A few old memories lead me to this game. Back then my little brother had bought it, thinking it would be a good horror game to play chasing around ghosts like a bug-catcher. I don't think we played much of it, though, as we just wound up walking away confused. Looking back, I chalked it up to us being idiot kids who were much more into twitch-bang-shootie games then it actally not being very good, so I wanted to give it a fair shake. And since it was re released cheap on GOG.com, I decided to give it a shot again. It was absolutely awesome as it started up, filled with 90s cheese and actually intelligent puzzles to progress... but lets just call this a bubblegum game. It lost it's taste well before I was done chewing.
Story: The museum is a bit of a local legend. It was being built by a Professor Windlenot who was incredibly secretive about what it would contain. He wouldn't even use local construction so as to hide what was inside till opening day! All he would reveal to the public before that time is the name of the place: Professor Windlenot's Museum of the Strange and Unusual. But everything stopped about 15 years ago when two students from your high school broke in and were never heard from again. The professor suffered the same fate shortly after. The local legend here is that the professor is a murderer and after killing the two kids, remained in the museum, waiting for the next victim. And maybe you should not have opened your mouth so much about it.
As of now, you have been dared to stay the night locked in by your friends. They will let you out in the morning after you "face the doctor" or his ghost in this haunted place. Little do any of you know that indeed the museum is haunted, but it is not by the doctor. Rather ancient spirits have been unleashed on the building and if you want to see the morning light, you are going to have to find a way to dispel them before they can devour you.
There really isn't much more to the the plot of this game. True, you will find details that flesh out the world, what exactly you are up against, and how to defeat/contain them well, but at it's core this game is basically a generic horror movie in video game form. We've seen this story before many times on many video tapes rented out over they 80s and 90s. But at the same time, it is also a very well done edition of it, showing just how well that story can play out in video game form. The game is designed to let the museum tell it's tale by letting you stumble on the pieces like those movies and feels perfectly natural while doing so.
So in the end, yeah, it's a simple plot you've probably seen before, but it's crafted well and takes great advantage of the interactivity available with this being a video game.
Graphics: In the early 90s CD-ROM was a new and exciting medium for computers. It was new enough in fact, that it wouldn't be even considered standard till Myst and the 7th Guest came out, causing them to fly off shelves and be demanded on PCs bought in stores. Shivers is from these early days of CD-ROM based gaming, taking after the former in style and the latter in atmosphere. Outside of character animation, this game is made up entirely of still shots of all the locations in the museum. But it's not just "one picture per room" affair like other games I have played. Rather each picture is your perspective as you explore in a slide-show version of a first person adventure.
Suffice it to say, the results are fairly dated. But not as much as you might think. The artwork that makes up the game scenes are created between paintings and CGI work still looks pretty good overall. But you can tell when the computer modeling is in strong use, as that is where the game shows it's age with rather simplistic geometry.
Nor can you expect much in the way of live action to help with this. In fact, there are only a handful of scenes with actual actors, be it ghosts of previous victims or your "friends." Most of the animation in this game, comes in the form of the evil spirits you need to deal with... and they are sadly terrible. Where everything else is either live or fits with the art of the museum in total, these guys look like they were drawn up for a cheap saturday-morning cartoon, and completely fail to fit in with the otherwise awesome atmosphere this game manages to still produce despite it's age... at least while you are not either being attacked by or capturing something that might have fit better in one of those knockoffs.
6/10
Sound: Shivers is going to give you a healthy dose of audio cheese, too. Right off the bat as the game starts, you will be greeted with a howl over the Sierra logo followed by an opening video with evil laughter in a short remix that can only be described as "90s." And of course this being a 90s windows game, your menu can not be remotely quiet. A lot of options will simply be used with a metal chunk sound, but if you are switching screens, you simply have to have some kind of sound effect dedicated to it, be it an evil laugh, a taunt, or whatever Sierra decided they wanted in that option. It just doesn't wait to scream 90s at you.
Still once you get past the initial burst the game opts to have much more ambient noise to go with your adventure, starting you without anything but the wind blowing around the museum while you try to get inside. Once there, however, the music will turn on but I get a strong suspicion the idea is for the music to be part of the museum itself in the form of hidden speakers as every room has it's own theme. These generally work well for their scene and fit the general aspect that room is presenting. The exception is one single hallway where there is no reasonable way to assume it would have been part of the presentation since it is a hallway for maintenance. This is kinda a shame as this is also one of the more fun and high energy tunes in the game.
But the voice work definitely brings it all together nicely to finish up the atmosphere, despite the cheese of the live-acting. You see throughout the game you will also get voice-work in the form of explanations available to the guests of the museum they can start by buttons in the doorway of each room. These just feel right to complete the feel of the place you are in as someone passionate about these more obscure and occultish topics would setup to help his guests understand just what they are looking at and why these things exist.
7/10
Gameplay: This might just be the single most dipolar game I have played in a long time. On it's face, it looks like someone tried to combine Myst, the 7th Guest, and Kings Quest into one project, and I can't really argue against these games all having their influence. However at best they were blended very unevenly resulting in an amazing first half of the game before the whole thing peters out so badly you really do need a guide to not quit out of boredom before you finish.
When you start, you will have to earn your way into the museum as the main door is locked. Rather there is secret passage in, and a lock to it. The solutions to both can be found by just paying attention to your environment which will set the tone for how half of this game is played. You will spend your time unlocking more and more of the museum by solving puzzles that either unlock or straight up reveal passages through the place. Every puzzle is completely self-contained, but the rules and/or solution may need you to explore where you can go so far to find and figure out before you come back to try again. If you, like me, enjoy puzzles mixed into your horror, this time with the game will enthrall you as those puzzles are generally pretty good, and only lead to more rooms to see and more puzzle... at least at first.
But long before you finish the game you will basically have the entire place unlocked and the puzzles done, leading you to the much more repetitious part: catching the evil spirits. You see, you are not alone in this museum. There are ten malevolent ghosts here as well who want nothing more then to jump out of their hiding places and steal your life-force. And the only way you are going to survive the night is by capturing them all. So how do you do it? By sealing them into the pots they were released from! This in itself is not too bad an idea for a game mechanic. After all there is serious potential here to have a balanced cat & mouse chase as the entities want to kill you while you look for the means to recapture them. But in this case, it is just executed horribly. You will wander around the museum looking for a matching pair of pot and cover, that, once found, will fuse into a single vessel that can be used to catch one of these spirits. The catch is you need the specific pot for each of the spirits for it to work and if you use the wrong one, not only do you still get hurt, but the little bastard will take and hide it so you cant try again with another one.
Now this last part is not a huge deal as even in this "puzzle" there are clues you can find in the museum which will explain which pot you need for which ghost, so if you are paying attention, the odds are you will not use the wrong one and have to do extra hunting. But that hunt in itself is a much bigger one since you can only carry one item in your inventory at any time in the game. You read that right: the game has a single inventory slot, so no matter how many pieces you find, you can only carry one at a time. So you have to keep a mental note of where you leave everything and come back later, leading to a lot of redundant running around to repeat the same exact step many many many times before you can finish what will be the second half of the game if you don't use a guide to finish it up. Seriously if there was ONE thing I would change about this game, it would be to add an inventory screen so that the game does not drag on needlessly long after you've finished all the puzzles the game offers you. It would have made the game shorter, but let the game be a much smoother experience rather then crumble in on itself before the end video plays.
But what about that cat and mouse game? Well, it's basically non-existent due to how the game works. Almost every spirit in the game has audio clues to when it is nearby only certain places they can be. Most of these are generally setup so it's easy to avoid them. In essence, you wont run into one of these monsters until you are ready, rendering their dangerousness to damn near zero.
6/10
Bugs: I don't believe I found a single bug while playing. The game ran perfectly.
Overall: I really wish this game was better. When I started I was loving it moment to moment as it made me figure out how to open everything and every room with well made and thought out puzzles that had to be found and solved. But this actual gameplay runs out well before the game does. As such, I have a hard time recommending giving it a go... to anyone. There are just too many better examples to play before you get to this one.
Score:
5/10
System Requirements:
- 1.8 Ghz processor
- 512 MB RAM
- DirectX 7 compatible graphic card
- 1 GB hard drive space
- Windows 7/8/10
- Broadband connection required
- Ryzen 7 (2700) 3.2 Ghz
- 16 GB RAM
- Nvidia Geforce 1660 (6GB VRAM)
- Windows 10 (64 Bit)
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