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
Shadows of Darkness occupies a special place in my heart and belongs to my absolute top favorite games. One of the reasons is the fact it has such a strong personality while still being a typical Quest for Glory title. It manages to combine all the elements that made the series so great and add to them its own unforgettable flavor.

What makes Shadows of Darkness different? Well, for starters, there's the setting. All Quest for Glory games had "ethnic" settings, but they were always taken more humorously than seriously. In this game, however, the Eastern European milieu brings something that we haven't seen before - a uniquely melancholic feeling pervading it from start to finish. The designers concocted a marvelous setting mixing genuinely dark themes with the series' trademark charm, resulting in warm emotions spread through the entire experience.

The atmosphere in Shadows of Darkness is so dense that you'd sometimes swear there is a Domovoi hiding somewhere in your apartment, especially if you play the game at night. Try wandering in the forest when it's dark, and after a while you'll start having a strong urge to climb over the city wall, go into the inn, and warm yourself near the fireplace, while watching the taciturn Yuri smoke his pipe. The swamps, the trees, the wooden houses, the caves, the Borgov castle - everything is made with such great attention to detail that you begin to think it all really exists somewhere. There is a good deal of nearly macabre elements, and the overall feeling of horror and suspense is ever present; certain images, such as the vampire girl, can be almost described as creepy.

This atmosphere is immaculately channeled through wonderful hand-painted graphics that absolutely surpass most everything achieved in the field of 2D visual design. As much as the last Quest for Glory was pretty, this one beats it fair and square with its more serious, soulful art. Particularly expressive are the huge character portraits, bringing to life the intriguing, exotic personalities of Mordavia. The music is also superior to anything we've heard in the series' installments so far. Like the icing on the cake, the CD version presents excellent voice acting, with even the narrator's comments being fully voiced.

Now, if you are familiar with the series but never played this installment, you'll probably ask: "But what about humor? Did the series lose its charming sense of humor in this game because it is so serious"? Not in the least: like its predecessors, it is crammed with jokes and silly puns, and many descriptions have endearingly ironic undertones that have always distinguished the writing in the series. Characters come across as even more extravagant: alone Doctor Cranius with his theory about the five elements - air, water, fire, earth, and pizza - is guaranteed to amuse you. Wait till you hear the Gnome's performance, and your last doubts about this game not having humor - in case you still have those by then - will eventually disappear.

The gameplay of Shadows of Darkness is perhaps even more satisfying than in the earlier games. There is a bit less combat and more puzzle-solving here compared to other Quest for Glory games - which is a good thing, since combat was never the focus of those games anyway. Puzzles are never as confusing as in the second game, and are quite versatile and interesting - I enjoyed the animal identification or gathering the stuff for Baba Yaga quite a lot. There is a good deal of solid traditional puzzles, so any fan of adventure games will probably be more pleased with this game than with the earlier installments. Some puzzles involve finding correct pattern or placing objects in a correct order, but they are usually not excessively challenging and are never as tedious as they are in so many other adventure games.

The role-playing system of Shadows of Darkness is fairly standard for the series, mostly serving as an enhancement of the otherwise straightforward puzzle-solving adventure gameplay. You can spend your days training in the city, increasing your strength in order to fight those swamp monsters with ease, or you can decide which side quests to complete and which to leave out. Some puzzles require upgrading your abilities: for example, there is a puzzle where you have to throw a stone at something, but if your throwing skill is not high enough, you won't be able to hit the right object. You'll therefore have to upgrade your throwing skill by going into the woods, picking stones and throwing them at trees. I find this type of puzzles a rather refreshing and realistic alternative to the usual inventory-based gameplay.

The combat system has been re-made from scratch for Shadows of Darkness. Instead of offering you a real-time menu with various actions to choose from, battles have been upgraded to legitimate arcade-like exercises reminiscent of versus fighting games. Basically, every battle takes you to a separate side-scrolling area where you can move back and forth, as well as jump or duck to avoid enemy attacks. The system is simple, and the overall low difficulty of these fights will hardly satisfy a fan of real action games; but it works marvelously within the frames of this hybrid title, providing a light refreshment between the more demanding tasks.

On top of all that, Shadows of Darkness delivers what is undeniably the best story in the series. Sure, in the previous games there were conflicts, dramatic situations, as well as sad and touching events. But no other Quest for Glory had the same intensity of storytelling or dealt with a similarly serious subject matter. Shadows of Darkness has a lyrical love story, tales of sacrifice, alienation, tolerance, and other important topics that haven't been handled by this series - at least not to this extent. The natural is blended with the supernatural, the ordinary with the grotesque, the trivial with the poetic, resulting in a wonderful mixture.

The Bad
There is a little bit less variation between character classes in this installment of the series compared to its predecessors. While the Paladin has appropriately unique options, the Thief character is not very prominently featured and mostly plays the same way as the Fighter. Also, the game's combat system would probably distress people who got used to the relatively pain-free clicking of the earlier games. The game wisely provides you with an option to set the battles on auto just for such cases, letting the game calculate the outcome according to the combatants' current parameters.

There are very few, if any, obscure or utterly illogical puzzles, and cheap deaths do not await the hero at every corner. That said, one infamously known element of Sierra design is unfortunately present in this game in at least one aggravating instance: if you forget to perform a certain action rather early in the game, it will become unwinnable much later. Dead ends might have been appropriate in the simple early King's Quests, but not in a game with so many options as Shadows of Darkness.

Unbecoming such an exquisite game, the initial release was very buggy. While subsequent floppy incarnations and the CD version seem to have corrected the most glaring flaws, new errors connected to speed issues started to claim their toll very soon. Only disabling the internal cache of my computer in the BIOS prevented me from encountering the dreaded crush occurring relatively late in the game.

The Bottom Line
It's quite hard to proclaim a specific Quest for Glory game the best in the series, since the quality of this particular franchise has been consistently high. Nevertheless, I'll make my personal choice and nominate Shadows of Darkness - a true Quest for Glory game through and through, and yet also something transcending even its excellence.