Shadowgate
Shadowgate shows that things weren’t all better back in the day. By Andy Chalk
Less than a remake, this is a new coat of paint on an old jalopy, a cosmetic upgrade that leaves the nuts and bolts of the original ’80s adventure game untouched: a collection of sometimes tenuously connected rooms within a massive castle packed full of traps, monsters and puzzles that must be solved or bypassed to save the land from a great, generic evil.
This version is every bit as opaque and unforgiving as the 1987 original. At one point I was stricken by an evil curse, but I didn’t actually know I was cursed (and, more to the point, that I needed to find a cure) until it had already taken a serious toll on my body. Some of the puzzles are wickedly obtuse— one in particular I couldn’t make heads or tails of even after I’d ‘solved’ it by use of a walkthrough—and hints are scattered, sparse, and vague. Shadowgate makes zero effort to communicate important information to you.
That may be precisely what a lot of old-time Shadowgate fans are looking for, but it’s also the root of its real weakness: it’s an anachronism that forgoes any kind of enhancement that would properly bring it into the current era. Some very basic elements of modern gaming are missing, such as the ability to rearrange inventory items, and even the visual overhaul isn’t all that terribly impressive.
Shadowgate is Myst in Hell, and while it’s an undeniable success as a straight-up reproduction of a mid’80s point-and-click adventure, the slavish devotion to its source material is tiresome and frustrating. Nostalgia is nice, but not everything improves with age.