Shadowgate

Recommended with *huge* caveats.
I apparently got this game as part of a cheap bundle back in 2016- and to be honest, this is the only way I recommend getting this game. As part of a cheap bundle or at a seriously deep discount. (And yes, the fact that I got this as a CD Key somewhere means my review has no bearing on overall review score- so I am going with a Positive review rather than Negative.)
I never played the original game- never heard of it, as far as I can remember.
It has Trading Cards- if you are a Completionist, you may just want to idle the game for the cards- the achievement unlock %s are rather low on this game, and to be honest, I don;t feel like that's because of difficulty- it's because you may have needed to play this game when it was a "cult favorite" back on NES to know what to do and where to go without having to blindly try to click your way through a few thousands clicks.
The map is huge- lots of rooms, lots of backtracking, lots of text boxes you have to click through over and over and over each time you revisit a room you've been in dozens of time already. No real fast travel- a few teleports that you will only use a few times- no fast travel using the map itself. My inventory seems to keep doing strange things and re-arranging things, which is frustrating (when I know the bar was in the third row, but it is now in the top row... huh.)
There are guides- use them, but expect some things to be inaccurate or different than what you see in your own game- mirror room, for example. The Apprentice Mode guide shows 6 mirrors in the room, while I only have 4 in the game. I haven't been following the guide step by step- only using it when I get lost on the huge map or am insure what Yorick's repeated hints actually mean. But I guess if you do things out of order, certain items don't appear, or they appear in different places, or the author may have gotten different difficulty modes mixed up.
The music is appropriate, but seriously repetitive and a tad annoying at times. The "This music means you are in danger, girl!" music when I am just sitting and looking around a room I have already looked around and cleared is a bit out of place for me.
The art is fairly typical for a Point & Click adventure from 10 years ago, similar to most HOGs/HOPAs too- don't expect intricate animations or photo-realistic graphics.
Runs fine out of the box on Windows 10 22H2 on a decently beefy gaming desktop with an i9 11900K, 32 GB DDR4 RAM and a 3080 RTX ti. No hitching, no stutters, no tweaking needed. Also ran well on my older desktop with an i9-9900K, 16 GB DDR4 RAM and a 2070 RTX Super. Could probably run on a toaster.
The save system is fine- make lots of saves in case you missed something or died- the gear icon in the upper right corner of the screen lets you save almost anywhere.
Don't expect high-action or any mind-bending battles- it's alright for playing short sessions and killing time- if you use a guide (if you never played the original game). Some of the puzzles are rather vague or obscure. And the achievements for *cure yourself in under 800 turns*- I am guessing that means clicks? Good luck with that if you don;t have the game and the map memorized already- you will be clicking a lot.
I will finish the game on Apprentice- but tbh, I am not likely to play it through again to try to unlock all achievements. It's too tedious for that.

I remember sitting on a swing as a little boy in the sun, inserting my first gameboy cardridge into the gameboy Color. Trying to see what it was showing on the screen due to the sun glare. There i sat for hours untill the batteries dieded and it gotten dark outside. The next day´s i would sit there enjoying the weather aswell as my gameboy that played the music from game Shadowgate on the background. Every now and then i would play a bit and just in case i got stuck again after hours of trying different things, I had a stack of printed papers of the playthrough right next to me. limiting myself to at least 2days of trying untill i give up and start using the playtrough guide that ´ve found somewhere on the internet with horrible telephone sounds.
Yes im that old by now.
I bought this game when it came out on steam back in 2014 and still haven´t replayed it untill i found my old original gameboy and the shadowgate cardrige back.
Now that i finally did, ´ll finally restart start this game again.
(its better than it already was, Thank you for this dev's i love this piece art).

I've just finished the easiest difficulty and I still had to use the hint system. Great fun game once you understand how it works and it's background. The original Shadowgate game which is notorious for killing the player instantly without warning and that is part of the charm. I strongly recommend the casual difficulty to start off in unless you've played/suffered through the original.
The different difficulties expand upon the puzzles, items and even rooms so what was easy to solve at the easiest difficulty but end up being a more complicated puzzle requiring more items and searching. Higher difficulties also have a timer mechanic where your torches will eventually burn out. This was again part of the original game and 'tough adventure' design. So you're definitely getting a very different experience that's worth replaying!
So again, good game for what it is, a re-imagining of the original Shadowgate. However, the timer mechanic and sudden deaths definitely can be annoying so this will appeal to a niche crowd who like this thing. For everyone else, I do recommend (again) that you play the easiest difficulty/casual first to enjoy the game and then play it again.

Shadowgate remains a classic game that every gamer should encounter, representing the point-and-click adventure genre.
I had a bit of an autistic obsession with Shadowgate as a small child, that only intensified with SG64. Hoping for more reworks and works in general in this universe.

Shadowgate either means something to you or it means absolutely nothing at all. Though the original game was a MacVenture game - a point and click adventure series that had an odd window-based interface on the Mac's desktop - most people at the time didn't have a computer at home. Computers at home, whether PC or Mac, were pretty rare and the Internet wasn't a thing. The home console market crashed hard as well and it was Nintendo that single-handedly revived it with its NES and now-draconian "Seal of Quality" process to ensure that people were no longer tricked into buying unlicensed shovelware. However, much of the market for the first two years were arcade ports or similar short-run quarter-munching style of games, especially action platformers that retrospectively coined the term "Nintendo Hard". So a couple years into the NES' insanely popular run, Shadowgate dropped out of nowhere and provided an experience that nobody had seen before. In a sea of run-n-guns, platformers, sword and sorcery action games, here was this unique-looking game split into several windows for menu, inventory, and wonderfully-detailed graphics that you wouldn't find in twitchier fare. It didn't matter that it was insanely difficult and killed you repeatedly without warning, nor did it matter that the puzzles were obtuse and favored trial-and-error over logic; Shadowgate was unusually different than the rest of the market and for many people, its unique gameplay coupled with its haunting music was captivating, whether you were taking a chance on a blind buy or more likely you were renting it from your local video store.
It's difficult to express why this remake by Zojoi attracted a lot of attention because from any other perspective, the overall design of the game is archaic. For veterans, part of the fun is simply how they subverted expectations, but ultimately the game is as obtuse as it has ever been. Despite revisiting several of the puzzles and redoing them, changing sequences of events and outright overhauling certain areas, the game is still solidly anchored to trial-and-error and save scumming. It's the only way you're going to complete the game without following someone else's guide, but some would argue that's also part of its charm. By today's standards, most people would take a dump on this game precisely for the same reasons why people enjoy it.
Shadowgate is firmly rooted in the Us vs. Them era, when developers made it a point to harass and obstruct players from completing their game rather than gently guiding them on sight-seeing tours. To finish Shadowgate on your own is an achievement of colossal proportions because a good portion of it is impossible to figure out without save scumming and risking countless deaths. That's just what we did back in the day. In fact, a lot of the time we couldn't even save because battery backups in a cart were expensive, so you just took extensive notes and tried again all the way from the beginning if need be because it really was Us vs. Them and we weren't about to lose!
I realize I'm reviewing this game almost a decade after it released, but I'm sure there's a good number of people who don't know it exists, but have fond memories of spending countless nights listening to familiar haunting jingles while the game actively sought to kill them. For those folks, this version of Shadowgate is well and truly worthy of the name, if somewhat lacking the original's charm. It's mainly why it took me so long to get to it. Thrusting myself back into that mentality and hunkering down to take on the challenge was a daunting proposition that dissuaded me from actually doing it.
For everyone else, this game is an absolutely frustrating exercise. Anyone expecting or looking for a casual, chill narrative adventure through an ancient castle can turn right around and walk out the door. This game does not reward curiosity whatsoever. More often than not, poking your head where it doesn't belong is a good way to lose it, perhaps even unfairly. Unless explicitly telegraphed, there's no way to know if you're going to suddenly be met with a Game Over or why on earth you might want to carry 20 human skulls (protip: you don't. A few is enough!). All of the keys you find are unlabelled. The spells you learn are just gibberish words with no way of knowing what they do until you find the place where they are actually used. Remember that thing you saw in an early room that you couldn't get several hours ago? You better. Every action you take except for looking at things (an improvement over the original, actually), costs time measured in torches and if you're not using a guide at all, running out of torches poses a real risk. I should also mention that you have to manually keep them lit because letting them go dark means you trip and break your neck. I'm not kidding.
Shadowgate goes against all established adventure game procedure. Do -not- pick everything up that's not bolted down. Don't open every door. Most certainly do not try everything you can and hope it works because Adventure Game Moon Logic.... sort of. Like I said before, completing the game is heavily dependent on save scumming. It's expected. The game is 100% going to kill you for simply trying something out. Repeatedly. Save before doing something even remotely questionable. Save before doing something entirely mundane. Save multiple slots because guess what? That banshee curse isn't going to cure itself and haha, you're definitely not going to cure it until much, much later, if at all. Maybe you'll just die. You probably will.
So for the modern point and click enthusiast, I can only say you'e got your work cut out for you if you want to dive into this nostalgic piece of work. The art is serviceable if somewhat unrefined and lacks the pixel charm of the original. The remixed music fades into the background and takes a less prominent role than it did on the NES. The interface is even arguably worse than the original's on-screen action menu. But this is a dyed-in-the-wool old school adventure game challenge with an old school adventure game mentality. If you can wrap your head around it and understand where it comes from, the game becomes a much more palatable experience and is only forgivable in that context. As a modern design, it arguably fails in every aspect, but since it is rooted in the original 80s release, it would have been disingenuous to make it any other way. That's what Shadowgate is and must be.
This version of Shadowgate is a rare revisiting of an older title that doesn't seek to change its fundamental identity. It is purposely designed to be obtuse, illogical, and frustrating. Yet it's also quite rewarding to the persistent player and while the narrative is standard fantasy fare, it all ties into a lore that the designer's been carrying around in his head for 30+ years and has been explored in sequels like Shadowgate64 and the upcoming do-over of Beyond Shadowgate (which leans heavily on the retro design, so look out for it). But it's mostly about just giving him the finger because that's what he wants you to do. He doesn't want to show you all the pretty pictures; he wants you to earn it. You don't get rewarded for just following along and doing as you're told; you're only rewarded when you use the system against itself as you circumvent every death with a well-timed save, taking note of things and working your way through stuff the hard way, only to load when you've figured out the solution so you can save precious time.
The more Shadowgate hates you, the more you may come to love it. The heart of the original beats in its chest and it's arguably lesser, but ultimately still the same experience with a new coat of paint. Just know that the water isn't warm and you're going to die. A lot.

I love the shadowgate series.
Shadowgate on the NES was my first point and click adventure game ever. Love it!
Choose your own adventure where your bumbling can get you absolutely murdered!
FANTASTIC!