Beyond Shadowgate

~ BEYOND SHADOWGATE ~

ICOM Simulations / TTI / Viacom New Media

Super CD-ROM

1993

This game seemed like a sure thing to me. Shadowgate is my favorite NES game by far, and I even like the N64's much-maligned Trial of the Four Towers. Plus, back in the day, I dug Sierra's Quest games (which this effort is highly reminiscent of), as well as the TG-16's similar-in-style Loom. So all the ingredients necessary for success seemed to be in place here.

Well, being that I experienced so many awesome monster encounters while playing through the first Shadowgate, I've expected subsequent episodes to provide plenty of cool creatures to deal with. Shadowgate 64 let me down in this regard, but BS comes through with a minotaur, a troll, a wraith, and all sorts of other beasts and demons.

I also expect a good bit of humor in my Shadowgate experiences, and once again, BS does not disappoint, as it incorporates lots of creative ways to die, lots of silly situations for the protagonist to stumble into, and plenty of amusing NPC utterances. The humor here is more about goofiness as opposed to the original's wit, but hey, funny is funny. The only scene I really feel is too goofy is that of the final confrontation, as the main character looks so freakin' stupid, and the dialogue is remarkably awful. ("He offered me everything a man could want. But... I'm NOT a MAN!")

Of course, probably more important than monsters and gags in a Shadowgate episode are puzzles, and BS's are pretty darn easy. This is preferable to the ridiculous conundrums that Shadowgate 64 has us solve, but the original is just about perfect as far as challenge goes, so it's a little disappointing that this one doesn't deliver a few more tricky brain teasers.

The "challenge" to be found here basically comes in two ways. You need to be careful about what you spend your gold on and whom you kill, at least if you want to see everything the game has to offer. I'm sure the designers were thinking replay value here, but I like it when a game like this requires you to make all (or at least most) of the right moves the first time through rather than making you take shots in the dark during subsequent journeys. Also, at times, items you can take blend in so "well" with the background graphics that you may not even notice that they're there.

But whether the puzzles in a Shadowgate are hard or easy, I like to have good music to listen to while I'm solving them. The original's soundtrack is classic, a perfect mix of eeriness and catchiness; and, heck, music is probably what saved Shadowgate 64 for me. The tunes here... well... I don't know if I can really say. You see, every time you step into a different scene, the game has to load, so the music stops. You often don't spend more than a few seconds on a single strip, so even if the musical track remains the same in the next one, it has to start all over again. It's possible to jaunt along through four or five different segments and hear the first few seconds of a particular tune over and over again. What I've heard isn't bad or anything, but it doesn't really compare with the music in the other Shadowgates. There's a jolly town tune along with plenty of ominous/"lonely" ones.

The stopping and restarting of the tracks kind of kills the atmosphere for me. It isn't until the final all-too-short journey through Castle Shadowgate that I really find myself immersed in the adventuring. There's an awesome hall of monster statues; a creepy organ room where you meet a wild elephant man; and, of course, a gong-and-ferryman scene that'll stir up some fond recollections for Shadowgate vets.

Castle Shadowgate isn't the only place that looks good here; as most folks know by now, this game has some really nice background graphics. Sometimes, they're a little too static, so it looks like you're walking past a painting instead of treading through a real environment. But there are beautiful woods and nice rustic towns and appropriately dead-looking marshlands in addition to the aforementioned awesome castle strips.

Navigating these neat-looking locales can be a pain, though. My brother Duomitri dislikes the game because the hero traipses along at a very slow pace. Duomitri's gripe is a valid one, though the slow walking in and of itself doesn't annoy me much. But combine it with said hero's inability to walk diagonally and the fact that he controls kind of stiffly, not to mention that you have to do lots of backtracking, and BS ends up feeling slow and tedious at times. The interface is also a little cumbersome; an extra button on the TurboPad probably would've worked wonders for it. Combat feels awful with the scheme that was implemented.

All in all, BS is a good game, but it's my least favorite of the Shadowgates. To be honest, as far as this sort of effort goes, Loom has proven to be a little more enjoyable for me. But hey, Beyond's protagonist is voiced by the same guy who voiced Lykos for Shape Shifter, and that guy rules (although he was much cooler in SS).