Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness

aka: Ha-ratson le-otsma 4: Tslalei ha-khashekha, Hero's Quest 4: Shadows Of Darkness, QFG4, Quest for Glory III: Shadows of Darkness, Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness
Moby ID: 119
DOS Specs
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Description official descriptions

Shadows of Darkness is the fourth Quest for Glory game. It is a journey into the land of Mordavia - a setting influenced by Eastern Europe, particularly its Slavic areal. The hero had just begun to enjoy his victory in Tarna, when a spell zapped him into parts unknown, without a weapon, items, or even a source of light. Shortly after finding his way out of the dark cave, the hero meets a mysterious woman named Katrina. He traverses the swamps in the dark forest and finally reaches the town. However, the town is also engulfed by a foreboding atmosphere, and the hero cannot allow himself to relax. He must find out what is going on, why the town inhabitants are so hesitant and reluctant to help him, and what horrors are lurking outside of its walls. Life has never been quite so dangerous for our hero. He'll discover his quest soon enough - that is, if he lives.

Like the previous Quest For Glory titles, the game is a combination of puzzle-solving adventure and role-playing. The player character can be a fighter, a thief, a magician, or a paladin. Importing a character from a preceding installment of the series is also possible. Once again the hero improves his skills by repeatedly using them (like throwing stones at a tree to improve the throwing ability, which might be needed to solve a puzzle).

Combat system in this installment has undergone a major change. Battles are viewed from a side-scrolling perspective and are action-oriented. The protagonist is able to move freely, jump, and execute attacks and defensive moves, similarly to fighting games. The CD version of the game adds voice-overs to conversations as well as narrator's voice to text descriptions.

Spellings

  • הרצון לעוצמה 4: צללי החשכה - Hebrew spelling
  • 英雄傳奇4:魔障 - Traditional Chinese spelling
  • 영웅의 길 IV: 어둠의 그림자 - Korean spelling

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Credits (DOS version)

71 People (64 developers, 7 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 76% (based on 16 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.8 out of 5 (based on 155 ratings with 10 reviews)

The Quest For Glory series gets more mature

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.

DOS · by Katakis | カタキス (43092) · 2016

Not as great as the second one, but way better than the first and the third.

The Good
The paladin version of the game was by far the most rewarding, as you got to see everything in the game, especially if you were a thief/mage paladin like I was. The characters were more memorable than the third and first one, and actually had personality. The vampire girl I remember was sweet, but her appearance gave me nightmares. The story got more complex, and the puzzles got more fun. I enjoyed this game thoroughly as a paladin....

The Bad
....but I hated the game as the other classes. The thief had no impact on the game whatsoever, unlike the first and second game. There was no profit at all. Instead the focus came unto the paladin, who had more things to do. The battle system just fell flat on its face, and battles became a breeze to those with magic abilities and the real-life ability to hold down the magic button and let go at the the right time and an exercise in frustration to those who had to trudge through hand to hand fighting. The storyline, while the best in the series, took itself way too seriously and almost wiped out my impression of the light-heartedness of the earlier games and had no place in this series.

The Bottom Line
Buy this game so you can hate the third but appreciate the second game.

DOS · by SebastianLi (52) · 2000

Could have been the best....

The Good
First off the good points of this game. The graphics are highly detailed for their time. 256 colored backgrounds with very vivid and detailed graphics. Sprites with lots of animation and movement. The voice acting and varied personalities of the game also brought Quest for Glory 4 to life.

One of the best examples of voice acting ever. Also the fact that you could choose four classes in this game.

The mouse system is also very intuitive. Very easy to control in this game

The storyline is the best of the original four quest for glory games and delivers some really emotional moments.

The group inside the inn is also quite hilarious and some of the best lines money can buy.

The Bad
The Combat Engine. The first Quest For Glory combat engine was good The second Quest for Glory perfected it and the third one went downhill just a bit. However this combat system is more akin to a arcade title. Not too bad but very unfitting for a rpg/adventure hybrid.

BUGS! ERROR 42 will make you bang your head against the wall. Also running it on anything higher then Windows 95 tends to crash the game badly at least on my copy. Everytime I clicked outside the game screen the whole computer froze! HORRIBLE! For the best experience with this game run on at latest Windows 95 OSR 1 and under a pentium II processor

Not as diverse as previous Quest for Glory games. While there's four classes the things you do don't vary anywhere near as much as Quest for Glory 1 or 2 though better then 3 The Fighters and Theif's games are almost identical! The magicians game is a little more varied but to get the most out of this game you have to use the Paladin class to get all the extra quests.

Some extra bugs where if you don't do a certain event you can't get it again and hence literally have to restart the whole game! ARGH!

The Bottom Line
This is a great game to play. Don't let the negatives get to you too much since this is undeniably one of the best adventure games ever made. Would have been the pinnacle if the classes were more varied and the bugs weren't in there. Overall a 9/10 on my scale though to most it would be a 8/10

Windows 3.x · by Mr. Huh (105) · 2004

[ View all 10 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Some more non-bug problems Nowhere Girl (8680) Aug 2, 2016
My bug collection Nowhere Girl (8680) May 12, 2013
Bugs? Like dialog progressing too quickly Nowhere Girl (8680) Aug 15, 2012

Trivia

CD-ROM version

Quest for Glory 4: Shadows of Darkness was also released on CD-ROM, which was a part of the Quest for Glory collector´s edition. This CD version of the game featured full speech, although it was similar to the earlier disk release. The earlier parts of this series (unfortunately) only had disk versions.

Domovoi

There is a Domovoi (in fact two of them, one with a large role who has blue fur, and the other with a small role who has discolored brown fur) in Quest for Glory IV. In medieval Russian folk tales, when the good housewife heard the house making creaking noises, these were supposed to be the sounds made by the mommy Domovoi's little tiny children. It was said to be a good idea for the housewife to throw down a heavy cloth on top of the place where the housewife heard the noises. The mommy Domovoi would then not be able to hear where her little children were, because the cries would be muffled. In exchange for telling the mommy Domovoi where her children were, it was said that the medieval Russian housewife could ask the mommy Domovoi any question at all, and would be able to count on getting a magically correct and complete answer.

Fun things to try

Here are some interesting things to do while you play the game. Be warned, the first ones will get you killed, so save before you try them:

  • Break into the Burgomeister's office and stay until morning
  • Break into Nikolai's house and stab him with the knife
  • Die from exhaustion (no health or stamina)
  • Read the necrophilicon
  • As a thief, touch the statue in the monastery basement

Now for a few less-fatal ones...

  • Cast calm while fighting the pit horror and touch it
  • Try giving money and candy to various townsfolk
  • Burn down the monastery while Igor is outside, and talk to him afterwards
  • Try to fence items with Lorre Petrovich (Chief Thief)
  • Walk up the slippery path just outside the Dark One's cave
  • Talk to the townsfolk (Hans, Ivan and Franz) in the Inn during the evening

Installation program

During the installation of the disk version (which takes a while because it came on 9 disks) the player gets to read all kinds of amusing anecdotes from the customer department. The installation program also compliments you for the quality of the poetry found in your word processor directory, and at the end of the installation process it apologizes for not mentioning earlier that you've got some parsley stuck between your teeth.

Music

The name of the song played in the Hotel Mordavia is called "Anitra's Dance", and it was composed by Edvard Grieg.

Narrator's voice

John Rhys-Davies, who played Sallah in Raiders of the Lost Arc and Gimli in Lord of the Rings, provides the voice of the narrator on the CD version of the game.

Recurring elements

  • The enigmatic Moose Head and 'Maltese Falcon' appear in this game, as they do in every game in the Quest For Glory series. (Courtesy of the prop department, of course.) The rare Mordavian Moose in the adventurer's guild has fangs (funny little thing that amused me when I first noticed it).
  • Baba Yaga (a major villain in the first QFG1) makes a re-appearance in this Quest for Glory game.

References

  • The book in the monastery basement is named 'Necrophilicon', which was probably inspired by a book called 'Necronomicon', which appears in several of H.P. Lovecraft's stories. This "Necrophilicon" has references to a mad monk named Amon Tillado (which in turn is a pun on the mad Arab named Abdul Al-Hazred, also mentioned by Lovecraft). And the name "P.H. Craftlove" is featured in the game's manual too ;)
  • Just to further elaborate, the name "Amon Tillado", besides being a play on Lovcraft's Mad Arab, is also taken from E.A. Poe's story 'The Cast of Amontillado.' And yes, students of old greek, the name "Necrophilicon" does roughly work out to "The book of sex with the dead." (a rather raunchy joke by the standards of the series; probably assumed anyone who "got it" wouldn't be offended.)
  • In the Adventurer's Guild, a pamphlet contains Dr. Cranium talking about "The castle of Dr. Brain", which is a reference to the educational Sierra game Castle of Dr. Brain.
  • The vorpal bunny is based on the rabbit from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
  • The Chief Thief, Lorre Petrovich, is Peter Lorre backwards and with "Peter" in Russian. The Chief Thief does look quite a bit like Peter Lorre, too! Peter Lorre is an actor who has been in a number of horror movies, but is probably best known for his role as Ugarte in the classic film Casablanca. Of course, Quest for Glory 2 fans will remember Ugarte from Raseir.

Townsfolk dialogue

The voice actors of Hans, Franz, and Ivan at the Inn had some particularly humorous ad-libs that were not in the townsfolk's scripted lines. They say a number of funny things, so if you are one of the people who read what the script says and doesn't listen to the full speech, I advise you to stop and listen to the townsfolk.

Information also contributed by 88 49, Boris Stovich, Jiguryo, OceansDaughter, Rambutaan, Roedie, Roger Wilco, Timo Takalo and WizardX

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Game added by Eurythmic.

Additional contributors: Unicorn Lynx, Indra was here, Jeanne, Shoddyan, Havoc Crow, Paulus18950, lee jun ho, Duduzets, Kayburt.

Game added May 16, 1999. Last modified January 20, 2024.