Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness

The Good
I've always found the Quest for Glory series to be my all-time favorite series of adventure games, and much better than any other RPG. However, the incredible atmosphere of this fourth QFG, well-titled "Shadows of Darkness", put it ahead of all other adventure games, with the possible exception of Grim Fandango. Why?...

It's in the Russian/Transsilvanian atmosphere, that adds SO much to the game. All of the Quest for Glory's take place in different settings, such as the Medieval or the African Desert, but the setting of QFG 4 stand out triumphantly from the others...it's dark and tragic, but doesn't lose its classic sense of humor. The graphics, 2d as they are, capture this feeling perfectly, better than 3d graphics could have ever done for it.

But the game stands out in more ways than that. The professional voice-acting adds a new layer, and it's unfortunate that QFG 5 didn't come close to measuring up in that area. The new, very arcade-y combat system is much simpler to use than that of the previous games. And even besides that, get ready meet and talk to Dr. Brain's ancestor...Dr. Cranium!...and you "reunite" with Baba Yaga, the witch from the first Quest for Glory.

Before this space ends, I'll mention that this game, while its ending remotely resembles that of QFG 3 with your hero being teleported to a new land, it isn't nearly as much of a quickie ending...

The Bad
In a very annoying way, there is a point very near to the game's beginning where if you don't do something there, you have effectively lost the game as you will not be able to complete it later...

The Bottom Line
The all-time BEST Quest for Glory ever, and in a series like this one, full of awesome games, THAT's saying a lot...

The Good
Shadows of Darkness is the fourth instalment in the Quest For Glory series, and it was released at the time when Sierra started dropping roman numerals from sequels to some of their franchises for a number of years (Some other examples include Police Quest: Open Season, Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail!, and Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh). It also employs an Eastern European setting, much like the second game having a Middle East setting, and the third having an African setting.

The game follows right where the third game left off, and it caters for new players that are introduced to the series for the first time. You don't get a recap of what happened in the finale, nor do you read a text description of it You wake up in the cave somewhere in the land of Mordavia, wearing the same clothes as before. You have no idea of how or why you got there. All you know is that you need to get out.

You start each game by selecting one of three classes – A Fighter, Magic User, or Thief – and assign different stats to that class, and these stats affect your performance throughout the game, which characters you can talk to, and how easy the game's puzzles are. If you played a previous QFG game and saved your character to disk, you can also import him and modify the stats if you wish. I imported a thief that I used in the previous game, but Shadows of Darkness detected that I was a magic user. Luckily I was able to choose the correct one and had plenty of points so that I can beef up my character a bit more.

Assuming that you manage to get out of the cave at the start of the game, you can explore your surroundings and battle monsters. You can also visit the town where the locals are hostile toward you, but their trust in you will be gained as you do more and more heroic things. Four characters that appeared in other QFG games make a comeback, and two of them are Baba Yaga and Ad Avis. Shadows of Darkness also operates in real time, and it runs on a day/night cycle. Some events only happen on specific days, so it may be necessary to rest for a bit or improve upon your skills.

The monsters you fought in previous QFG games were relevant to its theme. Here, it's Batters, Necrotaurs, Wraiths, and Wytherns. The combat system is a bit unusual as the view is side-on, rather than isometric. During the battle, you can alter your aggressiveness, your ability to use magic, how easy it is to defend yourself, and whether you can use any special attacks. After you defeat the monster, your hero flexes his muscles as if he is a little boy saying “Yeah, I'm a big, strong man”. You can then proceed to search the corpse for a chance to gain more money and other stuff.

Also different aside from the combat system, is the way that conversations take place. Clicking the talk cursor on a character in previous QFG games cause the "conversation tree" to appear, and the character portrait is shown along with their dialogue. Here, the screen clears and a huge version of the character appears on the left, while the tree/dialogue appears on the right. I don't have a problem with this, and it's something you can get used to quickly.

The soundtrack for Shadows of Darkness is brilliantly composed by Aubrey Hodges, who plays a multitude of instruments and works in a variety of styles. He decided not to include the famous QFG theme music that we were all familiar with in the first two games. Actually, you hear a snippet of it as you head into town the first time, but that's about it. I enjoyed listening to this game's theme as it was struck into my mind for the first five minutes of me hearing it.

The CD-ROM version of the game was released at a time when Sierra dropped the idea of using its own employees to portray each character to make way for well-known Hollywood actors. In Shadows of Darkness, one or more characters are portrayed by the same actor. The game is narrated by John-Rhys Davis, who reads the script from the bottom of his heart, and one of the highlights is listening to him perform the rituals near the end of the game.

The humor in Shadows of Darkness is on par with any QFG game out there. As well as Dr. Cranium believing that pizza is one of the elements (alongside air, water, earth, and fire), for me much of it comes from the interface itself. All the cursors in the game are animated as you move the mouse around the screen, and the animation itself stretches about ten frames. You can use these animations to your advantage by hovering them over a character on screen and pretending they have big eyes or are miming some words out. Also, one of the monsters you fight during daytime is a cute little bunny rabbit, and I find that pretty funny.

Shadows of Darkness is much darker in toner than previous QFG games, and therefore the game is aimed at a mature audience. Two examples come to mind. The innocent peasant girl that has eyes for our hero throughout the game turns into a dominatrix who whips him while he's being chained up; the Resalka, a half-naked woman in the lake, turns in to something grotesque after you do something for her. Then there's the sexually-explicit language coming from the same two women.

I like the way the developers pay homage to the Castle of Dr. Brain by letting the player solve a series of puzzles to unlock his laboratory, including the “Simon Says” puzzle when you try to open the front door. You can then proceed to get an Antwerp through a maze and complete a jigsaw, and even change the difficulty of these puzzles.

The Bad
The combat scenes can be automated so all you have to do is watch your hero fight whatever monster stumbled in his path. But since QFG is supposed to be a RPG/adventure hybrid, I think this defeats the whole purpose, as I have never seen a feature in the previous games.

Also, runtime errors happen if you attempt to run Shadows of Darkness on anything greater than a 486, and the first set of these occur when you are traveling down a slope at the start of the game. And the first lot of these happen when you try to travel down the slope at the start of the game. Something totally unexpected also happen as well. In his Let's Play for the game, YouTuber LateBlt was throwing the spear at Ad Avis after telling “the ultimate joke”. Ad Avis gets killed only to be resurrected and kill our hero, triggering the scene where Avoozl comes out of the volcano and starts terrorizing the town.

The Bottom Line
Shadows of Darkness is my second favorite QFG game (after Wages of War). As the nameless hero, you do the usual things that you did in the previous games, such as exploring the sights, battling monsters, talking to people, and building up skills. The game operates in real time. There are events that only happen during the day, and some at night. The graphics and sound is great, and there are heaps of playability as you can play the game again with a different class and possibly see everything the game has to offer.

The Good
I really think QG4 had the chance to be the best in the series. There are lots of things to love about it. I find Mordavia to be a very cool setting. There's quite a bit to discover in this game (especially if you're a Paladin), and the character design is good. Mordavia's citizens are fun to interact with, and you can watch their attitudes toward you change as you begin to make a name for yourself in the town. The fighting system was totally redesigned for QG4 (as it was for every game in the series). In this game, instead of seeing the action from behind your hero, all of the action happens in a side-view. This gives the fights a more arcade-like feel. You can also fight in a "strategy mode", but I doubt that many people use it since the fights are so easy. QG4 has very nice graphics. The beautiful portraits of the game's characters are also a nice touch. There's also a great soundtrack; probably the best in the series up to that point. Those of you with wavetable soundcards will be especially pleased - this game was one of the first which treated the gamer without a Roland MT-32 to high quality MIDI. The voice acting is pretty well done. You'll probably recognize the voice of John Rhys-Davies (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) as the narrator. Everything is fairly solid, and mostly recorded well. There's one scene which I found especially funny; you'll have to play the game to find out, but let's just say that the townsfolk in the Inn at night take some pretty huge liberties with the script. :) So. In the good points, I've mentioned the story, the characters, the fighting system, the graphics, the music, and the acting. Sounds like a game you should just rush out and buy, right? Well...

The Bad
You may have heard that the game has a few bugs. Well, let's put it this way: I've bought the game twice, and tried three times to win it since 1993. In fact, the most recent time was just a few weeks ago (with the game's most recent version), and I still haven't beaten it. THAT'S buggy. I'll explain...

First of all, version 1.0 of the game had literally hundreds of bugs. This was, of course, back when Sierra made adventure games, and new games found their way to my house almost right away. I played as far as I could, before the bugs stopped me in my tracks. By then a patch had been released, so once it arrived in the mail (this is how we got our patches in the old days, unless we wanted to spend a couple of hours calling long-distance on our 2400 baud modems :) ), I installed it. I was now playing version 1.1, I believe. I was, ahem, thrilled to find out that I now had to restart the game because my saved games were no longer compatible with the new interpreter. I played the game again, but I was again stopped by the bugs. My patience had run out by then, so the disks got thrown back in the box.

Fast forward to 1999. I've just purchased the Quest for Glory Collection Series, looking forward to playing the CD-ROM version of QG4 for the first time - and finally finishing it. Unfortunately, rather than finally fixing the bugs in QG4 (and the few that hamper gameplay in QG3), Sierra decided to leave it as-is, and provide pages and pages of absolutely pathetic walkarounds for the many bugs that they didn't feel the need to fix. As you can probably tell, this doesn't make Sierra look too great in my eyes. It's actually BUGGIER in 1999 than it was in 1995 (I believe) when the CD-ROM version first came out. The reason is that the speed of many events in the game is dependant on the speed of your CPU. I can't understand why Sierra would do this. Their AGI and 16-color SCI games were coded so well, that they run at exactly the same speed on my Pentium as they would on an XT or AT. That's solid. You'd think that by QG4, Sierra would know that faster computers would come along, and that many people would still be playing their older games. Or, you'd think that they'd at least alter the programming of QG4 slightly, realizing that most people aren't running 486's anymore.

Don't try a software slowdown utility to get around the speed-based bugs. It won't work. If you're running a Pentium/75 mhz or faster, you'll probably need to go into your BIOS setup and disable your internal cache. If you don't know how to do that, I'm afraid it's not likely that the game will run on your computer.

So you've disabled the cache, and played the game happily since then. And you've saved your game every five minutes (because it can still crash without warning, due to problems with the 32-bit DOS extender). You're now on the game's day 40, and nothing new has happened in forever! Why could this be?

Ah, you've discovered my next big problem with QG4. It suffers from a little something known as the 'Dead End Fallacy'. You have to meet a certain someone, in a certain location, on Day 5 or 6. Not before, or after. And if you don't, you can't win the game and you won't figure that out until later. You're led down the long path to a dead-end, and you'll have to restart the game.

I have other, smaller, problems with QG4. But these are the main things. They make the game very difficult to enjoy.

The Bottom Line
I want to love this game. I want to reccommend it to everybody. It had all the potential to be a really great adventure game, but it failed.

If you're willing to perform all kinds of tricks to make QG4 run, and you understand the fact that you'll have to read some of the hints before you even start playing (if you don't want to risk the dead-end), then pick this one up, by all means. If you're the more impatient type and flawed execution bugs you a lot, move on.