Game 428: Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness

This is the only sequel in the series to not include the game's number in the title.

       

Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness
United States
Sierra On-Line (developer and publisher)
Released 1993 for DOS and Windows
Date Started: 5 August 2021

    

Whether the discussion is films, books, or games, it has become de rigueur to complain that everything is a remake or sequel or part of a franchise, that Hollywood has no original ideas, and so on. I prefer a more balanced approach. We should always welcome originality, but there is also an incomparable joy in seeing the title screen of a new entry in a solid franchise, especially when you have a history with the authors and you trust that it's going to be good.

  

I realize that such an opening paragraph is dripping with irony. Fans who purchased the game in December 1993, anticipating the latter experience, were swiftly disabused--and, in equal proportion, abused--by a title so buggy as to be unwinnable. For a series that had always been well-crafted, free of not only bugs but also most "walking dead" situations, Shadows must have been a shock. I've often seen Shadows described as the first game to use the strategy, now unfortunately common, of releasing an unfinished game, using paying customers as beta testers, and following up with a flurry of patches.

  

I'll discuss the issues with the initial release more in the final entries, but for now, I'll just say that 28 years later, playing a version that is not only patched but re-released at least twice, I can let myself feel some of that joy. I'm aware that the final version still has problems (although I've tried to avoid spoilers), but I also know that it's fundamentally going to be a good game.

      
Shadows of Darkness was originally going to be the third game in the series--it is announced as the next title at the end of Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire--but the authors decided that they need another one in between for pacing reasons. I agree with them that it worked out better that way. Shadows features the reappearance of Trial's villain, and it makes more sense to give him time to regroup and plot in between his two games. Fricana helped create a more varied game world for the series, and it allowed the authors to explore the paladin class while the hero still had a paladin to learn from. 

      

As the opening cinematic showed the camera swirling around a mountaintop, a few things occurred to me. First, I'm not in love with the theme. So You Want to Be a Hero opened with the classic "hero" theme, which was re-cast into an "Arabian" style for Trial by Fire. Wages of War opened with a new theme, heavily influenced by African music, with syncopated drumming and shouts. The theme here is credited to the well-known Aubrey Hodges, albeit early in his career. The theme starts out at least adequate. For a game set in a fictional version of Transylvania, you definitely want a minor mode and a lot of low-register instruments, and that's what we get, at first. But it's a bit too fast, and after the wolves howl over the title, it goes off the rails completely, turning into a rock anthem complete with some shredding on an electric guitar that just doesn't fit the game's mood at all.

   

While I'm talking about negative things, I'm also not a fan of the subtitle. I'm not sure whether Shadows of Darkness means "shadows cast by darkness" or "shadows composed of darkness"; the former makes no sense, and the latter describes all shadows. I realize it's probably making a reference to the TV series Dark Shadows, which is similarly redundant but at least gets it out of the way faster. What I like about the previous two games is that they took common cliches and made them thematically relevant in the game itself. In that spirit, I think something like Dead of Night or Shadow of Death would have served it better. 

   

The opening cinematic closes on an image of a castle with a moon behind it. If there wasn't the sound of a wolf howling on the audio track, you'd almost certainly hear it, unbidden, in your mind. The title appears over the moon, the subtitle in a gothic font, arced as if to suggest that that the words are moving from the front left to the rear right of the image. It occurs to me that I've seen this exact title arrangement perhaps a thousand times, but I have no idea what the original example is. Some Hammer film from the 1950s?

As usual, the game lets you import characters or create new ones. I love the character creation screen, which starts with three closed doors. The fighter bursts his way through his door, the wizard dissolves his with a spell, and the thief pokes his head through before cautiously edging it open. You cannot create a paladin; you have to import one from Quest for Glory III: Wages of War. 

     

The character creation screen offers a cute set of animations.

      

Attributes (strength, intelligence, agility, vitality, luck, magic, communication) and skills (weapon use, parry, dodge, stealth, pick locks, throwing, climbing, acrobatics, honor) have not really changed since the last game except that "Communication" has become an attribute rather than a skill. There are no more "paladin" points, but that's fine, as in Wages they were more a reflection of the player's progress towards becoming a full paladin.

 

The creation process is far more limited here than in the previous games. New characters start with most of their attributes and skills defined, with only a pool of 100 points to allocate to improvements. 100 points is the minimum for learning any new skill, and every character starts with at least two skills at 0, so you cannot create a "jack of all trades."

    

Imported characters have only a slight advantage over new ones. I ended Wages with characters of all four classes. My highest statistics are found with my thief, who has a highest attribute (strength) of 300 and an average of 248. A newly-created thief has a high attribute of 250 (agility) and an average attribute of 208. For skills, my thief starts with the same levels as a new thief except for throwing (100 points higher for the imported thief) and weapon use (31 points higher). My imported fighter, who I rushed through Wages, has no advantages at all over a new fighter except that I gave him the "Acrobatics" skill for some reason.

     

My imported paladin.

     

I asked my Patreon subscribers what class I should play for my initial (and most complete) experience with Shadows, and the most common answer was "paladin." That works well, since I've favored the thief and wizard in previous entries. Every class but fighter got a fair number of votes, though, and unless the game is unusually long or complicated, I'm sure I'll check it out from multiple perspectives.

    

Quest for Glory III ended with the victorious hero seized by some kind of magical epilepsy as two figures watched him in a crystal ball. One was Ad Avis, the enemy from Quest for Glory II, now looking rather vampiric. The other was an unrevealed hooded figure. I said that it was likely the "Dark Master" Ad Avis had spoken of in his villain's speech--someone so evil that his or her portrait had been obliterated in the Wizard Institute of Technology (W.I.T.).

   

The magic apparently teleported the hero away, as he awakens at the beginning of Shadows in a huge cavern full of skeletons, large and small. The narration kicks things off:

   

You awaken from nightmares of flying and falling. You find yourself in this strange place, the only illumination an eerie green glow. You've lost your weapons and the contents of your backpack somewhere during the journey. All you have are the clothes and armor on your back. This leaves you with four burning questions:

   

Where are you?

How did you get here?

Who brought you here?

And how in blazes can you get out of here?

No, make that FIVE burning questions: What city did your luggage end up in THIS time?

  

You have of course taken note of the series' patented humor. But what's more notable during gameplay is that this text is actually narrated, by none other than John Rhys-Davies. This is seven or eight years before he would become famous for playing Gimli; contemporary players would recognize him as Sallah in the first and third Indiana Jones films or from one of his many television roles. I don't think the voice work was present in the original 1993 floppy disk release. My understanding is that it accompanied the 1994 CD-ROM version. 

   

Rhys-Davies narrates everything, including every object you click on with the eye icon and every action that you take, including those that work ("you take the torch") and those that don't ("it doesn't budge"). It is both impressive and spectacularly unnecessary. He does his best, but his voice simply doesn't work well for the many jokes and asides that the authors put into the text. It's particularly jarring for me, as I've always heard those narrations in Lori Cole's voice. I've actually never heard Lori Cole's voice, but for some reason I've always imagined that she sounds like Julia Sweeney.

    

Rhys-Davies's grave voice simply doesn't work well for some of the game's more flippant text.

     

(It's been about eight months since Corey Cole commented, so I don't know if he's still reading, but if he is, this is what I would like to know: Were you aware that the lines would eventually be voice-narrated when you were writing the text in the first place? If so, did that change how you approached the writing process?)

   

(Another parenthetical: After I had been playing the game for a little while, I put it in the background while I did some work. A few hours later, I had completely forgotten about it. I was trying to troubleshoot an SQL statement when I was startled by a deep voice saying, "You are getting very hungry." This was all the more alarming because it was true. It took me a few seconds to realize that it was the game.)

     

The interface is essentially unchanged from the previous version. Everything is still almost completely mouse-controlled. Hovering the cursor at the top of the screen brings a row of icons that allow you to walk, look, talk, manipulate, cast a spell, use an item, perform a variety of special actions (run, sneak, sleep), or go into your inventory or game options. Right clicking the mouse quickly cycles the cursor among these options. There's a new "Jump" option on the "special actions" menu. Some of the problems I've had with previous titles have been fixed, such as the "special actions" menu not staying active. There are no keyboard redundancies except in combat. I don't really understand why "Talk" couldn't have been mapped to "T," and so on.

      

From later in the game: A forest scene with a row of control icons at the top.

    

I will continue to maintain to my dying day that the text parser was a better interface, requiring more creativity on the part of the player. But it certainly wouldn't have worked well in the opening moments of Shadows, which find you in the cave below. If you had the text parser, what would you even type? No individual object or location stands out. There are some blobs that could be skeletons, so I guess you could type SEARCH SKELETON, but otherwise you really need to be able to click to get anywhere.

   

I was a little embarrassed by how long it took me to get out of the first room, but a lot of it depends on clicking on things that have no graphical emphasis. Fortunately, when you click on something useful, the character actually walks over to it, whereas when you click on something useless, the game tells you immediately that there's no point. By essentially clicking everywhere on the screen, I eventually found some money (crowns and kopeks), a dagger, a chunk of flint, and a torch. Lighting the torch involved using the dagger on the flint, which creates a spark, and then using the flint on the torch. 

 

That sounds horribly unpleasant for whatever this thing is.

     

The torch allowed me to see well enough to operate a sphincter on the far wall, bringing me to a new cavern. The second cavern had a weird, glowing pillar in the center and three other "sphincter" doors, none of which would open. A skeleton on the floor had a sword and shield. 

  

Again, it took me a while to get out of the room. It's not clear to me from the image that the southern "wall" is open and thus the room's exit. I had the same problem with caves in the first game, I seem to remember. Eventually, I wandered close enough to it that it triggered a fixed combat with a couple of giant bats.

    

Is it clear to you that the exit to this screen is in the foreground?

   

Combat has been somewhat redesigned from the first three games. In Shadows, you fight from a side view. You have the same number of options as the previous games, including attacks, defenses, and spells, but now with consideration of whether the enemy is high or low. There's a quick combat option if you want the computer to fight for you. I'll cover combat in more detail later, after I've had some more experience with it. For now, let me just say that I really don't like the appearance of the main character in combat. I'm also not sure why my sword wasn't flaming, since that was a paladin ability I acquired in the last game.

     

The combat screen. I've killed one bat and am engaging a second.

    

The graphics are otherwise on par with Wages of War. The forest scenes have a softer touch, almost impressionistic in places, but otherwise I don't notice any major changes. They seem state-of-the-art for the era, and certainly good enough for me. There are some nice background sound effects, particularly out in the forest, with birds chirping and hawks screeching. I like the in-game music better than the title theme. As I commented in relation to Perihelion, music in this series is scored better than the typical title. It shows up to establish a mood, never pushes itself to the foreground when it shouldn't, and goes away when it's not necessary.

  

Getting out of the cave involves crossing a chasm on a rope tied between two stalagmites. I used my "Acrobatics" skill to tightrope-walk. A tentacle swatted at me from below but didn't hit me. I imagine the wizard uses "Levitate" and then pulls himself along the rope, and the thief can use "Climbing" or "Acrobatics." It didn't occur to me until I'd already crossed that fighters and paladins don't normally have "Acrobatics" or "Climbing," so I'm not sure what the proper solution was supposed to be.

       

Maybe the fighter just takes a running leap.

      

As I emerged from the "cave's" mouth, it closed behind me, indicating that I'd been in the belly of some beast rather than a natural cave. My paladin senses tingled. A hooded woman stood next to an archway, and she introduced herself before I could do anything. She expressed surprise that I had made it out alive, introduced herself as Katrina, and said we were in Mordavia. She forestalled any further questions by saying it was dangerous to be out at night, and she suggested I head directly for the town to the north.

    

His first girlfriend had hooves. His wife left him for another warrior. Is our hero's luck about to turn at last?

       

Katrina is voiced by the famous Jennifer Hale, in which might be her first voice acting gig (she had two cartoons the same year; I don't know when they were released). She affects a high-pitched, vaguely Germanic accent. Something surprised me about it, but it might involve spoilers for later, so I'll cover that at the end of the game.

    

The path to the cave had an archway at the entrance. When I looked at it, the game said that it had eight arcane symbols, and I recognized seven of them as Blood, Bone, Breath, Essence, Heart, Mouth, and Senses. The last, which I could take, "looked like a six-armed starfish, or perhaps like the tentacles of an octopus." The game cleverly avoided the word "Cthulhu" here, but it's pretty clear that's what it was going for. I had remembered that the game had a strong Gothic horror foundation, but I had forgotten that it also had Lovecraftian elements. More likely, I simply didn't know anything about Lovecraftian fiction the first time I encountered the game in the late 1990s and thus didn't recognize the references.

  

The game opens up a lot at this point. I spent some time randomly exploring, fighting a few combats, noting a few puzzles, but I really need to start over and map from the beginning. My recollection is that Shadows is like the first game in its geography, in that you simply move between a series of screens rather than transitioning between different types of geographies at different scales the way you do in both Trial by Fire and Wages of War. 

   

I obviously haven't gotten very far, but I thought I'd use the rest of this entry to talk about the game's documentation. It comes with several booklets, including a manual, a technical guide, and a "hero's journal." The manual and technical guide are curiously misnamed, as the "manual" is more about the process of installing the game and the "technical guide" is more about how to play it. Either way, they're both relatively dry and clinical. The usual Cole humor is saved for a fictional magazine called Hero: The Journal of General Job Adjusting, into which the authors poured every joke, reference, and pun that they could think of. It's certainly funny: the first page is an advertisement for an oversized ladder meant to help adventurers buff their climbing ability. The roles of the four classes are explored in goofy magazine-style articles, including an opinion piece from fighter Carl Atlas, an advice column by paladin Magnifico Mannerly, an interview with Erasmus and Fenrus, and a confessional from thief Matt "The Cat" MacMaster. There's apparently a system of "thief marks" in the game, much like the hobo code of old, which warn you of treasures, dangers, and traps. (Amusingly, the thieves' guild itself is just the letters "TG.") 

    

The contents of Hero magazine.

         

These and other articles offer some clues about the setting. In Erasmus's interview, the reader is reminded of the mysterious Erana, who established groves of safety in Spielburg and Fricana before disappearing. Erasmus also recounts the fate of Ad Avis and mentions his mysterious "Dark Master"--who is rumored to be "holed up in an abandoned castle somewhere in the Land of Mordavia."

   

Mordavia is described in a travelogue by "October Derleth," a play on Lovecraft's publisher August Derleth. It is described as both a valley with one entrance (much like Spielburg) and a town within the valley. Key locations are the abandoned Castle Borgov, the Monastery of the Mad Monk, the Gardens of Erana, some place called the Mouth of the Dark One, and the laboratory of Dr. Cranium. An article by "P. H. Craftlove" (come on; you guys can do better than that) establishes the Cult of Amon Tillado and its goal to summon an ancient horror named Avoozl. Erana apparently died battling the beast during the last attempt to raise him. I'll cover more about this lore as I encounter pieces of it during the game.

   

The manual is fun, but its frequent goofiness undermines what I thought was supposed to be a darker, more serious entry in the series. I certainly hope that the tone of the game doesn't turn too often to the jocular. That there's a mad scientist named "Dr. Cranium" (a clear play on Sierra's Dr. Brain games) somewhere makes me nervous.

      

Despite some points of criticism, I'm already enjoying the game and feeling extremely optimistic about it. I look forward to thoroughly exploring it with multiple character classes.

   

Time so far: 1 hour