From the Memory Bank: My History with Video Games

Modern Classics: Beyond Shadowgate (PC)

Chapters 1-3 | Chapters 4 and 5 | Chapters 6 and 7 | Chapters 8-10 | Chapter 11 | Alternate Endings and Closing Thoughts

Chapter 6: Themeire Mansion

So we enter into the mansion. Seconds after we do so, a strong gust of wind causes the door to slam shut behind us. And now it's locked tight! We try to open it, but we can't because an unknown force is holding it closed.

We stand in the entryway and survey our creepy surroundings. Both they and the eerie, disquietingly mysterious music tell us that something deeply unsettling is going on in this place. Nonetheless, we must press on in our mission to help the imp. First we have to find it and ask it what it wants us to do, specifically.

The entryway has two doors: one to the left, and another to the north. We head left first, into the scullery (a small kitchen).

As we enter into the scullery, we get a horrifying fogged vision of cloaked skeleton hanging from the ceiling. At the same time, we feel a tightening sensation around our neck; it squeezes harder and harder. The sensation quickly fades as we emerge from the mental fog. We have no idea what any of that was about.

The scullery, we note, hasn't been occupied by a chef or a servant for many years. It, like the rest of the mansion, appears to be abandoned.

There's only one item obtainable item here: a simple metal chalice. We make sure to take it. And since the scullery's pantry door is locked, we ignore it for now.

We retreat back to the entryway and head through the northern doorway. It takes us to the main hall, whose two most noticeable objects are its grand staircase and its painting of a night sky, which, we note, has a small crescent-shaped depression in its canvas.

The room's two doors are locked, so all we can do right now is head upstairs.

There is, though, a fun death that we can trigger in this room. We do it by moving closer to the floor's suspiciously wide crack and trying to see what's down below. When we get close to the hole, a slimy purple tentacle creature reaches out from the crack, wraps itself around us, and pulls us into the darkness below. The game then asks, in an obviously referential fashion, "What kind of maniac has a tentacle monster in their mansion?"

It's an amusing little nod to Maniac Mansion, which is one of Shadowgate's fellow point-and-click pioneers.

So we head upstairs and arrive at another hallway. Its most notable object is its painting, which depicts an eerie night sky hanging over snow-capped mountains. We notice that its strange golden sun appears to be out of place. And because we're Shadowgate veterans, we know exactly what this means: We can pull the sun off of the painting! We do so and then and pocket the item.

Both of the hall's side doors are locked, so we head forward, into the adjacent hallway.

Immediately we see an item on the ground: our magic lens, which the imp must have dropped as it was running through this room! We pick it up. Then we head forward, to the attic entrance. We arrive just in time to see the imp scurry up the stairs and pull them shut.

Speaking from behind the door, the imp apologizes and tells us that there's nothing it can do. "I'm alone here," it says. "Alone... I was." It explains that an intruder came into its home and disturbed its peace. The intruder did horrible things, and now the home is angry. It's "talking," in fact. Fortune smiled upon the imp when it saw us on the ship. It saw an opportunity. It had to make us follow, so it took our stuff. Now it wants us to fix what the intruder did and make the house quiet again. If we do this, the imp says, it'll give us back all of our things and more.

So that's our goal: find the intruder and get it to leave this place.

We start by heading back to the second hallway.

When we get there, we observe that a strange purple light is now emerging from the left passage. The door on the right is locked, so we have no choice but to head left and discover the purple light's source.

When we enter the side hallway, we see that the light is coming from the room on the left. We see, also, that the hall contains a rolled parchment. We pick it up and discover that it's a scroll ("scroll M1," as it's called). We unfurl it and read its contents. It explains, to our discomfort, how to banish the incorporeal. If bile or blood from a spirit's beloved is processed with the proper laboratory equipment, it says, it produces a purifying liquid. The scroll notes that sewage is a discreet source of the samples that are needed to synthesizer a purifier that can exorcise the spirit from reality.

So it looks as though we might have to engage in a dark chemistry experiment sometime soon.

So with great hesitation, we slowly pass through the left doorway. It leads to a sitting room.

As soon as we enter into the room, we notice that the air is frigid despite the room's containing a roaring fireplace flame. And seconds later, a nightmarish purple phantom, with a blast of displaced air, manifests right in front of us! Numbing waves emanate from the creature in waves and chill us to the bone. The wisp tells us that it's unable to identify what, exactly, this phantom is, but it senses that a vast evil is present and advises us to run.

Time pressure activates, and we have a limited time to escape. We do so by simply moving north. (If we fail to act in time, the phantom lunges toward us, numbs us with its frosty energy, and sucks the life force out of us. Consequently we're reduced to a shriveled-up husk.)

We're gripped with terror as we realize that this phantom is unlike anything we've seen before. We don't even consider the possibility or reentering the room at this moment. Instead we head back downstairs, to the main hall. When we arrive there, something catches our eye: the door on the left is suddenly open! Frighteningly, though, it, too, emanates a strange purple light. We don't want to enter that room, but we have no choice; there's nowhere else to go!

So we head left and enter into the parlor.

Immediately we see that the room's lone suit of armor is radiating an eerie glow, and we observe, also, that its metal plates are clanging against one another as it shakes violently. Obviously the phantom has followed us, and we don't want to stick around to see what happens next! Time pressure activates, and once again, we have only a limited amount of time to escape. We do so by simply heading out the way that we came in. (If we don't react in time, the suit of armor comes to life, charges at us, and drives its sword through our heart.)

It's now safe to return to the parlor (or the "Armor Room," as it's called), though there's no point in doing so at the moment.

So instead we return to the now-phantom-free sitting room and take the opportunity to examine it. As we're doing so, we take a closer look at the fireplace and discover two things: Its flame doesn't give off any heat, and there's an opening behind it (the opening isn't marked on the map, so to access it, we have to click on the fireplace while the "Move" command is selected).

We travel through the opening and find that it leads to a storage room.

The storage room contains some barrels and a large mounted stag head, and their presence tells us that this place was once a trophy room.

As we examine this room, we make three observations. The first is that a torn parchment is wedged between the two barrels. We obtain it simply by moving the right barrel to the side. And we find that the parchment is another piece of the map! So now we have two pieces!

Our second observation is that the room's wooden floor contains a trap door. We open it and look down to check out what's below. We see a library. There's no ladder or stairway, we note, so we're going to have to jump down into the library and thus make a one-way trip.

And our third observation is that there's a purple key hanging from one of the stag head's antlers. We jump up and grab it. As soon as we do, a pale light begins to fill the room, and the stag head starts to glow! The phantom followed us here! Time pressure once again activates, and we have to quickly find a way to escape the room. (If we don't escape in time, an unseen force will possess the stag head and cause it to float toward us and take a bite out of our neck.)

There are two ways to escape: We can jump down into the trap door, or we can open the locked door in the room's northeast portion (if we didn't do so before taking the key) and exit through it. The latter leads back to the first upstairs hallway, and it gives us a more convenient way to move between the two rooms.

When we jump into the trap door, we fall a considerable distance and crash down onto the library's soft carpet. The fall bruises us up a bit, but otherwise we're OK.

There's a lot that we can do in this library. First we focus on collecting as many items as we can: We take the purple skull and the bottle with the glowing liquid (which we determine is "ectoplasm").

When we interact with the stack of books on the northern bookshelf's lower shelf, we move them aside and find that the panel behind them is conspicuously unlevel. There's no way to pull on it, so we decide to strike it. Doing so causes it to fall away and reveal a secret compartment. The compartment contains a moon icon. We take it.

Next we focus on the books and particularly the open tome that rests on the wooden desk to the left. Its elegant red script tells us that the energy of inert polarity arises from nodes, which are physical sources of power, and flows outward, enveloping all of nature. The actions and intentions of beings polarize this energy, and profane action imbues it with vile darkness. Desecrating the grave of a tortured soul produces much evil, it says, but pious action and purifying substances create the opposite. Once the energy is imbued with polarity, it may be absorbed into a being or used to create a portal to a corresponding dimension.

This is basically a warning. It tells us that if we're going to mess around with the dead, we have to do it the right way, lest we'll unleash terrible evil.

One of the books on the rightmost bookshelf's lowest shelf provides us additional information about experimentation with unnatural forces. It's titled Summons and Rituals (we recognize it as a banned tome filled with knowledge unfit for mortals), and it says that creatures of unnatural origin, while not bound by the laws of our dimension, may be influenced by our actions and materials. What unleashes an entity can also expel it if the process is reversed and naturally opposing items are used. In the case of impure, amorphous apparitions, the book notes, pure crystalline salt is opposite in both form essence. In some cases though, some spirits require additional "coaxing," and a blend of materials that are familiar to the shade is also necessary. Finally, the book says, it's helpful to focus the entity to one spot as you work. Several candles and a charm will suffice to snare it.

The other books provide us some interesting lore. A book from the rightmost bookshelf's middle shelf speaks of architectural plans and does so in a dwarven language with which we're familiar. It's clearly talking about the plans for this mansion. It says that the location proves difficult for obtaining materials and for construction, but the family is paying extra, so the dwarf architects don't mind. Though, they don't understand why anyone would want to build an opulent mansion in a place like this. Apparently the family thinks that a desert and a swamp make for an "invigorating atmosphere."

We skip to an entry that's titled "Themeire Mansion status update." It speaks of injuries that the dwarves suffered while building the mansion (individuals were hurt by "the revolving panel," "the first-floor stair mechanism," and "the crusher"), and thus it clues us in to some of the mansion's inner workings and secrets.

The old book on the rightmost bookshelf's top shelf is titled The Great Upheaval, and it tells us that history has forgotten what once was. The land is young, and much existed before the people planted their roots. A great society thrived. It was capable of feats that people would call miracles. It was even common activity to travel to other realities. Though, such power beget hubris, and the people's boldness was punished. The One sent a flaming star to end their reign and begin anew. The star was called "the portent of doom," and it wiped out all but a few of their structures--all but their large circular constructions.

The book on the northern bookshelf's middle shelf contains dates and notes. The 2nd note says that "development has gone as expected" and that a particular subject has shown some evidence of ability, which is atypical of one of such age and lineage. The 7th entry says that development is accelerating and that subject's ability is superior for its age; it shows proficiency in necromancy. The 13th entry says that the subject now exhibits mastery, and it has a preference for elemental sorcery and the propensity to manifest disaster-scale weather events. And the 17th entry says that development is beyond measure. The subject exhibits cloaking of aptitude. It's now ready to proceed. (So it's speaking of one of the terribly dark experiments that went on in this place. And the monstrous being that it created was obviously the one that scorched this area and turned it into a desert.)

And the book on the northern bookshelf's top shelf is a journal. It says that the sun and the moon have circled many times, yet "we" do not forgive the transgressions of the accursed Circle of Twelve. With their prophecy as false evidence and ignorant of his gentle nature, they, in their fear and hunger for power, took him. They feared what he would become, the author thinks, because he was "the most gifted in our line." For eons, the author and his closest associates served with honor as the king's mightiest sorcerers, yet in their time of need, "he" looked away. Their line could not tolerate this injustice. And they found a way. With their sacrifice, they righted this wrong and brought about the rise of their champion. (This book is clearly talking about Talimar and the fate that befell him. So is this the game's way of saying that this mansion used to belong to Talimar? It seems so. And that's very interesting.)

So when we observe the library's layout, we learn that we're not trapped here. There are two doors: one to the left, and another to the south. When we pull the metal lever on the left wall, the south door opens. It leads back the first floor's main hall (and gives us more convenient access to the library)!

The left door leads to a laboratory.

The laboratory contains entomological specimens and some laboratory equipment. The glass apparatus, we note, is used to combine liquids into powerful potions; all you have to do is "pour and pull." The apparatus' side panel has a round hole in it; we look into it and see a number of gears and cogs.

We'll probably be using this apparatus soon.

The room also contains a single door. We open it and pass through it.

It takes us outside, to a gravesite. As soon as we step onto it, we get another terrifying foggy vision: a skeletal corpse half-buried in the dirt. At the same time, a suffocating pressure wraps around our chest, and the odor of dirt fills our lungs. As the sensation fades and we regain our breath, we wonder why we keep feeling these types of sensations.

There are two objects beside the grave. The first is a tombstone with an unsettling skull carved into it; the skull has indentations in its eye sockets. The other object is a corpse that's bound tightly in wrappings; it remains unburied. We decide to do the right thing and place the corpse in the grave.

And that's all that we can do here at the moment.

When we return to the main hall, we once again observe the star painting and remember that it contained a small crescent-shaped depression. And, well, we happen to have a small crescent-shaped object: the moon icon we found in the library! We snap it into the depression, and as soon as we do, sounds of moving metal begin to emanate from under the stairs, and seconds later, the bottom steps slide upwards and revealing a hidden stairwell! We immediately squeeze into it and head down into the secret stairwell.

The stairwell contains a door, and naturally it's locked. Though, we happen to have the key the unlocks it: the basement key that we found in the storage room! We unlock the door and move forward.

And we find ourselves in a dark dungeon hall. It contains a single obtainable item: a shovel. We take it.

There are two doors here and also a path that leads further down the hall. The door on the left is locked, and the one on the right leads to a torture room, entering into which results in our getting crushed by spike walls (it's a trap room, basically).

So we head north, to the hall's end.

As we approach the hall's end, we once again get a terrifying foggy vision: A robed skeletal figure lies on the ground, and it has a sword sticking out of its back. At the same time, we feel a sharp pain between our shoulders and we stumble forward. As the pain fades, we run our hand across our back, looking for the cause of the pain, but we find none. So we get back to investigating.

We look forward and see that the hall's end contains a cesspool. We're drawn to its curiously dark and vile liquid because we feel that the eerie vision was somehow related to it. "This liquid may be the key to something," we think.

We see, also, that a stone statue of a crouching gargoyle is set upon the cesspool's far end, and we observe that a small key hangs from of its lower jaw. We carefully climb around the cesspool's edge and grab the key. It's a "bedroom key," we learn. And as we inch back down the pool, we notice that the room has begun to glow brighter. The phantom is here!

Time pressure activates, and we have to act quickly to escape. We do so, again, with simple movement: we hurry back to the dungeon hallway. Then we safely return to the hall's endpoint and pick up the scroll that's lying on the ground. It's called "Scroll M2." We open it and read its dwarven text. One of its notes catches our eye: It speaks of the mansion's construction and how the dwarves wondered why the family wanted to "hide a compactor's failsafe." The compactor (the trap room) works in a special way. As the note's author explains it: The mural is bewitched, so you have to reveal it. Then you have to put the relief into place. That raises up a mechanism. Then all you have to do is flip the lever to activate the failsafe.

So to safely move through the trap room, we've learned, we have to activate its failsafe, and we have to do so by interacting with its "mural" in a certain way. At the moment, we don't know what any of this means. We remember, though, what the M1 scroll said about needing to process "bile" to help synthesize a purifier. And, well, this cesspit certainly contains a substance of that sort! So we scoop up some of the bile with our chalice. (If you attempt to "move" into the cesspool and thus interact with it, something reaches out, grabs your forearms, and pulls you into the dark liquid. You never emerge from it.)

There's nowhere else to go on this floor or the one above it, so we take the moon icon from the main hall's painting and regain access to the upper floor, which, we remember, has a few unexplored rooms. "Maybe our bedroom key will open one of its locked doors," we think. And we find that it does! It opens the upstairs hallway's rightmost door.

The door leads into the guest bedroom.

Nothing about the guest bedroom seems particularly odd until we start examining its objects.

We start with the bed, whose sheets, it appears upon inspection, have recently been hastily redone. We see, also, that there's something underneath the bed, though the bedframe sits so low that we can't reach it. After taking these facts into consideration, we decide that there's only one thing we can do: dismantle the bed! We start by pulling the sheets and pillows off of the bed.

When we do this, we find an old scroll resting on the mattress. We pick it up and read it. It says, "If apparations ye seek and sure ye won't flee, Educ Spritus ye speak, and there they'll be." And thus we learn a new spell: Educ Spritus! Its description tells us that we can use this spell draw a phantom forth when the conditions are right.

Then we continue taking the bed apart. We pull the mattress off of the bed frame and toss it against the wall. And thus we reveal a hidden ladder that leads to the basement! We climb down the ladder.

It takes us to one of the cellar's dark corners.

This room's focal point is a stunning mural of an angel holding a harp. It looks out of place, we think. When we inspect it with our hands, we sense, strangely, that the surface doesn't actually match what we see. Luckily we have a magic lens that can helps us to see through illusions!

As we look through the lens, the mural's holy image fades, and its true form is revealed. It's a ghastly reaper! When we examine it, we see that its head is missing. Because the mural happens to be purple-colored, we figure that our purple skull, which we found in the library, might fit into its depression. So we push the purple emblem into the mural, and as soon as it snaps into place, a faint sound begins to emanate from the wall. Moments later, a mechanism rises from the wall.

It's the mechanism that the dwarves were talking about! And we know what to do with it: pull its lever! When we do so, we hear a loud click from down the corridor. That must be the trap room's failsafe activating! Now we can safely enter that room!

Before doing so, though, we head northeast, into the dark corridor--a dead end that stops at a wall. We see several small flashes of red twinkling in the wall's hole.

As we examine the wall, we see that one of its bricks is in such a crumbled state that it can barely be considered part of the wall. So we do what we always do to cracked objects in MacVenture games: We decide to strike it! As we start to wind up our punch, several bats fly out of the hole. They speed past us in a hurry, but they don't harm us. And once they're out of the way, we strike the brick. The impact causes it to crumble away like sand. And thus we reveal a skeletal hand that's holding some type of trinket. We take it, and then we inspect. We find that it's a red charm whose inscription says, "With candles, we invite spectral beings. May we contain their blight."

Then we backtrack to the mural room and open its left door. It leads to the dungeon hall! And it gives us quick and convenient access to the trap room, whose mechanism has been deactivated.

When we enter into the trap room, we make two obvious observations. The first is that one of the room's tiles looks out of place and is slightly misaligned, and there are scratches on the floor next to it. We slide the tile away and find a shallow hole. It contains a crank handle, which is something that we'll need if we want to successfully operate the lab's apparatus.

The other observation is that the room's door contains a purple object. It's too high to reach, and we wonder how to get it down. We do so by simply grabbing the sliding door's bar and pulling it downward. And we see that the object is a shield! We take it. And we know where just such an object belongs: on the suit of armor in the parlor! We head there and place the shield on the armor. As we do so, we hear a soft clicking noise, and moments later, the wall panel in front of us suddenly revolves and exposes a hidden relief.

The relief contains an unopenable compartment and two sets of small holes in its celestial body. And we happen to have two celestial-type objects: a sun coin and a moon icon! We try placing them in the small holes. They fit perfectly, and they form a perfect circle! As they snap into place, the compartment below opens up. It contains a small red gem. We take it. Also, we take back the sun coin and the moon icon, both of which we might need to use later on (as we know, we need the moon icon to help us open up the main hall's hidden staircase).

As we continue our search, we revisit the guest bedroom and notice that something about its mirror is odd: There's a draft coming from behind it. That doesn't make sense because the wall behind it is solid. So there must be a magical force at work, we think. We discover that to be the case when we use our Tar Gwynthal spell (which dispels enchantment in the presence of a shimmer) on the mirror. It causes the mirror's face to disappear and reveal itself to be an opening into the adjacent room!

We move through the opening and arrive at the main bedroom.

As we look around the main bedroom, a few objects stand out to us: an elaborate cuckoo clock, which we suspect is a hiding place of some sort; a large bed, underneath which is an unidentifiable gray object; and red book, which is lying on the floor.

We do the safest thing first and read the book. It's a diary, and one of its entries tells us about a fascinating thing that the author read about. Should things go awry, he says, and he's haunted, purifier alone won't be sufficient. The remedy, he reveals, is to pour salt on the corpse. We quickly close the book and wonder what monster wrote such things.

Though, we've gained more useful information about the way to properly carry out an exorcism. We now know how to rid the manor of its intruder--the ghostly phantom. We have two of the purifying ingredients: the ectoplasm and the bile, but we don't have the salt that must be placed on the corpse. It might be hidden the clock, we think, so we play around it.

The clock represents a puzzle. To open it, we have to turn its hands and fix them into certain positions and do so by tugging on the two corresponding weights; then we have to turn the key. But the problem is that we have no indication as to which positions the hands should be in. So we have to once again think outside the box. We start by looking at our map, which, we remember, had the answer to a previous puzzle. And as we're examining our newest map piece, we look to the corner and see a clock with hands fixed to a certain position (they're in random positions in each play-through)! This must be how to solve the puzzle! So we fix the cuckoo clock's hands to the matching positions and pull the key. And voila: the clock face swings open and reveals a red gem! We take it.

So now we have two red gems!

We can think of only one place to put them: in the tombstone skull's ocular indentations! We decide to hurry there and do that. Before we go, though, we unlock the room's door and give ourselves quick access to the second-floor hallway. (If, by the way, we turn the clock's key when the hands are in the incorrect positions, an adorable cuckoo will pop out and greet us. Its chirping will cause a figure to crawl out from under the bed! The gray object, it turns out, is a skeleton. It sinks its bony fingers into our eyes and blinds us, then it strangles us the death. This same event occurs if we try to mess with the bed's bottom portion.)

When we place the red gems into the skull's eye sockets, the skull slides upwards, and a hidden compartment is revealed! It contains the salt that we need. We take the salt sack (a strange thing to keep in a graveyard, we think), and then we pour its contents onto the corpse. Subsequently we use our shovel to move the dirt onto the corpse and properly bury it. (Please note that what you do here greatly affects how the game's end portion plays out. If you do the incorrect thing and bury the corpse without first pouring salt on it, the phantom will survive the exorcism and retaliate by killing the imp. This won't end your game, no, but the events that trigger afterwards will prevent you from getting the best ending. I'll explain what those events are later on.)

Now we have to make the purifier. We do that in the adjacent lab. We pour the ectoplasm and the bile into the apparatus, then we slide the machine handle into the hole and turn it. When we do so, the apparatus powers up, and bubbling and hissing sounds start to fill the room; moments later, the apparatus combines the liquids and fills the table's vessel with a pungent-smelling substance. It's the purifier that we need! So we take the vessel, and in our haste, we choose to name its contained substance "No-Ghost" (another cool reference/connection).

And now it's time to exorcise the phantom. We do that in the library, whose circular arrangement of floor candles conveys us that this room was designed to carry out rituals. Remembering what the room's Summons and Rituals book explained to us, we lay our charm within the circle of candles. This causes a magical symbol to appear on the floor. Our trap is set, and now we must call the phantom. We do that with our new spell: Educ Spritus, which, we know, can draw forth phantoms.

The spell does its job and summons the phantom. And quickly we use our purifier on it. We scream "Begone, monster!" as we splash the liquid onto it. This causes the phantom to dissolve. Now it's no longer a threat.

As we look around the room, we find that everything is calm and peaceful.

So we head back to the alcove to tell the imp the good news. We climb up the now-open stairs and enter the attic, and we let the imp know that the intruder is gone. He thanks us and allows us to take back our goods. An "imp charm" is mixed in with them. When we examine its back portion, we see an inscription. We read it out loud: "When the dead hold a secret, these words will show you their final moments." And thus we learn a new spell: Discitea Mort! As this happens, the charm crumbles in our hand.

We see, also, that a key is resting below the bag. It's the pantry key! We pick it up, and then we head to the scullery and use it to open up the pantry. It contains three items: some shattered dinnerware, a jar with a creepy eye floating within it, and a yellow stone that's identical to the one that we used to create a portal. The stone (which is identified as the "P.I. Stone" in the inventory) is the only item that we can take. And we know just what to do with it: take it over to the conduit and use it to open another portal! We head out to do that. Thankfully, thanks to our ritual, the phantom is gone, and the front door is now open. We're free to leave!

We're happy to step out into the cool night air. Though, we're well aware that much time has passed since we began chasing Belezsarr. And consequently, we're overcome by a unsettling feeling that we don't have long before his evil scheme comes to fruition. So we hurry over to the conduit and place our yellow stone into its slot. The space in its center becomes a portal. This one shows the image of a red building whose window has "Joe's" written on it.

Thus we reach the end of the most intensive and most intriguing chapter so far. It gives us a lot of fun things to think about. "Is this really Talimar's mansion?" we wonder. "And is that purple phantom related to him in some way? Is it one of his creations? Or does it come from somewhere else?"

We're left with so many mysteries!

And you probably have an idea of where we're headed next!

Chapter 7: Deja Vu All Over Again

So we hop into the portal.

And if you can believe it, we enter into the world of Deja Vu!

I suspected, after playing the Uninvited chapter, that the game might go in this direction, but still I wasn't entirely sure that it actually would. "They're not going to go that far with this 'beyond' stuff, right?" I wondered. "They wouldn't dig that deep into the nostalgia bin, would they?"

My sense was that they probably wouldn't because of how difficult it would be to incorporate Deja Vu's world in a natural-feeling way.

That's why I was surprised again when the image of Joe's Bar appeared in that portal.

I was happy that it did, and I was eager to see how, exactly, they'd incorporate Deja Vu into Beyond Shadowgate's world. The only question I had going in was, "Are they somehow going to script it to where Del's activities play into Ace Harding getting framed for a crime? Are they crazy enough to contrive that type of connection between the games?"

I was very interested finding out the answer to that question. (And obviously, now, we understand that the "P.I." in "P.I. Stone" is intended make us think of the words "Private Investigator," which is what Ace Harding is.)

The chapter's intro is total homage to Deja Vu's: As we enter into the alternate dimension, we, much like Ace did, stagger around as our head spins and we feel as though we're recovering from a stupor after spending a week in a very loud and boisterous place (the festival at Windmere, which, apparently, is much like Vegas). We have no idea where we are or why we're here, but we do at least remember our name.

We look around and find that the portal is nowhere to be found. As we wonder what to do next, the wisp speaks to us and tells us that this is another good news-bad news situation. The bad news is that we've entered this world in a place that's nowhere near a portal, but the good news is that a portal key, it senses, is in this very building.

So we have two goals here. The first is to find the portal key, and the second is to find a portal on which to use it.

Our quest begins in Joe's Bar and the same dingy hallway that Ace was standing in after he regained consciousness and exited the bathroom. And the difference in scenery tells us that we're in a different period from the one in which Ace's adventure occurred. The place is in a little better shape than it was in Deja Vu, so this could be the time before it fell into a state of neglect or the period after it was fixed up. We don't know yet.

The biggest difference is that there are a few objects hanging on the wall. Two of them are pictures. The picture on the right depicts several people wearing the same uniform--one that has a snake logo embroidered onto it. We're not from this world, so we don't know that what we're seeing is a sports team; we think, rather, that the team members are "soldiers from this kingdom" and that they're fighting in the name of their "snake lords."

The picture on the left depicts one of the team's players. He's holding a leather glove and a white ball (so obviously he's a baseball player). The plaque at the picture's base says that the player in question is "K. Roelofs" (this is a reference to Karl Roelofs, who helped to create both Beyond Shadowgate and the original MacVenture games) and that his player number is 73. This seems like extraneous information, and for that reason, it's highly suspicious. The note that's written on the picture says, "To Joe: Thanks for the free grub. It was edible." (This note was left for Joey Siegel, the bar's owner--or its former owner, if we're in a post-Deja Vu time-period.)

The object below the pictures is a mounted glass case that was intended to hold a baseball bat. We've never seen one of those, so we assume that the case was instead meant to hold a sword. When we open up the case, a barely legible not falls out from it. It's written by "Dave" (a reference to Dave Marsh, who, likewise, helped to create Beyond Shadowgate and the original MacVenture games) tells "Karl" (who apparently works here now) that the place has a rat problem and that a bat has been brought downstairs to deal with the vermin.

Sadly, we can't open the door on the left, which, as we know as Deja Vu fans, leads to the women's bathroom. It's locked, and there's an Out of Order sign hanging from its handle. There's a dried stain near the door, and it's a perfect match for the puddle that was emerging from underneath the door in Deja Vu. This strongly suggests that Beyond Shadowgate's events take place after Deja Vu's.

So there's only one way to go here: forward.

When we travel forward, we find ourselves in the very familiar bar area.

As we approach the bar's glass door, we look upon a vast city that's unlike any other we've ever seen. It's filled with humans who are dressed in unfamiliar clothing. We'll need to blend in, we think. While we're at the door, we see two men standing out front, and we overhear their conversation. "We got da door covered an' Franky's inside lookin' for da money," one of them says. "No way Ace's gettin' out alive." That's when we realize that we've accidentally stepped into the middle of something serious. So we decide to stick to doing what we do best: quickly getting what we need and making a silent escape. (So apparently Ace still has some dealings with this place.)

Before moving away from the window, we peer through it once more and notice that "unusual carriages" speed along the roads and that people wearing "strange garments" march to-and-fro. "What an unusual world," we think.

The place is the same as we remember it. It has all of the same features: the polished bar, the wooden floor, the big window, the cellar door, and the stairs that lead to the second floor. The only difference is that there's no glass of seltzer on the bar. This time, rather, there's a newspaper (a "folder paper," as we identify it) lying on it, and it's open to the "sports column." The paper's text tells us that it's a big day for the local sports fans because all of the city's teams are in action. Then it lists the game times: The Hounds play at 1:30, the Serpents follow at 3:45, and the Gargoyles finish with a match at 8:00. This is more seemingly extraneous information that probably isn't.

There are two ways to go from here: through the door to the north and upstairs. We decide to go through the door first. The sign attached to it says "No customers allowed," but since we're not customers, we think, it's OK for us to open it and travel through it! We do just that.

The stairs beyond the door take us down to a dark cellar. We can't see anything except for a small chain hanging from the ceiling. When we pull the chain, the connected bulb lights up and illuminates the room (we identify the bulb as a "self-lighting miniature lantern"). And we, the players, are exactly where we expect to be: the wine cellar!

It, too, has all of the familiar features: the pull-chain bulb, of course; the big wine barrel; the dusty wine rack; and even the spider web! There are two new additions, one of which is a little difficult to spot. The more observable of the two is the framed picture that rests below the wine barrel. It's covered in filth, so we can't make out what it depicts.

We turn the wine barrel's knob, hoping that wine will pour out from the tap (so we can get a quick drink), but unfortunately, only water pours out from it. Conveniently, though, the water cleans the underlying picture and helps us to see its depiction. It shows an image of a man wearing an odd helmet that has a monster painted onto it. He's holding a brown leather ball (obviously he's a football player). The plaque at the picture's base tells us that he's "C. Gaizat" (a reference to Chris Gaizat, who is Beyond Shadowgate's lead developer) and that his player number is 79.

"Hmmmm," we think.

The text written on the image says, "Joe, you gotta hire a painter and fix the place up." (Maybe these notes were written before Joe was murdered?)

The second new object is the baseball bat ("the long wooden object," as we identify it) that's mixed in with some of the wine bottles and consequently obscured a bit. After we finally spot it, we take it. (We're not surprised to find such an item here. We expected to do so because we remembered what the glass case's note said.)

Disappointingly, we can't, as we did in Deja Vu, hit the wine rack and cause it to slide to the side and open the way to the casino. The bar's new owner must have installed a locking mechanism to stop wine-rack-punching enthusiasts from finding their way into the casino.

(Note that some bottles are weightbearing and that attempting to take them will result in the entire rack collapsing on you and crushing you to death.)

So we head back to the bar and up the stairs on the left.

They take us to the upstairs hallway.

As we creep our way up there, the figure of a man comes into view. He's facing away from us and engaging in an activity that's producing scraping metal sounds. We're an experienced thief but a terrible lock-picker, so we recognize the sound of a stubborn lock when we hear one.

Realizing that we're the only two people in the building, we think of a way to subdue (but not kill) this intruder before he sees us.

The hall looks very similar to how it did in Deja Vu. Pictures still hang from its walls, but their arrangement and depictions have changed. The picture of boxer Puff McMuffen is still there, but it's been switched to the left side. The picture of Doghouse Riley is gone completely; it's been replaced by a photo of large padded boxing gloves. And the picture of Ace is missing, too; it might have been what was occupying the faded spot on the right (it could be that the picture of Ace was removed because it brought back some bad memories for certain people).

We decide that the best way to deal with a human from this world is to use a weapon that we found in this world: our slender "club." We sneak behind the thief, raise the club over our shoulder and prepare to swing. As we're doing this, the man, in a gruff voice, mumbers "Got it!" and the lock clicks open. We seize this opportunity and strike him in the head (and to our great delight, the classic Deja Vu "POW!" displays when we do it!). After receiving the blow, the goon stumbles slightly and collapses down the hall.

So now he's out of the way, and, as a bonus, we don't have to worry about the lock. (If we try to take the goon out with any other weapon or item, he quickly turns around, pulls a tommy gun out from under his coat, and then proceeds to fill us with lead. "Welcome to Chicago!" he says after blowing us away. And if we die in this place, we get to see this chapter's exclusive grim reaper: a blue skeleton holding a gun and laughing at us!)

We open the door and head into the next room.

It's the familiar reception room! And just like in Deja Vu, the odor of cheap perfume lingers within it.

Everything we remember is here: the run-of-the-mill desk; the clipboard (which was incorrectly identified as a "typewriter" in Deja Vu); and the small desk lamp.

There are three new additions. The first is a coat rack, from which hangs a familiar-looking trench coat. We take it, thinking that wearing it might help us to blend in. When we put the coat on, though, we realize that it doesn't fit us. We're too short to wear a coat like this one! At this moment, the wisp sighs and decides to help us out; it uses its magic to shrink the coat and turn it into a snug-fitting garment. So now we can pass as a Chicago resident.

The second new addition appears when we remove the coat from the rack and reveal what's in the room's northeast corner. It's a picture of a man wearing strange armor that has a large dog painted on its chest portion. He's carrying a tall, curved stick (so he's a hockey player). The plaque at its base says that the man's name is "D. Marsh" (another reference to MacVenture creator David Marsh) and that his player number is 33."

"All these numbers have to mean something," we think.

The signature on the picture says, "To my favorite joint in town, Jim's Tavern." (This is probably a reference that I'm not understanding.)

The third new addition is a button switch whose wire extends out to the left. When we press it, the door on the left opens (in Deja Vu, we needed Key 1, which was in Ace's wallet, to open this door). Sadly, we're not able to open the desk this time around. Though, we are able to take the clipboard, which, we think, might help us to navigate this place.

After we finish taking all of the available items, we head through the door on the left.

And now we're in the familiar office! It looks pretty much identical to the one in Deja Vu. It has the big desk, the wall phone, the blinds-covered window, and the other object that'll be coming into view momentarily. The only things we learn are that (a) the desk, despite its looking exactly like it did in Deja Vu, is brand new (they probably got rid of the old desk because they couldn't clean the blood stains off of it) and (b) the room's carpet is faded in stains (Joe apparently wasn't good with the upkeep).

Sadly, there's no option to head south, onto the elevator that helped us to move between floors in Deja Vu. It must be out of order.

As we inspect the room, we see that its framed picture is hanging askew, and this bothers us. So we decide to pull it off the wall. When we do this, we find that there's a wall safe (the other familiar object) behind it! Unfortunately, though, we don't know the combination to unlock it. There's no "Card 3" (which in Deja Vu contained the combination in question) for us to find, and there are no obvious clues anywhere. And we've been everywhere that we can possibly go, so there's no where else for us to look.

That's when we remember the bar's folder paper and the numbers we saw on the three pictures. Surely those numbers have some connection to this safe, we think. Surmising that the names in the folding paper ("Hounds, Serpents and Gargoyles," which we interpret as "Large dogs, Snakes and Monsters") are a sequence chain, we enter the correlating player numbers (33, 73, 79) into the safe's number pad, and then we pull the handle. And to our surprise, it works! The safe opens!

The safe contains the portal key we've been looking for and some money ("green paper," as we identify it). Because the paper was in a safe, we assume that it's important and take it, too. (Note that the numbers on the paintings are randomized in each play-through.)

As soon as we back away from the safe, we hear noises in the next room, and then we hear a gruff-sounding person say, "We got Ace trapped, boys! Get in 'dere and let's rattle him! Don't stop 'til he's full of lead!" The wisp tells us that these goons mean business and advises us to quickly escape from this room. There's only one way that we can go (since returning to the reception room would be stupid, and the game won't let us do it, anyway): through the window! We pull on the blinds' cords to open the blinds, and then we climb out the window.

We step out onto the familiar fire escape, and as we do so, a cold wind whips past us ("This is a windy city!" we think). There's snow on the steps, so obviously we're visiting this world during the winter season. We can't go back into the office because the goons are in there and ransacking the place in search of us (because they think that we're Ace), and, as there was in Deja Vu, there's no option to climb up to the fire escape's highest point, so we have no choice but to climb down from here.

We do that and drop down into the familiar alley.

It's a long drop, and we take a hard fall, but still we're no worse for wear.

This time around, there's a fence closing off the alley, so we can't simply exit the alley from the north. And we can't reach the fire escape because it's too high up. All we can do at the moment is open the manhole cover (which we identify as a "steel set") and drop down into the sewer.

This time, there's no maze of tunnels waiting for us down here, Rather, there's just a single room. And it contains three objects: a crushed tin can, wire cutters ("cutting shears," as we call them), and a cat.

Feeling that the wire cutters are the only item that we need, we take them and then promptly head back to the surface.

(If we try to take the tin can, we accidentally knock it into the water, and as soon as we do, a ferocious sewer alligator pops out from the water, and then it clamps its jaws on our legs, snapping our bones in several places, before pulling us into the water and eating us. If we try to interact with the cat, something similar happens: The cat reoils and hisses loudly as it runs off, and this sound alerts the alligator to our presence. It pops out from the water and eats us.

"Is this the same alligator we encountered in Deja Vu?" we wonder. It just might be!)

We use our wire cutters to cut a hole in the fence, then we escape through the hole.

We emerge on the street in front of Joe's Bar.

There's a Mercedes parked in front of it, and it looks identical to the one that was in front of the building in Deja Vu!

(This has to be a different vehicle, right? I mean, there's no way that the car from Deja Vu hadn't exploded since then or that there wasn't an investigation that discovered the planted bomb. It has to be a different Mercedes--one that's there only to complete the nostalgic visual.

No, I'm not thinking too hard about this stuff. Leave me alone.)

Sadly, we don't the chance to examine the scene. As soon as we step out onto the street, someone slips a cloth over our head and shoves us. We hear a loud slam, and then a muffled, gruff voice says to us, "Youse pretty dumb to come around again, Ace. Da syndicate has had enuff of you."

Whatever we're being held within starts to rumble, and it takes us on a very long ride. When the shaking stops, we hear a loud click, and we're met with a gust of frigid wind. We're lifted into the air and thrown onto the cold ground. Right then, our captor says the he likes us, so he's giving us two options: We can freeze to death or drown in the lake. "See ya, Gumshoe," he says as he departs.

When we take the cloth off of our head, we find that we're standing on a vast frozen lake. Obviously we were mistaken for this "Gumshoe" person, we think, as we discard the now-useless coat.

We see that there are four directions in which we can travel.

This is where the game exhibits clever use of the navigation box. Because there are cracks in the ice, we know that we can't just carelessly move in any direction. We have to cautiously ferret out which parts of the lake are traversable. We do that by looking at the navigation box's squares and getting information about the terrain that lies in the directions to which they correlate. If, upon examining a square, we learn that there are cracks running through the ice, we refrain from heading in that direction (if we try to move in that direction, the ice will collapse and we'll plunge into the frigid water and die). If, however, we find that no cracks are visible, we know that it's safe to travel in that direction. So what we have to do to proceed is find the safe direction seven times in a row.

When we do so, we make it to the safety of the lake shore. (Note that the sequence is randomized in each play-through.)

As we step off of the frozen lake, we breathe a sigh of relief.

After we calm down, we quickly retrace our steps and write them down on our notepad (we can't move back onto the lake, so we're doing this for another reason). And now we feel like a real detective! Surely, we think, we're better than "Mr. Shoe" guy who those goons were after.

We look ahead and see stone stairs leading to a grand entrance (it's The Art Institute of Chicago!). We head over to its entrance.

As we approach the building, we come across a man wearing a familiar-looking yellow trench coat. He has a ragged face and bruises across his knuckles.

Yes, my friends: In yet another surreal moment, we get to meet Ace Harding!

We speak to him, and he responds by greeting us and telling us that we look lost. It happened to him once, he says. He introduces himself and asks us our name. We tell him that our name is Del. He thinks that it's a strange name for a short one like us. Then he invites us to come down to his boxing gym and offers to teach us how to keep people off of our case.

Then we tell him about our encounter with the goons and our trek across the ice. He recognizes who the goons are and states that he took care of them. He's been at this for years, after all, he says. Then he says that it's windy out here and suggests that we find cover inside the building. We throw a punch at him, just to see what he does. He deftly grabs our hand and says, "Nice try, kid."

Don't mess with the master, I guess. (Note that you can't attack him in any other way.)

So we step into the building.

It's a museum, we learn. We're at its entrance hall.

We see a couple of interesting objects. The first is the red ticket box in front of us. There's a thin slot in its front side, and we wonder if it has anything to do with the strip of paper sticking out of the top portion. We see, also, two very familiar objects: a painting of an eagle attacking a snake and a statue of a burly man holding a sword. We're interested only in their aesthetic qualities. (They are, of course, two of the objects we see in Uninvited. So obviously the Crowleys either bought these pieces from the museum or won them in an auction that was held later on.)

The ticket box is the only object that's of real interest to us (touching anything else gets us arrested). The width of its slot is roughly equal to the width of our paper money, we notice, so we slide the money into the slot just to see what happens. When we do it, a ticket emerges from the box's top; it says, "receipt museum of science and industry" (we don't know what "science and industry are, but we know a ticket when we see one).

We take the ticket and start to move forward. As we do this, we're confronted by a cop who asks us for a ticket. (He'll tell us to scram if we don't have a ticket. And if we try to assault him, he'll arrest us.) We give him the ticket, and he lets us pass.

We walk into the museum and come across an exhibit that we're very happy to see: a conduit! The wisp tells us that it's drawing power from this place, but it has no destination. It urges us to use our portal key so we can get home.

We place the key in the circular slot at the conduit's base, and suddenly a portal appears. It displays an image of the wasteland from our home world. We quickly jump into it.

Moments later, we emerge in our home world.

At this point, we're exhausted, and it looks as though the wisp feels the same way. We consider resting, but a gust of desert wind strikes us and reminds us that we have a long journey ahead of us. There's no time to rest. But at least now we have the knowledge to traverse the great barren's dangerous expanse (or at least we think that we do). So we head to the expanse's starting point.

As we squint our eyes and look across the sand, we see only endless dunes, so we have to watch where we step. This area, like the enchanted woods, is a maze, and we won't be able to successfully travel through it unless we know the precise directions to take (if we just head in random directions, all willy-nilly, we'll eventually slide knee-deep into quicksand and then sink into the depths).

Fortunately, we have the correct directions. They're in our path notes! They happen to correlate to the directions we wrote down after we safely traversed our way across the frozen lake. (How exactly that works, I don't know.) So we move through the desert using the directions in our path notes, and this helps us to find the correct route through the desert. And now that we know how to correctly traverse the expanse, we toss away the notepad (so basically we can now travel between the two areas without having to navigate the maze).

And this is where the chapter ends.

I loved this chapter. Revisiting Deja Vu's world was a lot of fun. I'm really fond of what they did with it. They succeeded in incorporating it into Beyond Shadowgate's world in a logical and clever manner. My only disappointment is that we didn't get to see more of it. It would have been great to visit the casino and the medicine room (the "Weird Room," as the Macintosh version of Deja Vu calls it) and see how they changed.

The only thing I wonder about is the portal key. Why did the owner of Joe's Bar have it in his safe? Could it be that Lakmir and his ilk are able to enter these alternate dimensions, too, and set up wit-testing puzzles within them? That's what they do, after all: They set up clever and sometimes-deadly puzzles. It's how they roll.