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Shadowgate: 25th Anniversary Remaster
PC (Steam)
A Welcome Return
4.5/5 stars
The original “Shadowgate” was created by ICOM Simulations, a Western game maker that, at the time, was equivalent to modern Indie developers in its scope. “Shadowgate” was the third in a series of four stellar Adventure games that were originally released for Mac OS, but were quickly ported to a range of other PC platforms and consoles. My first experience with ICOM’s Adventure games came from the NES ports, which were among the finest pieces of entertainment to be found on that 8-bit console, despite still falling into standard Adventure game design flaw of sometimes being a bit too clever for their own good.
Regardless, thanks to its fantasy theme and tantalizingly dangled background lore, “Shadowgate” was always my favorite of the ICOM games. As a middle-schooler, I was so enthralled with the game’s world that I even wrote a fanfiction, creatively entitled “Shadowgate II” for one of my writing classes in school. I desperately wanted a sequel that captured that great “Shadowgate” essence while simultaneously expanding our view of how the game fits into a larger setting with surrounding characters and events.
Had I even known what a TurboGrafx was at the time of its release, I probably would have hounded my parents to buy one for me solely for the opportunity to play “Beyond Shadowgate,” which was released for that misbegotten platform in 1993. Instead, my next encounter with the world of “Shadowgate” made me and my beloved Adventure franchise the victims of the N64, with “Shadowgate 64: Trials of the Four Towers” proving to be a disaster that didn’t come close to living up to its 8-bit predecessor.
When I heard that the original ICOM employees who worked on those classic Adventure games were forming a new Indie development company called Zojoi and Kickstarting an anniversary remaster of my favorite ICOM game, it was the best news I’d heard about Adventure games in a long, long time. Even better, upon finishing the “Shadowgate 25th Anniversary Remaster” (“Shadowgate Remaster”), I was even more pleased to see that Zojoi is working on a remaster of “Beyond Shadowgate” next!
Presentation
“Shadowgate Remaster” uses a 2D graphics engine with impressionistic-style hand-painted graphics. The engine isn’t particularly impressive from a technical standpoint, but the art is great and does an excellent job of evoking the setting of Castle Shadowgate. There are significantly more animations in the remaster than the original, as well. “Shadowgate Remaster” also provides a plethora of options for players to choose between modern and retro aesthetics, covering the graphics, audio, scene transitions, and menu commands, which is an extremely nice touch. Unfortunately, the retro style graphics are absolutely awful and unusable since, instead of actually building a separate set of retro-style scenes into the game, the devs decided to just apply a super-pixilating filter to the modern graphics and called it retro.
The modern audio is, sadly, not as impressive as the retro audio, which includes the complete original chiptunes score that I remember from the NES version. The modern soundtrack is just far too muted and doesn’t do a good job of capturing the melodies of the original soundtrack at all. All of the cutscenes are fully voiced, but the quality of the recording and the delivery of the lines can be a bit iffy.
In the end, I settled for a chimera experience with the game’s presentation options, using modern graphics and retro everything else. It worked well enough, but I really would have liked to have heard the original soundtrack in fully-orchestrated glory.
Story
The original “Shadowgate’s” narrative felt quite mysterious and came across as something of a tease. It simply plopped a nameless character into a quest to infiltrate the Living Castle Shadowgate in order to stop someone called the Warlock Lord from doing something terrible. While it did reveal snippets of in-world lore, the original “Shadowgate” was, regardless, a rather opaque game.
“Shadowgate Remaster,” on the other hand, features a plethora of explanatory cutscenes throughout the game. Thanks to this newly verbose take on the game, we know that our hero is a boy named Jair who was summoned to the castle by the wizard Lakmir as a last resort to stop the Warlock Lord from dominating the entire realm. With time being of the essence, Jair was commanded to hurry to the castle, bringing only the barest of supplies with him.
Immediately upon reaching the castle, Jair discovers an annoying talking skull named Yorick who serves as a sidekick and a source of usually-unhelpful commentary and hints. Together, Jair and Yorick must make their way to the heart of the Living Castle and prevent the Warlock Lord from acquiring the power hidden within.
Over the course of his journey through the castle, Jair can read a plethora of scrolls, journals, and library books that do a fantastic job of fleshing out the narrative, character backgrounds (including his own), and bits and pieces of information about the world outside of the castle itself.
Gameplay
“Shadowgate Remaster” is a 100% authentic point-and-click Adventure game. Everything in the game revolves around clicking commands and objects in combinations to solve puzzles and push deeper into the castle structure… where more puzzles await. “Shadowgate Remaster” does an excellent job of updating such old-school gameplay. The player’s inventory is broken down into four sections (whereas the original just dumped objects into the inventory willy-nilly) for items, reading materials, wearables, and spells. Likewise, “Shadowgate Remaster” features a button the player can press to highlight every interactive object on the screen, which immediately eliminates many of the more frustrating moments from the original “Shadowgate.”
As a remaster, the anniversary release does a fantastic job of modifying many of the original puzzles to make them less obnoxious, while also introducing a large number of all-new puzzles. However, where “Shadowgate Remaster” shines the brightest is with its multitude of difficulty settings. The default difficulty is Normal, but the game also offers three ‘Classic’ difficulty settings: Apprentice, Journeyman, and Master.
In Normal difficulty, torches last forever, there is no ultimate time limit, and every puzzle is fairly straight forward and self-explanatory. Apprentice reinstates the torch timer but is otherwise nearly identical to Normal. In Journeyman and Master, however, many of the puzzles that require only one step in Normal and Apprentice become multi-step affairs. In addition, the harder difficulties also include more ways to die, shorter and shorter torch timers, a shorter overall time limit to clear the game (measured in ‘turns’ that count every action besides looking at things), and some puzzles that can result in the player permanently screwing themselves to the point of needing to start over from the beginning. I thought Journeyman was just about perfect, as Master really forces the player to be efficient with their turn usage and includes a few really obnoxious puzzles that hearken back to the worst aspects of old-school Adventure gaming. Unfortunately, playing on Master is the only way to unlock certain areas in the castle as well as access certain optional puzzles. I’m not really clear on why the devs thought it would be a good idea to include optional goodies only in the mode with the super-short timer.
Regardless of a few downer puzzles on the hardest difficulties, I really love the fact that “Shadowgate Remaster” is still a short game to play through (a run by an experience player might take an hour or two), as the length and multiple difficulties really lend themselves to multiple runs through the game. Even better, many of the puzzles on the harder difficulties become much easier if a player already has a working knowledge of that puzzle from the easier difficulties. In this respect, replaying the game subsequent times allows past experiences to build upon themselves and provide new insights that might not be immediately apparent.
Overall
“Shadowgate 25th Anniversary Remaster” is a wonderful facelift for one of the greatest Adventure games of all time. While I am disappointed in the new soundtrack and the fact that the game is not completely devoid of obtuse puzzles, the overall experience is extremely good. The fact that this is actually an Adventure game with a decent amount of replay value due to the way the puzzles and their solutions build upon each other through the increasing difficulty levels just provides the cherry on top of an already great experience. I’m very excited about the prospect of getting to play a remastered version of “Beyond Shadowgate” in 2016!
Presentation: 4.5/5
Story: 5/5
Gameplay: 4.5/5
Overall (not an average): 4.5/5
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