Beyond Shadowgate: Hey, I actually finished a game!

I like to stream games on Twitch as I play them in case I want to go back over what happened or to grab screenshots and stuff for blog posts. It doesn’t cost anything, I’m not on camera or mic, so why not? Streaming was one of the first things I started doing once I got fiber internet.

If you stream on Twitch, you run the risk that someone will actually watch your stream. I have been trying to make that something someone might want to do, by using templates and branding and stuff.

Today, while streaming through the latter half of Beyond Shadowgate, a player named “flitchard” decided to make it their mission in life to guide me through the game, and also to tell me about all the easter eggs and callbacks to the original Shadowgate game, Uninvited, Deja Vu and so on. This person was an expert.

I was fumbling my way through, but with flitchard’s help, I was able to speed to the endings — to three of the four endings.

So now that the game is done, how is it?

There’s two kinds of point and click adventures. There’s the one where your character is a sprite on screen, and you have to watch it move slowly from place to place across the screen until it does what you want. This is most adventure games. I find them tedious. It’s exactly like you’re using the world’s slowest mouse cursor.

Then there’s this kind, where it’s first person and you just point… and click… and things happen as fast as you like. Those, I like. This is way more like text adventures with pictures. The Nonary Games were a couple of recent games that played like this — and guess what, I loved the hell out of them, too.

Anyway. The Beyond Shadowgate Kickstarter had various stretch goals that would bring in areas from their other games, Deja Vu, Mines of Mythrok and Uninvited. Those vignettes served as stealth ads for those other games, and now I am interested. You even are Zelig-inserted into Uninvited retroactively…

The puzzles ranged from easy to frustrating; if my fairy godmother hadn’t been whispering from chat, at least one puzzle would have taken much longer. And, one puzzle I would never have solved, as I’d missed looting an item a long time ago and had to go back to get it. Thankfully, there is really no time when you can’t head out and return to an earlier place to get something you may have missed.

As a Kickstarter backer, I got some additional content along with the game — a full walkthrough guide, a comic book prequel, a comic book walkthrough for the original game of Shadowgate and a full soundtrack. The music was pretty good and appropriate to the era. When in the other game vignettes, those games’ music played.

The walkthrough guide also includes a history of the project, bios of the developers and the box artist who died from ALS during development, ads for their other games — quite a lot, as well as the location of the Gold Ring I missed looting.

If you like point and click adventures or think you might, give this one a shot. Steam says it took me ten hours to finish the game, but there were a few hours where it was running but I was not playing. Call it seven hours of actual play. There’s an achievement for doing it in two hours, and I think I could manage that now that I know what I’m doing. And I need to do that, in order to make one bad decision and see the final, worst, ending.

So give it a shot. It’s on Steam and GoG. It will almost certainly come to consoles at some point.

The header image is from Ending C. It’s a bad ending. Not the worst. But it’s bad.

Here’s video of the first three endings: