What Darkness Conceals, Terror Reveals

Yeah, I don't have the case anymore, but I do have the manual and the disc. ...You know, I never understood that tagline. What is it that darkness conceals that is revealed by terror? Is it implying that terror is what is concealed in the darkness? If that's the case, it's worded strangely.

But anyway, I should explain the game. Shivers was a point-and-click adventure game, some would call it Myst-like, released in 1995. It involved your friends locking you in a museum that was never opened to the public. The museum was created by Professor Hubert Windlenot, who was pretty obsessed with making his museum perfect, so much so that it took him over 20 years to shape it into its current state. 15 years prior to the game, he went missing and was never seen again. Around the same time, 2 teenagers also broke into the museum, went missing and were never seen again. Coincidence? That's for you to find out.


Professor Hubert Windlenot's Museum of the Strange and Unusual

Since you're locked in all night (and since your friends' dialog implies you have an interest in the museum), you decide to find a way into the locked museum. When you do find a way in, you discover that dangerous spirits called Ixupi that steal the life force from people have escaped from Egyptian vessels that Windlenot brought to his museum, as well as taken up residence. Each Ixupi has its own designated element (fire, stone, water, metal, wood, etc), and can live within objects made out of their respective elements. As you might expect, this is a key part of gameplay.

The goal of Shivers is to find all of the vessels and recapture all the Ixupi that have escaped and hidden themselves throughout the museum.


The ash Ixupi resides in a fireplace.

Each vessel has two parts: A pot and a matching lid, called talismans.



When they're both found, they can be combined to form the vessel, like so:



When you find them both, you can capture an Ixupi. But it's not that easy. You see, Professor Windlenot spent a lot of time building his museum. He wanted to make a museum that was interactive and fun for people to go through. To accomplish this, he built puzzles all throughout the museum. Some puzzles lead to other parts of the museum, and others just reveal secret compartments. What they were originally intended to contain, I don't know, but the Ixupi were smart enough to hide their pots and talismans around the museum, most of which you'll find from solving the its puzzles.



The cool part about this is that once you get into the museum, you can go wherever you want to go. It's not entirely unlimited, since some rooms are closed off by puzzles, but this means the game has a non-linear layout. The locations of the pots and lids (with the exception of 3, 2 of which are for the starter walkthrough in the instruction manual) are randomized, reinforcing the game's non-linear layout. You can solve puzzles at your discretion, so if you get stuck, you could go to a different part of the museum and solve puzzles there.

Clues to puzzles in the game, as well as the disappearance of Windlenot and the two teenagers, are scattered throughout the museum as well (although not random), which means the more you explore, the more you can figure out the game's story and the museum's puzzles at the same time. Any hints you find, like books, or notes, can't be taken with you, but most of the more important or informative hints can be seen again once you've found them in a flashback menu. Pretty cool. You can also rewatch cinematic scenes.



Perhaps the best part of Shivers is its setting. A lot of attention to detail went into not just story consistency, but also the museum exhibits themselves. They cover strange creatures, geographical mysteries, and human behaviors, and their somewhat disturbing, macabre natures add a lot to the fear factor of the game. Another thing about the museum is that around 90% of the game's informational content (as estimated by the lead designer), is in fact factual. They went to great lengths to ensure that the museum was as real as possible without sacrificing gameplay for truth.



The music, for the most part, is ambient, but it's entertaining and well constructed. There are some music-based puzzles in the game (don't worry if you're hearing impaired, the game has you covered), and when you're nearby an uncaptured Ixupi, a theme will play over the ambient music. It's the same theme melodically, but it's played with different instruments depending on where you are and what Ixupi it is you're trying to capture - For instance, when you're near a water Ixupi, you'll hear a bubbly sounding theme, or

While the premise of the game is cool, the puzzles themselves are mostly just logic puzzles. Some of them are traditional puzzles, like the Chinese peg solitaire, or a puzzle that's basically MasterMind, others are original puzzles, but they can be solved with trial and error or randomly throwing pieces around. Some location-based puzzles don't have much in the way of clues to help you figure out what you need to do.



Regardless, I really like Shivers. It's not very deep in terms of logical puzzle solving, but its layout and setting are both really good. It has this certain charm that's stayed with me for over a decade, and I get pretty nostalgic each time I play it.

1 Comments

Posted on 09 Jun 2010 by Bryan Skinner

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