Shivers

Professor Windlenot, an eccentric archaeologist, has created the ultimate museum of esoterica, including "proof" of the existence of Atlantis, UFO's, and unicorns, along with answers to many other mysteries. As a nameless high school student who has accepted a dare, you are to spend the night in this museum. There's one catch, though- Windlenot tampered with the occult and released thirteen evil spirits into his museum, one of which killed him. Two other spirits killed two previous students who accepted dares similar to the one you just took on. Your task is to survive your night in the museum. To do that, you'll have to capture the remaining ten spirits.

Game play is very similar to "Myst". You play in first person, and you move along a "track" through the museum. Play is not linear, however - although you can only move in a certain way, you can explore the rooms in any order you wish. The cursor does not highlight when you can interact with an object- so you have to click on everything you see in order to discover all the museum's mysteries. The game is quite similar to real life in that you don't have to die over and over again to figure out the correct answer to a puzzle. In fact, you probably won't die at all. You start out with ten life units and lose one when you get touched by a spirit. The spirits are like genies- each has a jar with a lid that can be used to capture it. If a spirit has taken some life from you, you get it back when you capture that spirit. Conveniently, the spirits make characteristic noises when they are in the vicinity, so unless you're completely unobservant, you'll get the heck out of there when you hear them, if you don't have the right jar for that spirit. The puzzles that you have to solve range from the fairly straightforward to the downright Satanic. One puzzle took me 3 days of playing for 2 hours a day to solve! Some puzzles will seem impossible the first time you look at them, but are actually easy once you have the right key, which you can find after a little exploration.

This is a game for adults. Not because it's scary- there's no blood or gore whatsoever. Actually, although Sierra says this game was designed to "scare your socks off", it would better be described as eerie rather than scary. The reason that this game is for adults is that any kid in his or her right mind would become utterly furious with the logic puzzles in about 5 minutes. In other words, it's more likely to frustrate your socks off than scare them off. The pace is way too slow for kids; sometimes you have to spend half an hour just reading some item you picked up over and over to see if it contains any clues. It's an awesome game, though, and one of only a few Sierra adventures in which I was not forced to resort to a walkthrough or hint guide at any point. If your favorite part of Sierra games is the puzzles, and you prefer a logic game to an action game, this adventure is for you.

NOTE: This game runs under Windows.

By: PsychDoctor