Game Review: Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness
2020-Mar-23, Monday 22:16![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
Well, my "play over New Year's" schedule for these games certainly got thrown off. I was looking forward to playing Shadows of Darkness for literally months, because it's been my favorite of the Quest for Glory games since the first time I played it. It has a creepy horror-themed setting with riffs on Eastern European myths, it has vampires, it has the Fair Folk, it has a Lovecraftian monstrosity that sleeps outside reality whose awakening the hero is trying to prevent...what's not to like? But then I got more social, and then I got distracted by Stellaris, and Shadows of Darkness faded into the background, to rise occasionally as I was sitting in front of my computer and thinking, "You know...I have this game I was playing..." But now that, much like the rains isolated the country of Mordavia, we're all isolated in our homes due to the Illinois shelter-in-place order, I realized that I no longer had any excuse to avoid finishing it.
Okay, that was a stretch. Maybe I need a hero to get me my own Good Humor Bar.
I've had that happen to me.
I didn't realize it until this latest playthrough, but Shadows of Darkness's basic structure is very similar to Quest for Glory I: So You Want to Be a Hero. In both the Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire and Quest for Glory III: Wages of War, the hero arrives as a known quantity, famous from saving the previous land and being lauded for defeating some evil threat. In QFGIII, they're even royalty, having been acknowledged by the sultan of Shapeir as a prince. There's a special feeling that comes after two games' worth of heroics to wandering around Tarna and being addressed as "the Prince of Shapeir" by everyone you meet.
In contrast, in Shadows of Darkness, the hero arrives in an isolated valley that is desperately in need of saving. The townspeople react with suspicion and fear, and despite all his previous famous deeds, he has to re-establish his reputation. Also, traveling the valley at night is far more dangerous than during the daytime, there's a garden created by the mage Erana with a puzzle that rewards a spell, a haunted graveyard is located just outside the town, and Baba Yaga is there. There was probably a bit of cultural confusion in the creators, now that I think about it, since QFGI is based on German legend and QFGIV is based on Russian legend, but maybe it's part of the master plan they set out at the beginning of the series that QFGIII threw off. Or maybe they just really liked Baba Yaga, and if so, I don't blame them.
Like QFGI and unlike the two games that followed it, QFGIV is very good about providing a breadcrumb trail of where to go and what to do. Right from the beginning of the game, where the hero arrives in the Cave of the Dark One and meets a mysterious woman, it's obvious that this is a land in need of saving. Even though there isn't a quest board like there is in the first two games, the townspeople somewhat reluctantly provide comments and guidance about the troubles afflicting Mordavia. And as the hero completes more and more tasks, they become more and more friendly, until they're greeting him like an old friend. And if that's not enough, sleeping in the town inn provides dreams and notes that help spur further action, and the inn's local domovoi is eager for a hero that could help the land. There are a couple quests that still rely on random exploration to find them--Anna's ghost is the major one that I couldn't find a direct dialogue hint for--but this is an adventure game. You're supposed to turn over every rock and poke through every bush.
The dying of the year.
Part of the reason that this is my favorite Quest for Glory game, and QFGI is my second-favorite, is the aesthetic. Fall is my favorite season, and the hero arrives in Mordavia when the leaves are starting to change and there's a chill in the air. The crops outside the village--I always love it when a game answers the question "But what do they eat?"--are ripe and ready to be harvested, and the villagers are approaching the fallow time of year. The nights are growing longer, the days are growing shorter, and it's a good thing the villagers don't have a lot of work to do because they need to shelter behind four walls and stoutly-locked doors, with strings of garlic through all the eaves, to keep out the creatures of the night. So many creatures.
Fortunately, you're a hero.
The hero's actions during the game are mostly about reversing this theme. Just as the year is dying and the trees are slowly winding down for the winter chill, the land of Mordavia is also dying. With the swamp cutting off access to the land, trade has dried up. The elephant herds that once provided income have died out and many of the townspeople have fallen prey to monsters. It's notable that while none of the Quest for Glory games include any children, QFGIV doesn't even have any young people other than Katrina, and she's never found within the town walls. Mordavia is slowly being overrun by the death and darkness until the hero arrives, saves the land, and reverses the cycle to bring a new spring.
Out, damned spot!
The horror aspect is a big draw as well, of course. Last month, I went on a date with a woman who grew up playing the Quest for Glory games and whose favorite game of all time was Heroine's Quest. We talked a bit about the games, and she told me her favorite game was QFGIII and was taken aback when I told her that QFGIV was my favorite. It turned out that she wasn't a horror fan, though, so it makes perfect sense. I am, even as a child, so QFGIV was perfectly designed to appeal to me. QFGI draws on some of the same tropes, but the monster variety is goblins, brigands, trolls, dinosaurs, kobolds, ogres, and other standard fantasy monsters, with cheetaurs and mantrays as the Sierra weirdness on top of it. QFGIV has "revenants" (basically zombies), wyverns, necrotaurs (undead monster dogs), chernovy (mutants), wraiths...a bunch of undead and mutants. And also the killer rabbit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but this is a Sierra game.
There's a graveyard with a crypt, which includes a secret passage that leads to the mountain castle of the boyars of Mordavia. The castle itself is fantastic, a sprawling collection of staircases and rooms with an ominous soundtrack, rooms containing hidden treasures, secret meetings, and all sort of dangers. It's almost as many screens as the valley itself, and while there are no wandering monsters and most of the screens are empty, it feels dangerous. And there is the occasional adventure game instant death for those who aren't cautious.
I do have to point out one problem, though, and that's the addition of Hammer Horror Romani. They live in a camp of colorful wagons, they distrust outsiders--with reason, since the townsfolk immediately seize on one and accuse him of a crime just because he happened to be nearby--they tell fortunes, they dance seductively around the campfire at night and...they're werewolves. Oh sure, they'll tell you it's not about the full moon and that they don't eat people, but they can all turn into wolves. I appreciate the usage of real Tarot cards for the readings that Magda gives, and it's entirely possible that this is the game I first learned about Tarot cards from, but maybe don't use real-world oppressed ethnic groups to provide spooky ambience to your game, and maybe especially don't make them werewolves. It's already bad enough using supernatural beings as stand-ins for oppressed minorities without making every member of that minority a supernatural being.
I foresee one of your descendants owning a castle...perhaps on an island somewhere...
Shadows of Darkness is the first Quest for Glory game with voice acting, and contrary to my worries it was done really well. When I was a kid, I only ever played the diskette version of QFGIV, which obviously didn't have room for the voices. A CD version came out nine months later, but I'm not sure I ever heard of that at the time and I had certainly never heard any of the voice work until I bought the GOG QFG collection and booted up this game. I never realized that John Rhys-Davies was the narrator! The lion's share of the speech, all the messages for looking at or trying to interact with objects, is his voice, so of course he does an excellent job. Here's a video that immediately opens with some examples.
To my surprise, though, almost all the voice work was of similar quality. My favorite was Hans, Franz, and Ivan, the three townspeople who show up in the inn every night to drink. Two of their voice actors are doing a Jack Nicholson impression, but just different enough to be distinctive. They also constantly ad-libbed, to the point where I feel like by playing the text-only version of the game originally I got a far worse version of the characters.
Since my first Sierra game with speech was King's Quest V, with Cedric's infamous hooooing, I'm always a bit nervous when I play an old adventure game with voice acting. Or not even an old one--in Heroine's Quest I turned off the voice acting almost immediately. But for Shadows of Darkness, I'd often sit and let the voices play out. I never do that.
"So Tomas Wanderer was no more, who never did no goode,
So remember poor Tomas, and roam not in the woode"
Mechanically, Quest for Glory IV is broadly similar to the previous games. There's a character sheet full of skills that go up to 400 and they increase from use rather than through discrete levels, the same system as previous games. QFGIV adds the acrobatic skill, which allows leaps and feats of agility, and removes the Communications skill that was introduced in QFGII and criminally underutilized in QFGIII. I really wish they had done more with it--it could have been a great Paladin class skill for solving challenges the Paladin way, distinct from the Fighter way--but I can see why they removed it, considering how important to the narrative the suspicion of the townsfolk and the generally insular nature of Mordavia is. If you could just grind the hero's Communications skill and get everyone to open up like a spring flower, it'd undermine the game's narrative.
Speaking of which, one change I don't like is the way that class-specific content was implemented. One of things I like about the Quest for Glory series is while there is an obvious path through the game for each class, it's primarily determined by skills. Anyone with the Lockpicking skill in QFGI knows the Thief Sign and can join the Thieves' Guide. Anyone with the ability to use magic in QFGII can find the way to the Wizards' Institute of Technocery. While there are places where the paths diverge, such as the endings of both QFGII and QFGIII, even there everyone can accomplish the same goals, just through different means.
That's not true in QFGIV. While everyone can meet the rusalka, she's just a bit of color for everyone except the Paladin, who is the only one who can break her curse and lay her soul to rest. Only the Wizard even meets the Fair Folk. This bothers me, because I really like how previous games fuse the best parts class- and skill-based system together, where class determines aptitudes and suggests the easiest approach to completing tasks but the skill system means that anyone can learn to do anything if they want to put in the effort and time. A fighter who knows a little magic? A wizard who learns to throw daggers for when they're out of mana? They're all viable options, and it's up to the player to limit or expand their ability to solve puzzles as they see fit. Locking content behind a certain class totally sidesteps all that and I'd prefer if they had stuck to their original design goals of letting everyone accomplish everything, just through different means.
You'll see a lot of this as a wizard
And of course, I have to talk about the combat system, which is vastly different than any preceding game.
Gone are the hero and his enemy standing in place and slashing each other. Gone are the multi-direction action choices. Gone is the rhythm of combat. In Shadows of Darkness, combat moved to a more arcade style, requiring advancing back and forth across the field. At least, the other classes have to do that. The thing about playing a Wizard is that QFGIV also added the ability to charge up spells, an ability that the enemy does not have, and a charged-up spell stuns the enemy, cancels any spells they're casting, and can be spammed faster than the enemy can act. I could have won almost every single combat by holding down the Flame Dart button until the enemy was dead, which is by far the most brainless combat has ever been in the entire series. The game adds quite a few spells for the Wizard to survive combat easier, such as Protection to reduce physical damage or Aura to cancel the life-draining powers of the undead, but almost all of them are useless and I only cast them for practice. Flame Dart costs 5 mp, and since I can just repeatedly cast it to win...well, anything else is a waste.
The other classes have a much more difficult time, since they have to advance forward, dodge enemy attacks and attack with the correct timing. The other change to combat is that it's primarily mouse-driven except for the spell hotkeys, so again, the Wizard wins. I guess that reflects that way D&D works, where high-level wizard rule the battlefield and everyone else is so much mud beneath their feet, but it's certainly a reversal from QFGII, where Magic-Users didn't even have to fight any battles if they didn't want to. One would think that Fighter, "one who fights," would have the easiest time in combat, but it's wrong once again.
Little graveyard humor there.
Despite that its combat is my least favorite of the games up to this point, Shadows of Darkness is still my favorite of the Quest for Glory games because of the mood. Worldbuilding and theme are the parts of stories that I latch onto the hardest--it's the reason I'm sad about the loss of thick manuals where the writers put all the lore they couldn't fit into the game itself, like the entire backstory of the Winged Ones in King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow--and QFGIV is the culmination of the story of Ad Avis and the Dark Master begun in QFGII. It reveals that the world of Gloriana is a soap bubble, and there are other worlds out there with horrific beings that seek to drain it of its light and life. It has wraiths and vampires and "werewolves" and beings obviously inspired by Cthulhu. It's like it was specifically designed to appeal to me, and even when I played it for the first time, back when I had never played Trial by Fire and had no real idea who Ad Avis was or why he hated the hero so much, it rapidly became my favorite of the series.
When people ask me what game I've replayed the most is, I usually answer Chrono Trigger, but I'm honestly not sure about that. It might be Shadows of Darkness.
Like the other Quest for Glory games, this game has held up amazingly well through the intervening years, somehow managing to avoid the problems with most adventure games and still being eminently playable today. The problems it had--the combat system, the tone-deaf portrayal of Romani--were problems at the time, too. To my mind, and while I will accept counterarguments about Gabriel Knight I: Sins of the Fathers, this the finest adventure game Sierra ever made.
I'd say they don't make them like this anymore, but Heroine's Quest exists, so play this and also play that!
Okay, that was a stretch. Maybe I need a hero to get me my own Good Humor Bar.
I've had that happen to me.
I didn't realize it until this latest playthrough, but Shadows of Darkness's basic structure is very similar to Quest for Glory I: So You Want to Be a Hero. In both the Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire and Quest for Glory III: Wages of War, the hero arrives as a known quantity, famous from saving the previous land and being lauded for defeating some evil threat. In QFGIII, they're even royalty, having been acknowledged by the sultan of Shapeir as a prince. There's a special feeling that comes after two games' worth of heroics to wandering around Tarna and being addressed as "the Prince of Shapeir" by everyone you meet.
In contrast, in Shadows of Darkness, the hero arrives in an isolated valley that is desperately in need of saving. The townspeople react with suspicion and fear, and despite all his previous famous deeds, he has to re-establish his reputation. Also, traveling the valley at night is far more dangerous than during the daytime, there's a garden created by the mage Erana with a puzzle that rewards a spell, a haunted graveyard is located just outside the town, and Baba Yaga is there. There was probably a bit of cultural confusion in the creators, now that I think about it, since QFGI is based on German legend and QFGIV is based on Russian legend, but maybe it's part of the master plan they set out at the beginning of the series that QFGIII threw off. Or maybe they just really liked Baba Yaga, and if so, I don't blame them.
Like QFGI and unlike the two games that followed it, QFGIV is very good about providing a breadcrumb trail of where to go and what to do. Right from the beginning of the game, where the hero arrives in the Cave of the Dark One and meets a mysterious woman, it's obvious that this is a land in need of saving. Even though there isn't a quest board like there is in the first two games, the townspeople somewhat reluctantly provide comments and guidance about the troubles afflicting Mordavia. And as the hero completes more and more tasks, they become more and more friendly, until they're greeting him like an old friend. And if that's not enough, sleeping in the town inn provides dreams and notes that help spur further action, and the inn's local domovoi is eager for a hero that could help the land. There are a couple quests that still rely on random exploration to find them--Anna's ghost is the major one that I couldn't find a direct dialogue hint for--but this is an adventure game. You're supposed to turn over every rock and poke through every bush.
The dying of the year.
Part of the reason that this is my favorite Quest for Glory game, and QFGI is my second-favorite, is the aesthetic. Fall is my favorite season, and the hero arrives in Mordavia when the leaves are starting to change and there's a chill in the air. The crops outside the village--I always love it when a game answers the question "But what do they eat?"--are ripe and ready to be harvested, and the villagers are approaching the fallow time of year. The nights are growing longer, the days are growing shorter, and it's a good thing the villagers don't have a lot of work to do because they need to shelter behind four walls and stoutly-locked doors, with strings of garlic through all the eaves, to keep out the creatures of the night. So many creatures.
Fortunately, you're a hero.
The hero's actions during the game are mostly about reversing this theme. Just as the year is dying and the trees are slowly winding down for the winter chill, the land of Mordavia is also dying. With the swamp cutting off access to the land, trade has dried up. The elephant herds that once provided income have died out and many of the townspeople have fallen prey to monsters. It's notable that while none of the Quest for Glory games include any children, QFGIV doesn't even have any young people other than Katrina, and she's never found within the town walls. Mordavia is slowly being overrun by the death and darkness until the hero arrives, saves the land, and reverses the cycle to bring a new spring.
Out, damned spot!
The horror aspect is a big draw as well, of course. Last month, I went on a date with a woman who grew up playing the Quest for Glory games and whose favorite game of all time was Heroine's Quest. We talked a bit about the games, and she told me her favorite game was QFGIII and was taken aback when I told her that QFGIV was my favorite. It turned out that she wasn't a horror fan, though, so it makes perfect sense. I am, even as a child, so QFGIV was perfectly designed to appeal to me. QFGI draws on some of the same tropes, but the monster variety is goblins, brigands, trolls, dinosaurs, kobolds, ogres, and other standard fantasy monsters, with cheetaurs and mantrays as the Sierra weirdness on top of it. QFGIV has "revenants" (basically zombies), wyverns, necrotaurs (undead monster dogs), chernovy (mutants), wraiths...a bunch of undead and mutants. And also the killer rabbit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but this is a Sierra game.
There's a graveyard with a crypt, which includes a secret passage that leads to the mountain castle of the boyars of Mordavia. The castle itself is fantastic, a sprawling collection of staircases and rooms with an ominous soundtrack, rooms containing hidden treasures, secret meetings, and all sort of dangers. It's almost as many screens as the valley itself, and while there are no wandering monsters and most of the screens are empty, it feels dangerous. And there is the occasional adventure game instant death for those who aren't cautious.
I do have to point out one problem, though, and that's the addition of Hammer Horror Romani. They live in a camp of colorful wagons, they distrust outsiders--with reason, since the townsfolk immediately seize on one and accuse him of a crime just because he happened to be nearby--they tell fortunes, they dance seductively around the campfire at night and...they're werewolves. Oh sure, they'll tell you it's not about the full moon and that they don't eat people, but they can all turn into wolves. I appreciate the usage of real Tarot cards for the readings that Magda gives, and it's entirely possible that this is the game I first learned about Tarot cards from, but maybe don't use real-world oppressed ethnic groups to provide spooky ambience to your game, and maybe especially don't make them werewolves. It's already bad enough using supernatural beings as stand-ins for oppressed minorities without making every member of that minority a supernatural being.
I foresee one of your descendants owning a castle...perhaps on an island somewhere...
Shadows of Darkness is the first Quest for Glory game with voice acting, and contrary to my worries it was done really well. When I was a kid, I only ever played the diskette version of QFGIV, which obviously didn't have room for the voices. A CD version came out nine months later, but I'm not sure I ever heard of that at the time and I had certainly never heard any of the voice work until I bought the GOG QFG collection and booted up this game. I never realized that John Rhys-Davies was the narrator! The lion's share of the speech, all the messages for looking at or trying to interact with objects, is his voice, so of course he does an excellent job. Here's a video that immediately opens with some examples.
To my surprise, though, almost all the voice work was of similar quality. My favorite was Hans, Franz, and Ivan, the three townspeople who show up in the inn every night to drink. Two of their voice actors are doing a Jack Nicholson impression, but just different enough to be distinctive. They also constantly ad-libbed, to the point where I feel like by playing the text-only version of the game originally I got a far worse version of the characters.
Since my first Sierra game with speech was King's Quest V, with Cedric's infamous hooooing, I'm always a bit nervous when I play an old adventure game with voice acting. Or not even an old one--in Heroine's Quest I turned off the voice acting almost immediately. But for Shadows of Darkness, I'd often sit and let the voices play out. I never do that.
"So Tomas Wanderer was no more, who never did no goode,
So remember poor Tomas, and roam not in the woode"
Mechanically, Quest for Glory IV is broadly similar to the previous games. There's a character sheet full of skills that go up to 400 and they increase from use rather than through discrete levels, the same system as previous games. QFGIV adds the acrobatic skill, which allows leaps and feats of agility, and removes the Communications skill that was introduced in QFGII and criminally underutilized in QFGIII. I really wish they had done more with it--it could have been a great Paladin class skill for solving challenges the Paladin way, distinct from the Fighter way--but I can see why they removed it, considering how important to the narrative the suspicion of the townsfolk and the generally insular nature of Mordavia is. If you could just grind the hero's Communications skill and get everyone to open up like a spring flower, it'd undermine the game's narrative.
Speaking of which, one change I don't like is the way that class-specific content was implemented. One of things I like about the Quest for Glory series is while there is an obvious path through the game for each class, it's primarily determined by skills. Anyone with the Lockpicking skill in QFGI knows the Thief Sign and can join the Thieves' Guide. Anyone with the ability to use magic in QFGII can find the way to the Wizards' Institute of Technocery. While there are places where the paths diverge, such as the endings of both QFGII and QFGIII, even there everyone can accomplish the same goals, just through different means.
That's not true in QFGIV. While everyone can meet the rusalka, she's just a bit of color for everyone except the Paladin, who is the only one who can break her curse and lay her soul to rest. Only the Wizard even meets the Fair Folk. This bothers me, because I really like how previous games fuse the best parts class- and skill-based system together, where class determines aptitudes and suggests the easiest approach to completing tasks but the skill system means that anyone can learn to do anything if they want to put in the effort and time. A fighter who knows a little magic? A wizard who learns to throw daggers for when they're out of mana? They're all viable options, and it's up to the player to limit or expand their ability to solve puzzles as they see fit. Locking content behind a certain class totally sidesteps all that and I'd prefer if they had stuck to their original design goals of letting everyone accomplish everything, just through different means.
You'll see a lot of this as a wizard
And of course, I have to talk about the combat system, which is vastly different than any preceding game.
Gone are the hero and his enemy standing in place and slashing each other. Gone are the multi-direction action choices. Gone is the rhythm of combat. In Shadows of Darkness, combat moved to a more arcade style, requiring advancing back and forth across the field. At least, the other classes have to do that. The thing about playing a Wizard is that QFGIV also added the ability to charge up spells, an ability that the enemy does not have, and a charged-up spell stuns the enemy, cancels any spells they're casting, and can be spammed faster than the enemy can act. I could have won almost every single combat by holding down the Flame Dart button until the enemy was dead, which is by far the most brainless combat has ever been in the entire series. The game adds quite a few spells for the Wizard to survive combat easier, such as Protection to reduce physical damage or Aura to cancel the life-draining powers of the undead, but almost all of them are useless and I only cast them for practice. Flame Dart costs 5 mp, and since I can just repeatedly cast it to win...well, anything else is a waste.
The other classes have a much more difficult time, since they have to advance forward, dodge enemy attacks and attack with the correct timing. The other change to combat is that it's primarily mouse-driven except for the spell hotkeys, so again, the Wizard wins. I guess that reflects that way D&D works, where high-level wizard rule the battlefield and everyone else is so much mud beneath their feet, but it's certainly a reversal from QFGII, where Magic-Users didn't even have to fight any battles if they didn't want to. One would think that Fighter, "one who fights," would have the easiest time in combat, but it's wrong once again.
Little graveyard humor there.
Despite that its combat is my least favorite of the games up to this point, Shadows of Darkness is still my favorite of the Quest for Glory games because of the mood. Worldbuilding and theme are the parts of stories that I latch onto the hardest--it's the reason I'm sad about the loss of thick manuals where the writers put all the lore they couldn't fit into the game itself, like the entire backstory of the Winged Ones in King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow--and QFGIV is the culmination of the story of Ad Avis and the Dark Master begun in QFGII. It reveals that the world of Gloriana is a soap bubble, and there are other worlds out there with horrific beings that seek to drain it of its light and life. It has wraiths and vampires and "werewolves" and beings obviously inspired by Cthulhu. It's like it was specifically designed to appeal to me, and even when I played it for the first time, back when I had never played Trial by Fire and had no real idea who Ad Avis was or why he hated the hero so much, it rapidly became my favorite of the series.
When people ask me what game I've replayed the most is, I usually answer Chrono Trigger, but I'm honestly not sure about that. It might be Shadows of Darkness.
Like the other Quest for Glory games, this game has held up amazingly well through the intervening years, somehow managing to avoid the problems with most adventure games and still being eminently playable today. The problems it had--the combat system, the tone-deaf portrayal of Romani--were problems at the time, too. To my mind, and while I will accept counterarguments about Gabriel Knight I: Sins of the Fathers, this the finest adventure game Sierra ever made.
I'd say they don't make them like this anymore, but Heroine's Quest exists, so play this and also play that!
