I entered Castle Shadowgate as a pitiful buffoon and exited as a seasoned adventurer.
"There are many strange things in this world," Shadowgate's narrator explained as I engaged in the peculiar act of playing a magic flute to force open a hole in a tree whose innards were hiding a blue ring.
That line stuck with me because it perfectly encapsulated how I felt about my early experiences with text-based adventure games and the platforms that gave birth to them. It said everything about my journey into a world that was unlike any other I'd ever visited.
In my case, the "strange things" were gaming computers and the types of weird and bizarre games and game-genres that were popularly associated with them. They weren't like other platforms and game types, no. They were remarkably different. They were strange and unusual to such a large degree that I couldn't help but regard them as otherworldly (I talk about this in detail in just about all of my Commodore 64-related pieces).
My history with the Commodore 64 and its games told me that the computer-gaming world was a vast wonderland filled with strange and wonderful things.
But I didn't realize just how large in scope that wonderland truly was until I was introduced to Shadowgate and its ilk.
At that point in my life, I didn't understand how important text adventures were to computer gaming and its history. I assumed that they represented some niche, offbeat genre--mostly because no one I knew had ever owned, played or showed interest in a text-adventure game. And, really, I just didn't know all that much about the genre. My knowledge of it was limited to what I'd seen in Law of the West (a choose-your-own-path-style text-based game that I played regularly), Oregon Trail (a text-based strategy game that we'd occasionally play on our school's IBM machines), and Colossal Cave Adventure (the made-for-film text adventure that Tom Hanks' character would play intermittently).
And, really, that was about all I cared to know. I just didn't take the genre seriously enough to want to learn more about it.
I mean, I was kinda fascinated with what Colossal Cave Adventure had presented--with the idea of a computer game that could understand almost anything you could think to type into its command box--yeah, but I simply couldn't envision a future in which games built on such systems could ever hold my attention for more than a few minutes.
"Text-based games lack substance and thus quickly grow boring," I'd always think to myself. "I could never have major interest in such games."
So as you can imagine, I wasn't exactly brimming with excitement when, on one random day in early 1990, my brother, James, walked into our den and eagerly presented to me the NES version of Shadowgate (the crown jewel of his latest game-grabbing binge).
There were two problems here: (1) I'd never heard of the game, and thus I had no immediate interest in it; and (2) as I looked over the box's back cover, I saw some troubling telltale signs: screenshots that displayed static imagery surrounded by words and a lot of expository text.
"Oh no!" I thought to myself as I examined the box cover's content. "This is one of those text-adventure games, like the one I saw in Big!"
In that moment, my mood soured, and all I could think was, "Really?! You bought a game about reading a bunch of text?! That's not what you're supposed to do in video games, man; that's what you do when you're in school! No one wants to read mountains of text while playing video games! Why would you even bring this to me?!"
Admittedly, I thought the name "Shadowgate" was cool-sounding, and I found the box cover's storyline description and imagery to be kinda tantalizing (both alluded to the existence of awesome-sounding monsters and villains, after all!). Though, I had no desire to actually play Shadowgate. Not at that moment, at least. Not during a period in which recent releases like Super Mario Bros. 3, Double Dragon II: The Revenge and Batman were dominating my life!
Still, I couldn't help but be a little curious as to what Shadowgate was and how it played. So the next day, I wandered my way down to the basement with the intent of watching James and his friends play it (and because James was currently borrowing my NES, I didn't have much else to do). And I arrived just as they were beginning to advance past the game's opening screen.
I figured that I'd watch them play for a couple of minutes--get a sense of what the game was--and then split. "I'll go do something more interesting," I thought, "like update my Superbook or watch some cartoons."
Though, it didn't happen that way. Shadowgate, surprisingly, managed to legitimately capture my interest.
Shadowgate wasn't what I was expecting it to be. Its action, much like every other text adventure's, was communicated mostly via text and static imagery, yeah, but even then, there was still something curiously unique about how said action was conveyed. During those moments, though, I couldn't quite identify what that "something" was. It might have been the way in which the monsters were coming off as frightfully menacing even though they were silent and motionless. Or how its chilling music permeated every part of me as it reverberated throughout the basement. Or the way its haunting vibe colored the room's entire atmosphere and insofar created an underlying sense of trepidation that we were all able to sense.
Whatever it was, it had piqued my interest.
And after thinking about what I'd seen and heard, I decided that the "strangely attractive" Shadowgate was worth at least a few minutes of my time. Not because I was seriously thinking about playing through it, no. I wasn't. It was just that I was still feeling a bit curious about some of its more unique aspects.
In order to do that, I just needed to get near it again.
The most convenient time to do so turned out to be the afternoon of the following day, at a time when James and his friends were out engaging in their usual troublemaking activities. Once I was sure that they were gone, I sneaked down into the basement (because James didn't want me hanging out down there when he wasn't present) and then proceeded to turn off all of the lights, settle into the wheeled leather chair (which was basically James' throne), and ready myself for a quick sampling of Shadowgate.
The atmosphere was perfect for this type of experience: The NES was set upon the sturdy wooden coffee table that formed the center of the basement's gaming space. The TV was placed up on high, atop James' custom-made entertainment center, commanding attention. The house was empty and thus dead quiet (since both of my parents were still at work). And the faint sunlight that was shining through the basement's pair of barred windows was producing an appropriately eerie yellow-and-blue backdrop.
And once again, things didn't go as I expected: After 12 to 15 minutes had passed, I was still there in that basement, playing Shadowgate (I didn't intend to spend more than 10 minutes with the game). Without realizing it, I'd slowly become engrossed in Shadowgate's action, and suddenly I was now invested in the idea of solving its puzzles because they were standing in the way of further eager appraisal.
The problem was that I couldn't figure out how to solve any of them. I was completely stumped--more so than I'd ever been stumped by a puzzle-type game. I couldn't even get past the game's second screen.
That session wound up lasting a half an hour, and it would have gone on longer had I not been worried about a scenario in which the basement's side door would suddenly open and my returning brother would immediately kick me out. And as I switched off the NES, I was sure of one thing: Shadowgate was a highly intriguing game, and I was definitely going to jump right back into it the moment my brother returned my NES to me!
James returned my NES about a week later. And though I was away from Shadowgate for seven whole days (which is a pretty big layoff period when you're 12), my enthusiasm for it hadn't faded. I was itching to hook the NES up to the TV in my bedroom, pop in Shadowgate, and try again from the start.
What surprised me most about Shadowgate's command-based system was how intuitive it was. I was expecting it to be difficult to figure if not completely opaque, but it was actually quite simple in function. I was still confused about certain aspects of the system (like the purposes of the "Speak" command, which didn't have any obvious application; the "Move" command, which, oddly, wouldn't allow me to move any of the onscreen objects; and the "Leave" command, which seemed to be entirely functionless), yes, but the majority of it made perfect sense to me.
"So maybe it is possible for me to excel at this type of game," I thought to myself during the seconds of calm that preceded the storm.
I had my wits about me and all the time in the world, and I was ready to go! I was ready to show the Warlock Lord that I was the type of pitiful buffoon you didn't want to mess with!
Now, I'm going to be doing something a little different with this piece. Because Shadowgate is such a special game to me and I have so many moment-to-moment memories of my experiences with it (great memories that would likely go unmentioned in a traditionally structured Memory Bank piece), I'm going to give it special treatment and thus exhaustively chronicle my first play-through of it and in doing so tell you what I thought about and how I dealt with each of its rooms and puzzles.
So prepare yourself for a long journey!
The gloomy-sounding tune that welcomed me to Castle Shadowgate's entrance affected me in the same way that Metroid's title-screen music did. It was another one of those powerfully evocative tunes about which I didn't know how to feel. And I didn't know how to describe it. Words like sad and somber came to mind, but I knew that such words weren't really sufficient. They were just superficial descriptors; they just didn't accurately describe the tune's nature. All I could say, rather, was that it was haunting in an indescribable way.
What that tune was able to do, I can say now, was evoke feelings of melancholy and wistfulness and therein create a deeply contemplative atmosphere. As I listened to it, I couldn't help but reflect. I kept thinking about days gone by and recall my most nostalgic memories and daydreaming about all of the wondrously enchanting fictional worlds I'd put together in my head over the years--the worlds I'd sadly never get the chance to visit.
Shadowgate's, from what I could tell, was the most unrelentingly haunting music I'd ever heard, and I didn't know how to feel about that. I simply wasn't used to moody soundtracks that refused to give you even the most temporary of respites. Even Castlevania and Metroid--two very darkly toned games--had at least one high-spirited, rocking tune dwelling somewhere in their earliest sections! Shadowgate, though, had none. It offered no such comfort. It was deathly serious at all times. It wanted you to constantly think about your plight and insofar explore the complex feelings that were being evoked by its grimly toned music and visuals.
Shadowgate's music was heavy stuff!
Then there was Shadowgate's instantly classic main theme. It accompanied the first couple of screens.
It was a powerfully foreboding tune that succeeded in creating a persistent feeling of danger. It had me convinced that the ground could fall out from under me at any minute, even when I was just idly standing there. As I listened to it, all I could think was, "What the hell am I getting myself into here?!"
The tune's perilous tone worked to make the narrator's mission explanation feel so much more urgent than it would have felt otherwise. I was the last in the line of kings, it told me, and the only one who could thwart the Warlock Lord's plan to raise the powerful behemoth from the depths! It was quite a burden.
What was most interesting to me, though, was the quality of the writing. Shadowgate's was the most coherent- and intelligent-sounding writing I'd ever seen in a video game. Its text descriptions had real substance and depth to them. This was a far cry from the vapid, childish (and often unintelligible) nonsense I'd read in the previous 9 years--the terrible writing that had characters "fulfiling" missions, "feeling asleep" and "prooving" justice; and the stories that were no deeper than "Save the president to win some hamburgers!"
Shadowgate's writing and narrative-building, conversely, were much more sophisticated in nature--so much so that I feared that I might've been out of my league. I wasn't sure that I was ready for more-adult-sounding writing. (Part of the reason why I was so surprised by this was that I assumed that Shadowgate was made in Japan by people who didn't speak English natively. I didn't know that it was a Western creation or that it was originally produced for American computers.)
Before starting the mission, I spent some time on the first screen (whose visual elements became iconic to me). I stared at the castle's doorway while soaking in the music and the atmosphere. As I did this, I wondered about the door's presence and what it said about the castle's structure. Usually castle interiors were accessed via drawbridges or elaborately designed outer gates, but Shadowgate's was accessible via nothing more than a simple wooden door! And there was nothing defending it; there was nary an obstacle outside of a murky-looking puddle of water! "What kind of people built this castle?" I was made to wonder. "And why did they use a simple-to-open door as an entranceway?"
I had other questions, too, like "How big is this castle, really?" and "What type of person would ever willingly visit such a desolate place?" I spent several minutes ruminating on these questions.
In just its very first screen, Shadowgate already had my imagination running wild.
The castle easily accessible (all you had to do was open the door), so I headed inside, to the foyer (the "hallway," as I called it). The moment I entered, a pair of shifty, evil-looking eyes appeared mid-screen, and the person they represented proceeded to insult me and belittle my adventuring credentials. This disrespectful antagonist (the Warlock Lord, I presumed) warned me that I no chance of solving the castle's puzzles and that the only thing I'd experience there was a horrible death.
I wasn't deterred, though, no. I got right to action.
The first thing I did, naturally, was burn away the hall's "beautifully woven" orange rug. I had to. I mean, there was a piece of fabric lying around, and I had a burning torch. Those conditions called for something to be torched! (This became tradition. I always made sure to torch this rug at the start of any Shadowgate adventure!)
And once again, I couldn't figure out how to get past this second room. And I got stuck here for quite a long time (for hours, it felt). I searched every inch of the opening two screens, hoping to find a key, but my conventional means of search yielded nothing. It went on this way until I stumbled upon the answer: The key that I needed (Key 1) was hidden on the game's opening screen; in order to get it, you had to "open" the creepy-looking skull that adorned the door's frame. This made little sense to me because the skull was a "sliding" object and thus something that you would instead have to "move"; so even though "opening" the skull was a pretty simple solution, I didn't feel stupid for not immediately considering it to be a possibility. Rather, I was invigorated by this accomplishment! I felt as though I'd just solved an ancient mystery!
So I entered the L-shaped stone hall and immediately centered my attention on the object that the game obviously wanted me to focus on: the book (or "tome," as the game called it) that was lying upon a fold-up stone slab. I tried to take the tome, of course, and found out the hard way that it was the trigger for a collapsing-floor trap. Then I spent the next several minutes learning that the stone-slab contraption was so rigged that doing anything more than simply observing it could cause the ground to collapse. I suffered somewhere around a dozen deaths in trying to manipulate the contraption in certain ways and thus find a way to cleverly remove the tome from its grasp. I tried, for instance, to replace the tome with the now-useless Key 1--to quickly swap one item for the other--and I did this with the hope that the key was heavy enough to keep the slab weighted down.
Though, nothing I did worked.
To me, this sequence of events served as a very ominous sign. I took it as a warning that any non-correct action could result in sudden death.
Here, at just three screens in, was the point in which I first questioned Shadowgate's sense of fairness and started to wonder if I had the patience to put up with a game whose internal logic was utterly mystifying. "If I'm having this much trouble on just the game's third screen," I wondered, "then what am I going to do later on, when the puzzles become way more challenging and thus even more arcane?"
It was going to take me a hundred-plus hours to beat such a game, I thought, though I wasn't sure that I wanted to devote that much time to a game. It was too much of a time sink.
I felt that this was a good time to test out the game's "Save" feature (since I wasn't yet sure that continues were unlimited). I was worried, though, that it, like the "Move" and "Leave" commands, wasn't actually functional. I suspected that it wasn't because of what I'd learned from history and specifically my experiences with games like Wrecking Crew and Excitebike: Sometimes save features were potentially useless. And since Shadowgate was apparently a computer-derived game, there was a chance, I thought, that its save feature was nothing more than a carryover and just there for cosmetic purposes--there to help provide Shadowgate the look of a computer game.
The save feature worked, I learned, but still I didn't trust it. I never trusted it. Even years later, I still had the same sense that it was somehow unreliable. That's why I was always nervous when loading up Shadowgate save files. I kept expecting for my progress to be lost.
It was an irrational fear, yeah, but one for which I had a reasonable justification: Shadowgate taught me to think that way. "Don't trust anything in this game," it told me. And I took it by its word.
So yeah--for the longest time, I couldn't figure out what to do in that L-shaped stone hall. It wasn't until days or weeks later (I was returning to Shadowgate at irregular intervals, so my memory is a little hazy in regard to dates and times) that I discovered that you could simply open the tome (I refrained from doing this originally because I assumed that making any type of contact with the tome would result in instant death). And then I spent the next couple of minutes feeling like a complete idiot.
So finally, after the longest search ever, I obtained Key, and as I expected, it allowed me to open the foyer's closet door. And as I entered into that cramped little closet, I was overcome by a sense of euphoria. I was never so happy to be standing in a tiny closet and looking at a pair of stone shelves. Because that's what Shadowgate did to you. It bewildered and demoralized you to such an insane degree that even the tiniest bit of progress felt like ultimate victory.
And while I was there, I obtained a sword and a sling, one of which, I was sure, would be very useful to me (I assumed that the sling would be another one of those "useless" items because I couldn't think of any application for it).
Then there was the L-shaped hall's other mystery: its white-colored wall tile. The game made it obvious that there was something conspicuous about this tile, but still I had no idea what I was supposed to do to it. And once again, it took me way too long to figure out the simple solution: You could simply "open" it! You know--rather than something more logical like moving it or hitting it and thus knocking it away (like I was able to do to one of the castle's other stony obstructions).
"Grrrrrrrrrr," I exclaimed while angrily gesturing toward the screen. "Stop making me 'open' things that are not logically openable!"
The L-shaped hallway's northeast exit led to a stone corridor that contained three doors.
The corridor, itself, is nondescript, though it does feature one of my favorite room descriptions. When you first enter into it, the narrator says, "The stones in these walls were probably cut by the hands of enslaved mountain dwarves." It's not information that will help you in your quest, no, but it's such a great world-building element. And Shadowgate is brimming with such elements. None of its objects, no matter how small or ordinary-looking they are, are merely decoratory. Each has real purpose to its existence. Each has its own backstory. And each has something interesting to say about the game's world.
The writers filled this game with wonderfully immersing, often-fascinating descriptions, and in doing so, they created a world whose every space is rich with personality. That's why I recommend that you take the time to examine all of the objects and environments and enjoy the game's world-building efforts. Doing this makes the experience far more enriching.
So when I arrived in the stone corridor, I had three choices: right, left and up. As I was apt to do in such situations, I took the right door.
That's when I stumbled upon a bizarre scene: a subterranean cavern whose lake was populated by a patrolling shark and partially submerged skeleton that had a key in its hand. And the mystifying strangeness of this scene was intensified by the cavern's newly introduced musical theme, which was, unsurprisingly, another very evocative piece. It had a cautiously investigative quality to it, and thus it worked to generate an uneasy atmosphere.
"Uneasy" was exactly how I felt when I looked at the submerged skeleton and read the narrator's description of it. I was told that "a lime-covered skeleton stares at you through eyeless sockets." I found everything about this skeleton and its predicament creepy and disturbing.
I was fascinated, though, by the narrator's description of this room. He explained, "This subterranean cavern has been carved by centuries of supernatural erosion." Once again, a rather-standard castle environment had a rich, thought-provoking story behind it. And I thought about that story a lot. When I was away from the game, I'd spend time wondering about "supernatural erosion" and how such a thing could affect the construction of an ancient cave. I'd explore such thoughts as "Were ghosts restlessly carving away at the cave's surfaces for years on end?" and "Was some unseen, otherworldly force exerting its destructive influence?"
This room also had the only Select-button-triggered clue that I ever found helpful. It told me that some objects had more than one use (more on this in a bit). Most of the other "clues" were useless. They amounted to nothing more than jokey-sounding observations like, "Oh man--doesn't this room look tough?!"
It was for the best, though. Solving Shadowgate's puzzles on my own felt so much more rewarding.
Right around this time, I read what I considered to be the most super-interesting of item descriptions. The narrator said of my lit torch (the visual version, with which I didn't even know you could interact until that very moment), "This torch throws dancing shadows about the room." I found this to be such a deep, vivid explanation of a torch's function and such a captivating use of language. I'd never seen language quite like it--language that was so expressive and evocative (not in a video game, at least).
That single line put so many images in my head. Mostly, it made me think about an old cartoon in which the shadows of candle-wick creatures could be seen marching about the stone walls of a torch-lit room. That's what I imagined was going on in Shadowgate's environments as I examined them.
All of Shadowgate's writing was like that. It was evocative and thought-provoking, and thus it added such rich texturing to the game's world. Its author's phraseology was unlike any other I'd seen, and I was fascinated by it because of how it inspired me to think. It had the power to conjure the most wondrous and most vivid of images. Until then, I didn't know that language could have such an effect on me.
So beyond the cavern was a small cave (a "subterranean cliff," as the game called it). Its cascading waterfall concealed a hidden passage, and I knew this going in because Nintendo Power had spoiled this secret for me (I thought that what I was reading was an old Shadowgate preview, so I wasn't expecting for it to give away puzzle solutions). I also knew, thanks to Nintendo Power, what I needed to do in the alcove that rested beyond the waterfall: hit the loose rock that was wedged into its curved wall and thus clear it away to reveal a gem-holding hidden bag (alongside the spoiling text, famously, was an image of the "Hit" command's accompanying "POW!" visual).
To me, the waterfall room's only true mystery was its partly visible stairway, which was obstructed by a rocky landslide. This landslide-covered stairway was one of Shadowgate's unsolvable red-herring puzzles, but I didn't know that at the time. And because I didn't, I spent waaaaaay too much time trying to find a way clear away the rocks and access the stairway. I tried poking at the rocks with all of my weapons and items; hitting the adjacent caves' walls with the intent of causing a rock-clearing earthquake; and searching for a shrinking-type potion that would render me tiny enough to squeeze through the landslide's small opening. Obviously I never found a way to access the stairway.
There was nothing else to see or do in the waterfall room and its hidden alcove, no. They existed only to house collectible stones and three magical gems. I didn't know what any of them were for. Though, I found the red gem's description to be quite interesting. It said, "Its color reminds you of your adventure across the sea of blood." This, I thought, was an intriguing way of developing a hero's character. It allowed you to learn about the hero's history through his recollections and his personality through his observations. This guy had been to many strange places, and he'd seen many crazy things!
The hero viewed almost every item and object through an adventurous lens. Take the broom item, for instance. To you, it might have looked like an ordinary broom, but to Shadowgate's hero, it looked like "the one owned by the sirens of the Isle of Yeklum Iret" (which is suggested to be an anadrome for some random woman). And so a simple broom became far more interesting than it had any right to be!
And that's how it was with all of Shadowgate's items and objects. Each told you something interesting about the game's world while providing you insight into the hero's psyche.
Once I ran out of things to do in the castle's subterranean cavern area, I returned to the aforementioned three-door corridor and headed west.
I was now in a refrigerated room whose air, the narrator said, reeked of decayed flesh. The room's description put me on alert because it made it seem as though many an adventurer had died here. "This room's probably loaded with traps," I thought.
The especially cold room contained an out-of-place-looking iron-trimmed pedestal, a trap door, and a conspicuous wall hole. It was rather easy to deduce that one of my new gems could fit into the circular wall hole. It turned out to be the white gem. Inserting it into the hole triggered an event: the appearance of an icy sphere. And that was all you could do here.
I assumed that there was much more to this room, though, so I didn't leave right away after taking the sphere. Rather, as had become a trend, I spent a ridiculous amount of time engaging in pointless activity. Both at this point and at several other points during the play-through, I spent 20-30 minutes at a time trying to (a) pry open the pedestal and (b) climb down the broken wooden ladder that rested beneath the trap door. And, as usual, I attempted to do such things by using all of my spells and every possible item combination.
Around this time, I got my first real taste of the game's your-torch-is-fizzling warning music. The tune was more effectual--more panic-inducing--now because I felt as though I had so much more to lose at this point. And that's how it was at every point in the future; that tune always succeeded in raising my anxiety-level. Just the first note of the tune, alone, was enough to freak me out and send me scrambling back to the inventory's first page, where my spare torches were stored. "No--wrong way!" I'd frantically shout whenever I'd invariably click the wrong arrow button.
What the music made me worry about most was my torch-total. I wasn't sure that I possessed enough of them, and thus I was afraid that I wasn't going to have enough time to get through the entire game.
The cold room's northern door led into a toasty passage--a "terribly hot" room whose very atmosphere was apparently deadly to me. The passage's far end, concerningly, was guarded by a concealed terror whose only visible feature was its evil-looking eyes, which, the narrator told me, were "watching every move I make." This was by far the creepiest thing that Shadowgate had thrown at me.
I spent the opening minute wondering about what, exactly, the eyes belonged to. In the end, I settled on "dragon," because, well, they were known to hang around castles and they liked warm climates! Why such a creature would choose to hide in the shadows, though, I wasn't sure. I imagined that the darkened room was its straw-filled sleeping place.
The room's most striking element, though, was its newly introduced musical theme. It was a grave-, harrowing-sounding piece that succeeded in making me feel great stress. It made me feel as though just standing around was unsafe--that even if I did nothing, the dragon would find reason to emerge from the darkened portal and pounce on me, or the ground would suddenly fall out from beneath me. So I was definitely feeling the pressure.
I figured out the hard way that it wasn't possible to enter into the darkened room (at that particular moment in time, at least). Each time I tried to do it, I was killed by the dragon's reactionary flame-spew. "I obviously don't yet have the means to kill this thing or sneak past it," I thought.
Still, I had a pretty good idea of what I needed to do in this room. The formula seemed obvious: First I needed to grab the shield so that I had means to protect myself against the dragon's flame-spew, and then I needed to focus on picking up the other seven items. But as I discovered, you couldn't do all of that in one shot. If you tried to pick up more than four items at a time, you'd die because the shield would no longer be able to absorb the heart and would resultantly melt. The only way to prevent the shield from melting, I learned, was to retreat to the previous room and thus allow for the shield to cool down. Then you could return to the heated passage and grab the four remaining items.
Once again, though, I spent a ridiculous amount of time, both at that point and in the future, trying to solve the unsolvable. I wasted hours on futile pursuits like trying to (a) lure the dragon out from the shadows (so I could kill it and thereafter freely access the dark room), (b) find a way to open the "heavy iron-bound" treasure chest (which had to contain mind-blowing treasures, I thought), and (c) unmelt the gold pile so that I could grab some riches and find out what was hiding beneath the pile.
So after I picked up the sphere, the shield, the hammer and some skeletal remains, I returned to the three-door corridor and traveled through the last remaining door--the one to the north.
That door led into an oddly situated crypt--a "long, cold hallway" whose walls were lined with coffins. I was fascinated by this room's presence. It spoke of the creator's unbridled creativity. "The people who made this game weren't afraid to embrace the most bizarre of ideas," I thought to myself, "and do stuff like include a 'coffin room' and furthermore situate it between a dragon's den and subterranean lake!"
There were six coffins in all, and each of them had a surprise for me. Some of those surprises were substantial, and some of them were deadly. So, really, this room was all about trial and error and therein figuring out which coffins not to open. You wanted to avoid opening the bottom-left coffin because it contained a jump-scaring banshee (which looked more liked a horned demon, I always thought) that would emit an "ear-shattering scream." You wanted to avoid doing this, mainly, because the scream didn't actually hurt you and thus opening this coffin was a pointless act.
And I learned, in a very painful fashion, that you definitely didn't want to open the middle-left coffin. That one contained a noxious green slime that poured out onto the ground and thus blocked off access to the top-left coffin, which was actually the room's northwest exit. So it looked as though I now needed to find an alternate route to the proceeding mirror room. At the time, though, I wasn't sure that such a route existed (I hadn't yet discovered the L-shaped hall's alternate pathway, which also leads to the mirror room), and I feared that further progress was now impossible. So I decided that the best thing to do was reset the game and start over--and this time avoid opening the middle-left coffin.
The green slime was memorable to me not because of its description ("The green slime is very thick and warm to the touch") but because of the disturbing death you'd suffer if you tried to pass over it. If you attempted to do so, the narrator would say, "You try to pass the slime, but it engulfs your body, dissolving it in seconds. You die instantly. No pain, no nothing."
Though, because I was usually around friends when I'd come to this part of the game, I wasn't as horrified by this description as I would have been otherwise. The presence of Dominick or Mike (both of whom would sometimes watch me play through parts of Shadowgate) helped to lightened the mood and thus turn a gruesome death into something hilarious. The description was especially funny to us because of its closing line: "You were slimed." Because as our favorite Nickelodeon shows had taught us, there was nothing funnier than being slimed!
All of Shadowgate's death descriptions had humorous elements to them, we thought. That's why we actively sought them out. We'd do anything to trigger a death. We'd jump into bottomless pits, feed ourselves to the shark, light ourselves on fire, and strike or stab ourselves with every weapon we could find. And we'd do this just to see what the narrator would say! "Suicide obviously does not solve problems," he would correctly tell us, but we didn't care because experiencing it was so much fun!
As for the coffin room: Only two of its coffins held (seemingly) valuable objects. The middle-right one contained a "Coppcoin"-holding bag (I assumed that "Coppcoin" was short for "Copper Coin"), and the bottom-right one contained a mummy. I was a longtime gamer, so immediately I knew what to do to that mummy: burn it!
When I used the torch on the mummy, it burned away and left behind a scepter. I procured the scepter and then headed west, to the mirror room.
(The top-right coffin, if you were wondering, was impossible to open. And it probably won't surprise you when I say that, yes, I did waste a whole lot of time trying to find ways to pry it open.)
I didn't know who "King Otto" was or what his "Fair" entailed, but I was certainly intrigued by the hero's referencing of them. His observation inspired me to wonder about the time-period in which Shadowgate's was set and think about the types of places that existed during that era. "How is a medieval-era 'Elvin Fun House' different from a modern Fun House, like, say, the one at Nelly Bly Park?" I'd wonder. "And how different is the air and the atmosphere in such a place?"
To me, this room's description represented another important piece of world-building and, by extension, character development. It told me something interesting about the game's world and the hero who occupied it. It spoke of the hero's wealth of experiences and the types of activities in which he engaged prior to our meeting him. He'd been to places, and he'd done some things. And his having that depth of character made him so much more interesting to me than heroes whose histories entailed nothing more than stomping turtles, blasting evil robots, and shooting aliens with lasers.
My friends and I liked this room because it allowed us to suicide ourselves in funny ways. Smashing the room's mirrors with the hammer, we learned, resulted in some "hilarious" (read: "horribly brutal") deaths. If you shattered the rightmost mirror, shards of glass would fly through the air and slice into the hero's body, and this would cause him to bleed out. And if you shattered the leftmost mirror, you'd unintentionally open a portal into deep space and subsequently get sucked into it; and as you were hanging out in deep space, you'd suffer oxygen deprivation and die.
Well, honestly, the slicing-shard death wasn't really that funny. In that instance, we were probably using humor as a means to dampen the death description's discomfort-inducing impact and avoid having to seriously explore the horrible mental images that were forming in our heads.
Though, the description that really stayed with us and continued to make us laugh for years was the one attached to the event in which you shattered the middle mirror (the one you were required to shatter). When you'd use the hammer on the middle mirror, the narrator would say, "Bellowing like some Norse god, you smash the hammer into the mirror." We found that line hilarious because it reminded us of how some of our more-crazy schoolmates would act during our gym-class dodgeball games--how they'd take it way too seriously. We'd be reminded, for instance, of how one of the heavier boys would fiercely sprint toward the center line and roar with anger before throwing an absolute rocket directly toward the head of the frail, timid 4'10'' girl with glasses.
It was ridiculous, like something out of a Ben Stiller movie. Furiously bellowing for no apparent reason was amazingly stupid and ridiculously over the top, and that's why we loved when it happened.
So beyond the middle mirror lied a locked iron door. I was able to open it with Key 3, which I took from the submerged skeleton's hand after I used the icy sphere to solidly freeze the subterranean cavern's lake (this was one of the game's most-obvious puzzle solutions). The problem was that I couldn't advance into the next room. The game wouldn't let me. The room was "incredibly hot," the narrator said, and the heat was so unbearable that I was forced to turn back. So all I could do was get a sneak peek of the flame-filled room that lied ahead.
And I couldn't head downward because the room's floor hole was actually a death pit (at this point, at least).
This room represented my first major roadblock.
But I wasn't yet out of places to go. Eventually I discovered that you could "open" the L-shaped hall's white-colored wall tile and consequently uncover a secret entrance. Once I did that, I was able to move northward into a hidden chamber. This room contained two torches, an arrow, and a strangely elevated doorway that rested above a stone ledge. I was able to easily obtain the arrow but not able to do much else. When I tried to enter the elevated doorway, the ledge collapsed and cut off my access to it. And, for some reason, the game wouldn't allow me to take either of the torches. So, it seemed, there was nothing else I could do in this room. I was stuck.
It was only through the exhaustion of options that I was able to find a solution. The solution--in what was yet another example of Shadowgate's opacity and therein its loose interpretation of words--was to "use" the unobtainable right torch, which was actually a disguised lever, and thus pull it downward. Doing this revealed a secret passage.
(My assumption was that the game's designers were short on menu space and thus couldn't fit in a more suitable command like "manipulate." So what they should have done, I thought, was repurpose the room-transitioning "Move" command and instead have it function as an object- and item-moving command. The "Move" command was basically useless, anyway, since you could transition between rooms without clicking it, so it would have made sense to assign it an alternate use.)
And of course, I spent (or, rather, wasted) a lot of time here attempting to solve unsolvable puzzles--both the red-herring and hypothetical types. I desperately tried to find a way to reveal a secret passage on the room's left side. Because my symmetry-obsessed brain kept insisting there had to be a passage there. "If a symmetrical room has a door on its left side," logic told me, "then it also has to have one on its right side!"
Also, I made repeated efforts to locate a boosting-type item that could help me reach the room's elevated door. I kept figuring that the levitation-granting Bottle 2 could do that job for me, but for whatever reason, it just wouldn't work in this room.
The hidden chamber's secret passage led down to a deep chasm and what I considered to be the game's scariest cavern-type room. I felt that way not because of the room's visual content (its broken, tattered wooden bridge and a stone bridge whose overly affirming description made me suspicious), no, but because of the unseen elements. Mainly, I was unsettled by the narrator's room description. He said, "You stand at the edge of a deep chasm. From the darkness below arise the screams of the undead." As I read that description, all kinds of chilling images formed in my head.
And it got worse. When I examined the chasm's cliff, the narrator said, "You hear moans coming from the bottom of the chasm."
It was a shiver-inducing line, and I had trouble letting go of it. My mind wouldn't let me. It wanted me to stop and think about what those words meant. So I did. For two or three minutes, I wondered about what was going on at the bottom of that chasm. I explored questions like "How did those 'undead' beings get down there?", "How far down are they?", "What do they do all day?" and "Are they stuck down there forever?"
Every scene I visualized was haunting.
There was also another line that caught my interest, though this one piqued my curiosity in a more positive way. The narrator said of the cave, "This cave is hewn roughly into the chasm's wall."
"'Hewn'?" I thought to myself, quizzically. "What could that mean?"
It was such an interesting word. It was sophisticated-sounding, like so many of the words and terms that Shadowgate was throwing at me. I didn't know what it meant, obviously, but still I felt as though I was more intelligent for having merely seen it. Hewn was what I called a "Shadowgate word," and it was one of those that I was happy to add to my vocabulary later on in life (you know--after I learned what it meant).
Shadowgate was more than just a game to me. It was also a teacher. It introduced me to so many new, interesting words, and it taught me a lot about language. Insofar, it changed how I thought about language and showed me that you could use language to evoke powerful images and emotions. And I've been drawing inspiration from it ever since.
So it turned out that there were no psychological tricks being played in this room and that the tattered wooden bridge was indeed untraversable. The wooden bridge, I concluded after falling off of it just a single time, was nothing more than a red herring. So I took the only safe path: the sturdy stone bridge.
The stone bridge carried me into a small chamber. This "very cold" room was home to a Shadow Wraith--"a hideous specter who eternally walks the line between life and death," as the narrator described it.
I'd seen this thing before--back when I watched James and his friends play through the game's early portion. I recalled how they couldn't figure out how to get by it. Though, in the intervening period, I forgot about one particular aspect of this room: its musical theme. Now that I was hearing it again, I was reminded of how abrasive and tormenting it was and how it worked to create the sense that you were currently engaged in an incredibly tense standoff. All of the textual signals told me that I wasn't in immediate danger--that the Wraith, actually, was largely indifferent to my presence--but even then, I wasn't convinced. The music had me feeling so paranoid that I was afraid that even looking around would cause the Wraith to viciously attack me. And I didn't need that because I was already feeling as though I was under assault from the music.
Anytime I was in this room, I'd think about how scary it would be to witness this scene in person--how terrifying it would be to have to walk around and thoroughly investigate this room and do so while an eerily calm specter watched your every move. Merely thinking about it would make me shiver.
Sadly, I didn't get the chance to figure out how to defeat the Wraith. James, without being invited to do so, just strolled into my room and told me how to do it. "You have to use the regular torch on the 'special' torch," he said. And I felt like an idiot because, for all that time, I didn't even notice that I had a second type of torch in my inventory.
That's what happens when you don't pay close attention.
Afterwards, of course, I stuck around this room for an extended period and spent a whole lot of time engaging in pointless activities like trying to reach the room's unseen upper-right exit (which I assumed led up to the iron-pedestal room via its trap door). Naturally I paid little attention to the hanging green cloth. I looked at it once and concluded that it served had no purpose. I never once thought to take it.
The Wraith room's northern exit led into a stone chamber that contained a lot of curious-looking items and objects. The most conspicuous of them was a sign that read "Epor." The moment I saw it, I shook my head a bit because I knew that it represented the solution to a stupidly obvious puzzle. "So when I read the sign, the rope magically extends up into the ceiling hole, right?" I immediately thought.
Well, it was something close to that (you had to read the sign twice to learn the "Epor" spell and then use said spell to cause the rope to magically extend up into the ceiling hole).
I was surprised by it because it was such an un-Shadowgate-like puzzle. I couldn't believe that it was created by the same people who came up with ideas like "put a white gem in a wall hole to conjure an icy sphere that could be used to freeze a like" and "combine different types of torch flames to burn away a wraith." Spelling a word backwards, conversely, was the type of contrivance on which a 10-year-old creator would rely. It was, like I said, a stupidly simple puzzle, and I felt a bit insulted by it.
It wasn't hard to figure out, either, that the room's back wall contained a secret door. I mean, there was a very clear door-shaped outline! So when I opened this "secret door," I didn't feel as though I'd done anything special, no. I'd merely noticed the obvious.
I wondered if this room's puzzles were created during the end portion of the game's production, at a time when the developers were running out of inspiration. (Or maybe my theory was correct and it was a matter of a developer letting his 10-year-old kid design some of the puzzles.)
Though, there was something in this room that was actually very intriguing to me: the barred portals, which, the narrator told me, concealed some type of animal. I had fun wondering about what it could be (I guessed that it was either a panther or a giant mutated rat). "Whatever it is," I thought, "I'm probably going to have to deal with it later."
The room's secret door led to another small cave. This one, the narrator told me, contained a "concave polygon" that had been carved into into its stony surface. The polygon had a hole carved into its center, and the moment I saw it, I knew exactly what I needed to do: place one of my gems in the hole!
When I placed the correct gem--the blue one--into the polygon's hole, the cave's northern wall rose up and revealed a hidden room. It was occupied by an intimidating-looking wizard. He wasn't an enemy, like I originally thought; rather, he was an ally who imparted some vital information about what I needed to do to bring about the Warlock Lord's demise.
I forgot all of it within seconds.
Though, I did get something material from the exchange: a scroll that taught me a new spell ("Humana"). Now it was just a matter of finding use for it.
The problem was that I couldn't find any use for it. I couldn't find use for any of my new tools. I was stuck. The only available pathway, apparently, was the intensely hot flame-filled room, but I couldn't traverse it. The game wouldn't let me; it kept forcing me to turn back. So I had no clue what to do next. Because I wasn't thorough enough in my investigation, I didn't know that the Wraith room's "green cloth" was actually a "cloak" that protected its wearer from extreme heat. It was just some useless cloth, I thought, and certainly not an item that could help me to advance further into the castle.
So I was completely stumped.
I spent the next few days futility attempting to find a secret alternate path and otherwise resorting to trying to force my way through the flame-filled room. I just couldn't find a way to progress. I did discover a programming oversight that allowed you to safely occupy the flame-filled room (if you died in the mirror room after returning from the flame-filled room, the game would place you back in the flame-filled room and allow you to remain there), yeah, but even then, I wasn't able to move past it because a certain monster prevented me from doing so.
So I gave up and abandoned Shadowgate for a months-long period (or what felt like a months-long period). That whole time, the flame-filled room's terribly harrowing musical theme stayed with me and continued to be a source of irritation. I associated that tune with "the puzzle I was apparently too stupid to solve," and for that reason, I had no desire to think about it. So I did what I could to keep it, and the game, out of my mind.
It was a shame that my adventures had to end there.
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