Today, I beat Shadowgate, my first game from issue 10 of Nintendo Power. This is a port of a point and click PC adventure game to the NES. This is my first time playing an Adventure game of this type on NES, and I know there's boatloads, especially from the Famicom side of things.
Admittedly, I had to look up quite a bit of the answers to this one, although I feel like I didn't need to. Most of the solutions seemed really obvious once I looked them up. And a lot of the things were things I already tried but the aim of my cursor was a little off, or I used some items in the wrong order... there were also some things that mislead me, for example pressing select sometimes yields hints, and I was told "sometimes there are ways besides weapons to solve a problem", but then the solution still ended up being a weapon.
This game doesn't have game overs but it does have a finite supply of torches, and when your torches burn out, you die, if you get down to just one torch, you might as well restart your game, which sounds bad, but if you know the solution, you can quickly breeze through the game. Ideally you should do so making as few "moves" as possible, because your torches go out based on the number of moves you make so each time you do an action your torches get close to burning out.
There's also magic spells you can find but only some of them hint about their usage. There's no MP so you're free to try them on everything, just know that it costs you some torch time to do it, there's also spells that seem like they work but you'll be missing an item and have to come back when you have that item.
The game will get you on a technicality at times, looking at a book is not the same as reading a book, you have to use the "open" command to read a book. You also need to be a bit eagle eyed, if that pebble looks different from the other pebbles even in a subtle way, then there's likely something up with it... there's also a lot of red herring useless items, doors you can't ever enter, and most of your items are single usage only.
The game is actually pretty short, but it's padded out with the trial and error gameplay. And the fact that you'll find clues to later puzzles early on, meaning you're likely to forget them.
It's actually dripping with great atmosphere, and though the music is mostly short repetitive loops, I think they're great at adding to that atmosphere.
I'd recommend this to someone looking for something in the horror department for NES, but not to casual players that can't stand trial and error gameplay, if you understand this game is going to kick your ass around a bit aren't afraid to do a few burner runs where you just kind of futz about learning how to make progress before your real run begins, then go for it.
