth poking around for curiosity, but it's just not worth taking any more seriously then that.
Score:
5/10
System Requirements:
- Any Processor
- 2 GB RAM
- Any Graphic Card
- Windows 7
- 100 MB hard drive space (estimated due to it not being listed)
System Specs:
- AMD FX 8350 (4.0 Ghz)
- 16 GB RAM
- Geforce GTX 960 with 4 GB VRAM
- Windows 10
Source: Steam
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