Shadowgate Review

Shadowgate is one of the latest games to come out of a successful Kickstarter campaign as a re-imagining of a Mac and NES title from the late ‘80s. It is a dungeon adventuring game where you attempt to navigate your way through a series of rooms to complete your quest and attempt to avoid the great variety of ways in which the game wants to kill you. The game does a fair job of getting you acquainted with the fact that it is going to kill you a lot early on. The moment you finish the tutorial you are in danger of dying, as the first thing you interact with will kill you without any warning, teaching you a valuable lesson in vigilant saving practices. I am going to preface my review and say that I did not manage to complete the game as there was a game update that deleted my saved files and I did not have the time to go through it again but I did manage to get fairly far through the campaign.

The first thing that you notice when you begin this game is the art style. It has a very watercolour-based style and each new room in-game is beautifully drawn in the same style as the cutscenes. The music also does a good job of adding to the atmosphere, although I have not played any of the original games to be able to recognise songs that are taken from the first releases. The animation style is fairly basic and most moving objects are only primitively animated, but this was inevitable due to the hand-drawn art style.

The game is difficult and as I said before the game sets out with no pretense that it will kill you a lot, however this does run you into a problem. The first time you die, this cool animation occurs where you see a beautiful hand-drawn death and you get a message about how you have failed in your quest, this animation feels less special the 50th time you have died, starts to become an annoyance as you just want to get back into the room and work out how you progress without dying.

The voice acting is fairly good for an indie ‘game although’ there are only a few voiced characters they are all done competently especially for a Kickstarted title. There are however very few characters in the game as it does a very good job of creating a sense of isolation. It wants you to feel alone and constantly in danger and for the most part it does a very good job of this. Whenever you see a new creature you instantly feel threatened and are of aware how easily your actions can lead to your death.

While I have not played many point-and-clicks in my time having been very young in their hayday, of the late ‘90s and early 2000s I found myself very much enjoying Shadowgate. It has a real charm to it and I do believe that it captures the spirit of that era of games very well plus nicely slots into this new trend of very difficult games. I am in two minds over Kickstarter as a means of financing a game due to the lack of protection of backers, It is still good to see there is still demand for this kind of unique experience and it will be interesting seeing if more mainstream publishers start to take notice, especially in this time where consoles are suffering.

All in all I enjoyed my time with Shadowgate despite my personal incompetence. It took me some time to get into the interface, however fans of the original will instantly be familiar with this and once you work it out it performs well enough. If you are not up for a challenge I would stay away, however those willing to put in the time figuring out the games puzzles will be rewarded with a real sense of satisfaction from each one you complete. You will also be rewarded by seeing more of the beautiful art that has been created for the game. I only played on the normal difficulty setting and I felt that the challenge was hard enough for my peon brain, and at times to my shame I was tempted to go down to easy just because I wanted to advance and see more of the beautiful art.

I would definitely recommend Shadowgate to anyone who is looking for something a little bit different and I will keep going and try to complete it despite losing my progress (a problem you won’t have in the release version).