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
Note: We may earn an affiliate commission on purchases made via eBay or Amazon links (prices updated 3/23 7:17 PM )

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

Groups +

Screenshots

Promos

Videos

See any errors or missing info for this game?

You can submit a correction, contribute trivia, add to a game group, add a related site or alternate title.

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)

It could have been the best of the series.

The Good
Besides being a funny game with a great story it had one thing that no other QFG game had... John Rhys-Davies. Thats right, direct from Raiders of the Lost Ark, it's Indy's friend Sallah as the narrator. Along with that theirs a great atmosphere and a sweet arcade style combat system.

The Bad
BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS BUGS

Count the number of times I types bugs. Multiply that by a million. Thats how many bugs are in the game. I may be exaggerating, but not that much. The game would have been great without them. I CURSE YOU ERROR 42!!!!

The Bottom Line
If your a big quest for glory fan get the game. If your not swimming through the sea of bugs may not be worth it.

Windows 3.x · by Ryan Prendiville (689) · 2000

Brooding triumph

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.

DOS · by Unicorn Lynx (181780) · 2014

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

Analytics

MobyPro Early Access

Upgrade to MobyPro to view research rankings!

Related Games

Quest for Glory V: Dragon Fire
Released 1998 on Macintosh, Windows
Quest for Glory: Collection Series
Released 1997 on DOS, Windows 3.x
Quest & Glory
Released 1991 on DOS, Amiga, Atari ST
Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire
Released 1990 on DOS, Amiga
The Shadows of Mordor
Released 1987 on Commodore 64, DOS, 1988 on Apple II...
Shadows
Released 1996 on Windows
Star Wraith 3: Shadows of Orion
Released 2002 on Windows

Related Sites +

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 119
  • [ Please login / register to view all identifiers ]

Contribute

Are you familiar with this game? Help document and preserve this entry in video game history! If your contribution is approved, you will earn points and be credited as a contributor.

Contributors to this Entry

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.