Story: You were brought to Castle Shadowgate with a purpose this day. Teleported by the wizard Lakmir, you now stand at the gate with his words ringing in your ears and the mission they bestowed upon you dominating your will. You are here to stop the Warlock Lord from raising the deadliest titan of legend: the Behemoth. Should he succeed, the world as you know it is doomed.
However, if the prophecy is to be believed, as the last of the line of kings, you are the legendary hero who's fate is to save the world. Armed with only a torch and your wits, you grit your teeth and approach the gate, swearing you will succeed, no matter what.
From this basic start you will begin your adventure as you wander the castle in your quest to figure out how to reach that goal and fulfill your destiny, but there is little development beyond this point. This game originally came out in the 80s, so while there are a few clues here and there you might find, this pretty much is the story you will have to play through. It's enough to give you reason to want to see it through, but little else.
6/10
Graphics: There have been a few revisions of this game over the past, and this release is a direct port of the NES version. So you can expect all that comes with that in the look of the game, both good and bad.
You will spend the entire game with your screen divided up int three sections, two at the top and one across the bottom. Those top screens will keep pretty static functions as the left quarter or so will show you a picture of the room you are currently in while the right is a listed view of your inventory. The bottom will alternate between flavor text when you do something in the game and the command interface you will use to play.
The whole screen is well organized and looks good, but most of it is basically keeping a text interface available and clean, leaving any real graphical work to the upper left quarter. Each room will display here in all it's 8-bit glory and overall look really good considering the limitations of the 8-bit console this version originally was released on. The detail work is surprisingly high considering the colors and resolutions available. True this won't stand up to the modern games (or even the 2014 remake) in the looks department, but there is an old 8-bit charm here that is hard to deny for those who were there when the game first made it's way off computers at the time.
7/10
Sound: When this game originally came out for the Macintosh, it was a completely silent game: no music, no sounds, nothing. And considering the abilities of that machine, this makes a lot of sense... but when it came time to jump to the Nintendo Entertainment System, it simply would not do. No console with actual libraries featured silent games at all, and the 8-bit generation generally had music for all their games, so this would simply have to change.
In the porting process, the game would not get a lot of sound effects, opting for mainly a click sound for you to select things, a warp sound when switching rooms, and a few blips and bloops to add some flair, but not a lot could really be done for still images telling you what was happening. Rather, all the effort went to the music, and it was worth it.
In all it's chip-tune glory, this sound track now lives forever in the minds of the fans who played the game on their consoles as kids and became the de-facto soundtrack of the game going forward. Even that 2014 remake didn't so much take inspiration as rework the tunes to it's own dark fantasy tones (so much so a heavy metal rendition IS the credit roll of that game as a final treat). It is just a special kind of magic that can still be felt in the midi-goodness to this day.
I can't say much for the sounds, but the music alone is just that good here.
8/10
Gameplay: Shadowgate is a game unlike just about anything else that entered the library of the NES back in the day. Where most games were action side-scrolling affairs or maybe one of those first JRPGs to grace the console shores of the states, this is a full on point-and-click adventure in a castle that frankly wants you dead. As such the general gameplay loop is to enter a room, and use a series of "clicks" to interact with anything you like within it, and solve the puzzles within. To make this easy to understand, you would do this in three basic sections of the screen.
At the bottom you have a window divided into three sections: Move, commands, and inventory/self buttons. The move panel is exactly what it sounds like. Click "move" and you can then click various entry ways in the picture of the room itself or spots on a "minimap" of the room below that represent the various exits available to you. Commands are just as straight forward, as the game will offer you eight you can play with. Click any you like then whatever you want to do the action to, you click that next, be it on the picture of the room, in the inventory, or in that last portion of this lower window.
And that's the one place not so standard, as this section has 4 buttons: two to shift cards of your inventory so you can find what you are looking for, a Self and a Save. In Shadowgate you yourself can be the target of your own actions.... and the game really won't stop you from doing anything to yourself, from trying on things you find to drinking random potion bottles to even hitting yourself. (I swear not one of us will ever forget seeing "POW" across the view then reading "SMASH! Now you see stars" the first time and, depending on the age you were when playing, thinking it was hilarious.) You WILL have to interact with yourself to complete this game in at least a few points, so this is an important button to remember, however.
The last button is probably the most important though... the SAVE button. Shadowgate is a shorter game if you know what you are doing (I can usually finish it in 2 hours, but there are speedruns of barely over 1), but until you do, this game is a puzzle and not something to expect to complete in one sitting. You will be offered 3 save slots, but don't expect to use them for backups. You pick a slot, and whenever you save, you will save to that slot only.
But all these buttons would be useless without something to work with, and that's where the basic interface works with the top of the screen. Anything in that picture could potentially be something to interact with. For example you will probably want to use the "take" command on just about every torch the game offers you, but we will get to that in a second. Anything more advanced then 2 clicks (like for example the use command when you try to use something on something else) the game will guide you through, so don't get too hung up on the complication in front of you. It won't even be a matter of minutes till you are ready to go and used to it's offering as you try to solve the puzzles of the castle (even less if you are using a mouse... you can use a controller if you wish like the original release, but if you want to play this at a desk and just move the cursor like you would most games of the type, they added that functionality this time).
And all your puzzles will involve things you encounter in the game, be it an obstacle you need to open, a fiend who is just waiting for you to mess up, or even boobytraps to avoid. Death awaits around every corner in this game, so you will want to pay attention to avoid that as you figure and fumble your way through the game. Thankfully if you die, you are given a continue option (an alternate to the autosave the other versions use) which is quite forgiving if you do mess up, so don't be afraid to try dumb things once in a while.
In addition this game does have a "quasi-timer" in the form of the lit torches at the top of your inventory panel. This is not a timer in the traditional sense where it's always ticking, but rather it counts down on your actions, ticking down how long your lit torch or torches are going to stay lit before they go out. You can use a lit torch (like you can use anything else in the game) on your unlit torch set (it will list how many you have rather then have the all separated in the list) to light it, and when you hear the panicked music, you probably want to. If you let your torch go out without a new one to replace it, the room goes completely dark. And in the darkness, you trip, fall on your head and die. You only start with one of these torches, but right from the second room, you will find them about your adventure, so take all of them you can. This isn't a time limit I found hurt the game cause it's VERY lenient, but it exists and is worth mentioning.
Overall this remains a classic title, worthy of revisiting if you remember playing as a kid or for the first time if you like retro games and want something the NES truly did rarely at all, and yet masterfully in this case. And having played a similarly styled port of the original Mac version, probably the best "old-school" version of the game.
8/10
Story: There really isn't much I can say about the story beyond that you are about to step into a niore world, but that is very much by design. You wake up in a bathroom stall with absolutely no memory of how you got there, or who you even are. All you know is your stuff is hanging on the door in front of you, you are kinda groggy, and you can feel the itch of a pin-prick that suggests someone drugged you. Great way to start your day.
And it's about to get worse... the building you find yourself in is locked and your only company is a corpse in the upper office. How did they die, who were they and what the hell are you knee deep in without a clue about it? These are the questions you will find yourself answering as you explore the seedy side of the city in this point and click adventure. The story around it is fairly direct despite the theme of memory loss it's wrapped neatly in. Still it serves the game well, so I can't complain too hard.
6/10
Graphics: Being of the same family as Shadowgate, the interface is going to look very familiar to anyone who started there. Through the entire game, you will be looking at a screen divided into three sections. The top left side is going to show you a picture of wherever you are, the things there with you, and if anyone has decided to make themselves your business. You can expect the graphics to be relatively basic, this being a game designed for the original NES, but they are colorful and do a good job of catching the eye to the details you will need to focus on for the game. Outside of a few specific scenes, they will not, however, stand out as particularly high quality.
To the right of this "window" you will have the "notes" section which will show you a list. Most of the time, this will be a window into your inventory and you can flip the pages to find whatever item you need or want to try something with. However, any time you open something it will get it's own page to list the contents, and you will always have a page available called Address which will list any streets you find the address of. It's simple, no frills, and effective
Finally the bottom of the screen jumps between controls and descriptions. When you have the controls, it will offer you 9 check boxes to decide what kind of action your cursor is going to do when you click elsewhere and a "map" under the move button which shows roughly where on the display of the room you can click when you want to leave the screen (and the bottom potentially not on the screen as a simple backwards option). This is not all, however, as this panel also contains your controls to flip through the notebook a self box and a save box. There is a lot here, but it is clean and organized very well when it is on screen. I have to make this note, though since this is also where text whenever you do anything appears to explain what happens between your turns. This is a bit more simple as it makes room for a few lines of text, but it too looks good and fits the motif.
The whole package looks clean if primitive. I can't really complain, but I can't see a lot to praise once you get past the functionality either.
6/10
Sound: Since this is a recreation of the NES version of the game you will get absolutely no voice acting from Deja Vu and very little sound effect. In fact you better get used basically hearing typing sound of text when you complete an action, the beep sound of you hitting a button or clicking something to interact with, the pop sound when someone get smacked (or shot) and the swirlish-sound when scenes are changed, cause that's about all the sound effects this game is going to offer. Still I can not blame them for this. After all the original game the NES got a port of was for the Macintosh which has such limited sound functionality, most games on it were silent. The MacVenture series were no exceptions, so that we get sounds at all here was the porting team adapting to the standards of the new machine.
And so was the music, but unlike the sound effects, this had a lot more care. Deja Vu is a noire style game, and the music absolutely had to reflect this, and they got that down brilliantly. In the 8-bit tones that will send many a now grown gamer back to their childhood, you can hear the soundtrack of a black-and-white detective movie about a hard-boiled private eye just ooze through your speakers, and it is absolutely glorious from start to finish. Seriously as much as I love Shadowgate and as such that soundtrack has become an iconic window of growing up for me, the pure artwork to make this whole package flow from it's 1920s vibe is just absolutely brilliant. Can not praise the music here enough.
9/10
Gameplay: Again like Shadowgate, this is a point-and-click adventure designed originally for a controller based console in the 1980s. Since it even uses the same basic engine as it's gothic sibling, the gameplay will be very familiar to those who played it. To that end you will play the roll of an amnesiac who woke up in a bathroom stall in the 1920s. Foul play is afoot and somehow, you have the feeling you are knee deep in the center of it. This basic concept will have you playing a point and click adventure to navigate this situation and not only uncover the brutal details of what has happened, but how to get through it with your freedom and your life.
To do this, you will have three sections of the screen you will have to click around, and click around you will, since it is literally the only way to interact with the game. To do anything will take at least two clicks: one to pick a command from the selection of choices at the bottom and one to select something to do it to. Perhaps the simplest example of this might be clicking the open command before clicking a door (or the spot that represents it in the move panel) to open said door. After doing so, the on-screen picture will reflect what you've done as flavor-text scrolls where your control options were before another click clears the text to let you play again. If you need to act on an additional item, you will instead be asked with this same text box what you wish to do the action on. This is for things like if you use most items you will collect in your inventory as you play. If this sounds clunkly, it is. But it's also very self explanatory and easy to get used to. especially if you are using a mouse to play. Not that you can't use a controller if you wish. The original game was ported to work with the NES' limits, including this, so you can expect this to work really well too.
But these commands are not the only controls you will be offered. At the far-right of the panel you will have buttons to let you flip the pages of your notebook, which is important because you will also need to interact with the items listed here. Depending on the page you are on, you will find items from your inventory, list of things in the stuff you have opened, and an address page. Again, most of this should be self-explanatory, but the address page is something special for this game since you only use it when you get into a cab.
You will need to do this because the game is divided into a handful of locations, and the cab is how you get between them. When you find one and want to travel, you "move" inside and talk to the cabbie who will ask you where you would like to go. At this point your notebook will flip to the address page, allowing you to pick any of the places you have found the address of in your journey. Selecting one will tell the guy to drive there (before he asks for his fee on arrival, of course). It is an interesting mechanic to keep you restricted to useful areas at the moment, and serves the story very well.
The only other buttons I really need to focus on here are "self" and "save." The self button is a unique feature to this engine, as you will have actions you can do to yourself. Since you can never see yourself in any of the pictures, this is how the game lets you target yourself with any of the other actions.
The remaining button is the save one which should be self explanatory. But it is worth noting you can only use one save slot when playing at a time. (The game has three, but you are not allowed to back up your saves by using more then one for a run.) This may add the feel of pressure, in case you are a dead man walking, but I don't think you have much risk of this happening. Simply put the only action I can think of which can stop you from winning is to get stranded without money for the cabbie.
You see in this game you have some currency you can use as you play: a $20 bill and coins (effectively quarters). And you can lose them by using them in a few places or having them stolen by a mugger, but you will always need 3 coins to pay the cabbie when you want to travel. You can get more, but only in the casino you can find at the bar in the early game. Now don't worry about gambling running you out of coins. Yes it can happen, but if it does, you can check the other slot machines to find a spare coin that will let you try again anyway, so that will not be your issue. Nor will the mugger screw you over since he only shows up on the same street as said bar. (Although if you have the bad luck to run into him when you're out of money, that COULD be an issue.) However, there is no other place in the game where you can get more coins, so if you don't watch to make sure you have enough money for the fair to get home, you may well strand yourself.
Furthermore, while the game will do it's best to make you THINK you have a time-limit based on how bad you feel, the more grisly effects of your amnesia are scripted based on if go to a very specific spot before you do a very specific thing, so there isn't a point where you could have wasted so much time, you simply can't win... even if you try.
Overall this might just make this the easiest of the three games in the collection, even if it doesn't feel like it by some rather clever narration work. It's also still a pretty solid game, just not going to be my favorite between the all-powerful force of nostalgia Shadowgate has with me, or a taste for horror I am hoping to be quenched when I play Uninvited.
7/10
Story: You have probably had better days, much better considering how you woke up. Your car was totaled, leaking gas, and your sister is missing. On top of that, the only place you might be able to get help is a rather ominous looking mansion. But with nowhere else to go, it's time to step inside and deal with the horrific things within.
This basic beginning will start you on your journey to find your sister, figure out what is going on in this forlorn building, and hopefully get both of you out of it alive. It is not a very deep plot to be sure, but this is a point and click game created in the 80s. However as you navigate the house, you will find a few clues to start filling in the details which feel like the start to a picture started years before you arrive. But if you can't put it together, don't worry. There is a final data-dump towards the end which literally spills all the beans this game will offer, if not leave the absolute last encounter not fully explained. It also does a good job of setting the tone of this haunted house, which is a nice touch for the time. Simple, but effective.
6/10
Graphics: If you have played the other two games in this collection, you are already going to be very familiar with the layout of the screen, using roughly 1/3rd of the screen at the bottom to display your controls and, when needed, text to explain what is going on. This looks good enough and organized to be easy to read and be used, but it is basically text with buttons (in this case, blood splatters): there isn't really a lot to make it look special in any way.
This last part of the screen is going to look primitive, which is to be expected since this is based on the NES version of the game. Still some of this can look rough even for that. You will have a display for each room and hallway in the game that, while it good enough, can often be devoid of details or (potentially) rely on patterns which do not work well for the "3D" view you are supposed to have. If I were to hazard a guess, this might have allowed them to cram more game into the cart back in the day. Still all the details you need to see are here so while this wont be the prettiest game you will ever see (even by NES standards) nothing here will be remotely bad enough to get in your way.
Nor are you alone in this house, but this is where things look a lot better. Everyone you meet is crafted exceptionally well for limits of the hardware, resulting in some nice looking sprite work accompanied by some genuinely messed up closeups for when you really mess up dealing with these unnatural forces and are about to face a game over.
7/10
Sound: Again, this being a game based in the NES hardware originally, there is no voice work at all. Furthermore this being a point and click, you will have a very limited amount of sound effects. Expect outside of a few explosions, the beep of your button presses, the whir when you switch rooms, or magical twittering, to hear very little outside the music of the game.
And yet this seems to be for the best because this soundtrack is absolutely fantastic. I would not be shocked if the chiptunes were by the same people who did the NES port of Shadowgate, as they carry much the same feel. It's dark, moody, and just sounds right. And even that opening title sounds amazing, if a little out of place for how high energy it is. It sounds fantastic and makes a case for sometimes less being more... less sound effects to hear more of the music while you play.
8/10
Gameplay: And as noted, we finish off this trilogy of games with another turn-based point-and-click title. You will move time forward by choosing actions in the bottom of the screen and applying them to objects in your inventory, the view of the room, or yourself, to complete the puzzles the game will throw at you, but this title does both better and worse then it's sibling games. True it was the last one to be ported to the NES, but it was originally made before the legendary Shadowgate and it shows. This game is relatively simple with less hidden details in the rooms themselves you will need to pay attention to to figure out.
Rather just about every clue you will need will be delivered to you via text, be it an obvious foreshadowing question like when you open the mailbox at the very beginning or something you read in a scroll. It does lessen the depth and volume of the puzzles, but what is here remains enjoyable as you explore and figure out Master Crowley's house. Also, unlike either of the other games, there is no timelimit to get in your way, at least if you don't give yourself one. There is a specific a ruby you will find in the game which once you pick it up, you will be on a countdown till the spirit in the ruby possesses you and ends the game. However like most objects in this game, the ruby is not necessary complete your adventure, so if you don't want to deal with that, it is exceptionally easy to avoid.
Overall, it is satisfying game from start to finish, but it is very clear the devs making this first, learned a lot about how to do horror before they unleashed their magnum opus: Shadowgate.
7/10
Source: PC Gaming Wiki
- WHY CANT I CLICK? Twice when starting the game, the mouse didn't allow me to select an action. I do not know why but clicking literally did nothing. To fix this, I had to go to my keyboard and move the cursor that way before pressing space on a button. From that point on, it worked fine.
- Bugged achievements: Once again this seemed to only happen when playing Uninvited, but I couldn't get most of the achievements to trigger. This clearly didn't matter so much to me as was something I found weird as Ive never had a game fail to do that before.
7/10
System Requirements:
- Any Dual core CPU running at 2 Ghz or higher
- 4 GB RAM
- ATi Radeon HD 4800 or Nvidia Geforce 8800GT
- Windows 7 (64-Bit)
- 300 MB of Hard Drive space
System Specs:
- Ryzen 7 (5700X) 3.4 Ghz
- 32 GB RAM
- AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT (8 GB VRAM)
- Windows 11 (64 Bit)
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