Video Game Review: Shadowgate (Old School NES)

There's shadows and gates and how judicious you are and the power of your own memory determine your fate. (No walkthroughs! C'mon People!)

Caption: Just look at that gate. It’s full of shadows… Will you dare enter? Or just stand there, wondering what’s inside? Muhahah!

This has to be one of the hands-down absolute best games for the old school Nintendo Entertainment System.

First of all: the music. Just listen:

Listen to this music! Ba-baba-ba-baba-baba-ba-ba-ba-ba!

Tap along on the table with it. It FEELS like a grand adventure is about to begin and you have an uphill climb ahead of you.

For those who love the challenge of a solo adventure game, this is your 8-Bit Baby!

Now, for the gameplay:

You use the NES 2-button + directional + start/select-style controller to navigate the game world.

You want to look at that door, first you move the little hand that either looks like a skeleton hand or a knight’s hand in a gauntlet over to LOOK and then click it.

Then you move the hand to what you want to look at and the game will display a description of the item, object, creature or room. You can even click on LOOK and click on SELF and you’ll get different descriptions of the Adventuring Hero, which was pretty advanced for back then.

If you play the game on an NES Emulator, you won’t need the SAVE button because you will be able to save state. I play Shadowgate and a ton of other favorite old school games on this:

It only cost $50 and has about 28,000 games from NES, Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, (NO N64 sadly), Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Super Famicom, Coleco Vision, Arcade Games, much more. The controllers are basically PS1-2-style controllers and take 2 AA batteries to power. The little black CPU unit that stores the games easily plugs into your smart TV’s HDMI media input and fires right up. The Menu is self-explanatory and very easy to navigate for even an inexperienced gamer.

Shadowgate is a memory-testing and puzzle-based game. You walk around Castle Shadowgate looking for the Staff of Ages which was torn apart into its individual pieces by the Evil Wizard Lakmir. Why did Lakmir take it upon himself to wreck the Staff of Ages? To be able to keep control over the giant Bohemeth, a huge pink dragon-like monster that lives in the hot lava way, way down in the basement of Castle Shadowgate.

Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to wander around Castle Shadowgate with nary a clue as how to find this wizard.

The original game was intended as a trial-and-error type of game play where the player had to walk around finding items and figuring out how they fit together or performed different functions like keys that unlock specific doors or crystal orbs that freeze lakes over or a shield that protects the Adventuring Hero from dragon’s breath fire. Not all of the items are necessary, so the designers threw in that little twist to make it more complicated. And when it came out, obviously there wasn’t any Internet for any player to look up cheat codes/walkthroughs, so the nostaliga this game gives me playing it at age 46 is really powerful memories of sitting in my Mom and Dad’s basement with two of my three younger brothers and our friends getting all hopped up on Coca-Cola and Pizza and bouncing off the walls trying to figure out how to get to the next screen.

Random Fun Fact: Back in the day, sometimes players used to call “screens” in video games “boards.” My cousin Mark (now age 53): “Dude, I can’t talk on the phone because I’ve got to beat this board before I go to sleep!” [Phone hangs up].

So Shadowgate offers the new, experienced or very discerning game player a lot of fun times.

One classic shot from this game is the famous Shadowgate death scene.

Your character can die in a variety of ways from melting in a fountain of acid water to being eaten by a Hellhound. Back then, the death moments were not displayed on screen. If the player made an incorrect choice with one of the items or did something out of sequence in a puzzle room, it could trigger a death.

This is what the screen looked like:

Image: If you notice the upper right-hand corner of the Shadowgate inventory screen, you will notice two stick-like objects. Those are your torches. In this particular screenshot, you’ll notice that one torch is extinguished and the other is a tiny red flame. You need to have at least one torch going the entire time you play. The torch element to the came placed a sort of existential pressure on players to pay attention to their torches. If both of your torches went dark, that was it. Kaput. You’d trigger a death screen.

Check out the classic Shadowgate low torch light music:

Warning: Listen to this with the volume not on super-high because it’ll blast your eardrums out if you’re wearing headphones. You’re welcome :)

Imagine being 10 years old, which was how old I was when I first played this game at my friend Tarek’s house, a dude who has been my buddy for 40 years…

Imagine the music just bearing down on you and you are still learning to master the basically still brand-new NES 2-button controller.

The other day, I laughed because I was at my cousin Chris’s house who is 27 and a musician and management consultant. He and his fiance Meg, who is a special education teacher, invited me over for a drink and to play video games.

They had the latest XBox system and we played some zombie shooter game whose title I can’t remember. The upshot of it is, after 5 minutes of gameplay, I ended up putting down the controller because there were just WAY too many buttons to make it fun for me. I couldn’t keep up with their game play for the life of me and I was bringing the Zombie Crushing team WAY down, so I waved the white flag and said “no mas”. And they handed the controller to one of their friends who jumped right in and went to town smashing all those buttons. I thought I was looking at the flight deck of the USS Enterprise. To them, it was all second nature. And I was like “Why am I sweating?" Oh yeah… because I tried to play a video game for 5 minutes that I couldn’t possibly keep up with and it almost melted my brain to try. LOLOL!

Let me show you one more thing about Shadowgate and then you make up your mind if it’s worth it to try or not.

SPOILER ALERT: These are the two last screenshots of the whole game.

Image: That’s the wizard Lakmir and the Behemoth. The Gargoyle on the cartridge to the left with it’s tail busting out of stone statue mode is dispelled by the spell HUMANA you pick up at one point in the game. Once you are in the castle basement, you click USE on the newly-reassembled Staff of Ages and you select the Wizard and Lakmir’s Spell of Control over the Behemoth is disrupted. The monster grows angry at his former master and eats him in one bite then sinks down into the hot lava where I believe he opened up a travel agency for people who want to get the hell away from Castle Shadowgate forever.

And the final, final screenshot of the game. One that is, in my opinion, one of the best, most solid 8-bit game endings of all time. Check it out:

That’s obviously a screen shot from Retro Doc 79, a Shadowgate Enthusiast who does a nice job narrating his playthrough of the whole game if you feel you want to check it out.

You find out that the city you’ve fought for this whole time is called Stormhaven, which always made me wonder if the Blizzard game designers who created World of Warcraft used as a basis for the name of the Alliance capital city of Stormwind.

Some say that all creativity is recycled somehow.

Well, that’s it. I hope you appreciated this fun and random review of Shadowgate for Old School NES, one of the best 8-bit games of all time and a blast from the past whose story seems to last!

Hit Subscribe if you enjoyed this content and if you didn’t the Wizard Lakmir will rise from the hot lava, come to your house, and make you mow your lawn while it’s raining outside.

Cheers,

Pick “The Punny Guy” @ Punny Guy Word Emporium - Boston, MA