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)

Sierra really snatched defeat from the clutches of victory, didn't they?

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.

DOS · by Eurythmic (2663) · 1999

The best blend of gothic horror and comedy for the PC back then.. or until now???

The Good
Wow,what is there not to like?? This was the first PC game I ever bought, mainly because of the great box design: graves, tentacled monsters, witches and skulls, when I saw it I fell in love. Added to this all the booklets, full of gothic puns and spooky stories I thought it couldn't get better.

This game is mostly an adventure game combined with RPG elements which make it really decision-open. You can go anything you like, click at everything and read something clever, talk to anyone and actually do anything you can think of, almost.

The graphics were superb for 1994 with very nicely drawn surroundings and some of the most distinctive faces ever made for a game (ahh... Rusalka...). The sound effects and music add very much to the eerie atmosphere and a cozy feeling of old horror stories featuring ghosts and curses in little towns were the townsfolk bolt their houses at night (for example the inn features a midi sample of Grieg's Annitra's Dance, magnificent!).

The gameplay is a bit on the easy side, with most adventuring riddles being solved with a combination of using the right item on the right place, conversing with everyone and advancing the right skills to overcome obstacles. There is so much to be done though, and the feeling of adventuring is always there so its not so much of a hindrance that the various objectives are mainly easy. There is also a bit of fighting which adds an extra flavor, although it was very badly implemented in this game .

In the end the best aspect of this game is its concept, imagery and spooky feeling. It is a combination of all the classical horror themes (vampires, werewolves, mad scientists, ghosts, graveyards, Slavic mythology along with a Poeish and Lovecraftian touch). The master aspect of all these is that they never feel out of place or disjointed like in other horror games of that time (waxworks etc), but completed each side of the story of one of the best RPG adventures ever made.



The Bad
Well there were some bugs, but I didn't care at the time.

The really hideous part of the game is one that was advertised on the box.. combat. It was badly programmed and not entertaining. There was even an option that the character's fighting was carried out by the PC on autopilot which was very awkward at first, but really logical after the first few lame battles. Also the sound effects after a victorious battle were so kitsch and out of place.. a common feature of all Sierra games. Sierra could never really criticize their games effectively and cut some stupid art or effects out of them, but hey they had just come out of the 80's eh?

The game these days can be seen as a little retro. It hasn't aged very well as most of Sierra's games unfortunately. A bit childish in some aspects too.

The Bottom Line
This is the perfect blend of a mixture of gothic horror and comedy in a PC game adventure/RPG. You have to try it out if you like graveyards, superstitious folk, vampires, bloodthirsty bunnies and early 90's gaming. Actually there hasn't been one single game to be compared to it since then.

My dream one day, is not to see the wars end and earth be a better place, but some gaming company make another game that could compete this one in gothic horror feeling , mixing traditional spookiness and a bit of comic humor and make an equally open actioned game with more clever puzzles. Is it so hard???

My only hope right now for something a bit close to this, is "A vampyre's tale" an adventure made by Autumn moon entertainment, although its more on the cute graphics , leaving a bit of horror aside.. but since its supposed to be made from the creators of the perfect Monkey Island 3 its ok I guess.

So still Shadows of darkness is as close as it gets to the perfect gothic horror themed RPG/adventure. There is always Ghost 'n Goblins of course and Castlevania but these are arcade platformers and another story.

FIN.

DOS · by Frankenfed (32) · 2008

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

[ 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.