Beyond Shadowgate Reviews

Loved the game, also loved the cameos late in the game.

Great follow up for Shadowgate. I'm glad i spent some time with this

Shadowgate!!! Did you love Shadowgate on NES and play the other games, Uninvited and Deja Vu? You'll love this game!

I remember constantly playing Shadowgate Classic on the gameboy as a kid and it helped me through some serious stuff, ever since I have been hoping for a fitting end to the story but all the other Shadowgate games have, in my opinion failed to meet that expectation. Not this time. If you are on the fence due to the other games failing to scratch that itch I seriously suggest you try and move past that and give Beyond Shadowgate a go. Beyond Shadowgate? I am beyond impressed.

There’s something about playing this that invokes the perfect mix of nostalgia and intrigue that you just don’t get as often with modern games. Whether or not you played the original on NES doesn’t matter - what you have here is a super fun & challenging point and click puzzle game that is hard to put down once you get into it. The music rocks, the setting is awesome, and the number of QoL improvements over the original make it perfect to play, yet at its core it still feels like a game that could have been released in the late 80s. I was a bit nervous that it would be too difficult (as the original is pretty brutal and obscure at times) but it stays consistently challenging to the point where you can always find the solution if you think hard enough. Can’t recommend this more for fans of legacy point and click puzzle games, or to anyone who is just looking to relive the glory days of old.

Very good, very fun and replayable. Love the aesthetics. Love a lot about this game. Please make more like this.

classic but be warned that includes old school logic and difficulty.

Quite the awesome game, I love shadowgate and this scratched the itch. I 100% the game and loved every minute of it. I got stuck on 100% map completion and had to ask around, but don't forget to [spoiler]Look out of the telescope in the tower[/spoiler]. That one got me good.

Gaming as a medium is ever-evolving as the decades go by, with beautiful open-world and extensive RPGs dominating the 2010s before rewinding to the 2000s and seeing intense FPS series making their name at the same time as well-known MMORPGs at their peak. Going further back to the 90s saw platformers become a staple of success for many companies alongside the fighting genre highlighting the competitive spirit of many skilled gamers, so it comes with no surprise to say that the ancient 80s had its own defining genres that made it so beloved for gamers of its era, of which the adventure genre quickly blossomed from its infancy as a mere text-based interactive medium with no visual graphics of any kind to becoming a splendid delight for many nerds and gaming enthusiasts to explore fascinating worlds only previously imagined in the realm of one's own mind with books or the rare adaptation in film and theatres. For a little bit of background, my personal history with what is easily up there with the Sierra classics began with the originals by ICOM Simulations, then having seen the popular NES ports in action via various YouTube playthroughs growing up throughout the late 2000s and early 2010s, eventually getting the chance to play the Apple IIGS port of Deja Vu for myself earlier last year though I sadly found it less than impressive going through it myself. Seeing as I also own the Apple IIGS versions of Shadowgate alongside Uninvited that I've yet to risk trying out, I instead opted to venture out and try what has been quite the bold move with the original developers behind the iconic trilogy of adventure games pushing forward with making what I originally thought was just an expanded version of the original Shadowgate. However, to much my pleasant surprise, Beyond Shadowgate is a bona fide direct sequel that takes places 35 years after the original and carries all of the technological improvements with it too! So without further ado, delving into the actual gameplay side of things, Beyond Shadowgate has us take control of a Fenling known as Del Thornburrow who has found himself imprisoned for a crime he may or may not be guilty of. From there, the player is tasked with escaping and saving the land of Kal Torlin from the evil looming within that threatens to return after hiding in the shadows for decades. How the player goes about this is typical of the early graphical text adventures of this time as you use your cursor to select one of eight commands (MOVE, TAKE, OPEN, HIT, LOOK, USE, CLOSE and SPEAK) to interact with various NPCs and items alongside the environment itself to progress. Given that the original trilogy made excellent use of various puzzles with creative solutions to them, Beyond Shadowgate continues this fine tradition by requiring the player to observe each of the rooms carefully and pick up (almost) any and all items they can find to safely progress onwards! Seeing as one of the biggest delights of Beyond Shadowgate by far is the many ways that the poor Fenling can perish, with how the developers put a surprising amount of detail and effort into how the player can get themselves killed in what is truly an impressive variety of deaths and the fiendish descriptions of one's own demise, whether genuinely caught off-guard or by sheer stupidity. Though I mention this in particular as, unlike with the older games, the sequel to Shadowgate has an excellent save system whereby any deaths will take you back to the previous screen (save for one occasion right at the start, which puts you back in the spot of danger) so as to prevent frustration with lost progress. Couple that with multiple save slots and it's a pretty handy feature, all things considered! To touch upon technical improvements, seeing as this is a game in 2024 and not an NES title from 1989, the game largely does feel a whole lot bigger than the original Shadowgate as far as what content is on offer, noting that Beyond Shadowgate offers a much larger 250 or so rooms compared to the original's 50-ish. Though perhaps it may feel not quite as expansive given that the trilogy often had environments where you would traverse some areas often whilst visiting individual buildings or rooms, meanwhile Beyond Shadowgate goes for a more streamlined approach to game design which helps with keeping the pace more focused but does come at the slight cost of brushing by areas faster than you normally would in the older days. Alongside improvements to visuals and the design of each being noticeably better than the trilogy it's based on, Beyond Shadowgate offers a neat game mechanic in the form of the Grim Reaper himself who subtly hangs over the screen that displays each room, whereby any imminent danger will cause his eyes and the outline of the screen itself to flash in a dangerous red to indicate urgent action on the player's part before they die. Add in the bonus of multiple endings and other pleasant surprises and it's no wonder that this indie can be seen as a love letter to these point-and-click adventure games, especially for those keen to hear the developers' own commentary themselves which makes a second playthrough for other endings seriously well-worth it! Outside of the aforementioned streamlining issue, there does exist some other problems that are worth mentioning. Given that all but one puzzle can either be solved on the spot or, failing that, require some going back and forth around the area to find an item that you either did not notice or didn't think important enough to collect. However, going into potential spoilers ahead, [spoiler]halfway into the game at Chapter 6 you explore a mansion to banish a phantom so you can recover your inventory and continue onwards. Whilst it may seem inconsequential to bury a corpse at first, you are unable to interact with the buried corpse any further as you can't apply salt to it for banishing the phantom properly which, if it is done incorrectly, will still allow you to progress but at the cost of a familiar creature's life which impacts which endings are available for the player. Ultimately, if the player saves after this mistake, there's nothing one can do outside of restarting the whole game from scratch or go with the bad ending on one's first run.[/spoiler] Other than some of the music soundtracks not quite hitting the same as they could have, I feel that there is not much else wrong with Beyond Shadowgate outside of whether you are a fan of these titles as it's a given that this is the kind of game where you often need to think a fair bit on solutions, even occasionally going a little 'out of the box' to progress, however it's the witty writing and the memorable set pieces that adds to the charm of such games as these. And although I would have loved to have seen a direct sequel to Uninvited myself, the team behind this fine indie couldn't have done a better job with the vision they had going forward! It goes without saying here that Beyond Shadowgate is made primarily for those who loved the 8-bit adventure games of old and is, without a doubt, a fitting way of giving the series a return to form whilst also serving as an easily digestible game for newcomers who don't need to play the original to have a good time. Certainly this is one indie I can fully recommend as far as retro adventure titles go and, when considering the TurboGrafx CD sequel bearing the same name, does justice to a game as beloved as the original Shadowgate! Also for those curious, although I do not personally recommend the Macventure games on Steam, if one is keen to seek out the NES ports instead then I can direct you towards 8-bit Adventure Anthology: Volume I, which has all three classics in the one game and features its own QOL improvements to make it all the more easier for newcomers to experience these gems in what is arguably their most definitive version to play on: https://store.steampowered.com/app/664850/8bit_Adventure_Anthology_Volume_I/