Quest For Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness

"A highly interactive point and click adventure, one of Sierra's best efforts"

Quest for Glory IV continues the adventure game series starting afresh: unlike the previous games, you come in with no inventory, no plot carried over from the previous games, and no sense of where you are. The game exists largely independently of its predecessors, and is instead sprinkled with occasional references to your previous quests in conversations. The plot of the game requires very little context, and what there is to be known is explained fairly well in the game, both through the dialogue and a series of particularly well done fortune teller scenes which describe your character and his current influences.

Players who enter the game with no experience with the prequels will have a lot to learn about the system, but the game does not overly handicap you-an imported character will only have a slight edge over a created one.

Quest for Glory IV uses a curious blend of elements-a real time system that moves from day to night as you wait around or rest to help the passage of time, an adventure game styled system of puzzles to be solved with the help of an inventory, and an RPG system revolving around mastering certain abilities and tasks, and building up your stats in a variety of areas. All these elements blend together seamlessly to make a game that practically defines its own genre.

Review:

Shadows of Darkness picks up a plot thread that was foreshadowed since the very first game in the series-explaining precisely what happened to the mage Erana. In the land of Mordavia, she met her end in order to seal away an incredibly powerful demon. The details of your situation become clearer as the plot progresses, largely as you piece together what happened through conversations with the most major and minor of characters. You were apparently teleported to the land of Mordavia by malevolent forces, only something went wrong, and you're now caught up in the middle of a plan to bring back a being who could cover the world in darkness.

Story: 10/10

Elements of the gameplay include basic puzzle solving with optional hints, a battle system that can be played with a strategic or arcade style, navigating conversation trees, completing tasks requiring a certain building up of stats, and solving the standard puzzles of an adventure game. The game does an amazing job of holding your hand throughout, and hints and clues abound in the dialogue of the characters. The Quest for Glory series represents a classic synthesis of Sierra's regular point and click adventure and the usual stat-based Role Playing Game, while simply serving to entertain and challenge the whole way through. The amount of depth given to just a few characters and locales leaves a lot to be missed, and may give the game a frustratingly small scope for some, but it serves to immerse the player in a very unique world, with its own little problems to sort out... and some very big ones.

Gameplay: 10/10

The game can be played through with four different classes: fighter, magic user, thief, and paladin (available from an imported character). While there is a great deal of overlap between fighters and paladins, each class offers different ways to score points, different quests which become available, and different people which they can interact with. Between the variety of options available to solve puzzle, the number of optional quests, and the sheer amount of easter eggs and corny humor included just for fun, Quest for Glory IV is a game which you can play time after time, and still manage to notice something new.

Replay Value: 10/10

The music used for the game is fairly minimal, and curiously absent from some locales-which may serve as a welcome relief for some. The tracks are fairly simplistic, with only one brief usage of the main Quest for Glory theme. There are some nice Russian sounding tracks used for the town of Mordavia and its inn, your standard jerky battle music, some fairly generic dark and mysterious songs, along with the title theme and a particularly nice piece used for both Erana and Katrina's theme. There won't be much worth remembering from the soundtrack, and the midi music sounds downright chintzy by today's standards.

Music: 6/10

What's most impressive about the game is the sheer amount of dialogue and the number of conversation trees each character possesses. A few of the main characters have different sets of conversation topics depending upon what day it is, some characters react strongly to events you instigate, and many of the characters gradually change their attitudes and opinions about you over the course of the game. The voice acting is particularly impressive... a sardonic John Rhys-Davies provides the narration, and a few of the voice actors supply some of their own ad-libs which don't show up in the text. The script gives them a lot to work with too, focusing on humor for its own sake, in the midst of a rather serious and dark plot.

Voice Acting/Game Script: 9.5/10

The graphics are done in simple 256 color VGA. Simple sprites are used for the characters and some repeated screens are used in the forest, although enhanced pictures are used for conversations and close-ups, battle scenes, and in-game cinemas. Needless to say, the whole game is most definitely fixed in jolly old pre-rendered 2D. The character artwork is particularly well done, and there's nothing to give you a headache, aside from some occasionally repetitive scenery.

Graphics: 7/10

Despite being plagued by a few simple glitches and workarounds which become necessary for today's operating systems, Quest for Glory IV represents the pinnacle of its genre. Similarly to Majora's Mask, it chooses to focus on a small area and minute number of characters in great depth, rather than following in the footsteps of Quest for Glory III and dealing with three entire nations. The plot is unraveled artfully through a number of scenes, and the variety of solutions, clever sense of humor, and depth given to all the characters make it an enjoyable experience. By today's standards such a game would hardly even be playable, offering little in the way of immediate gratification for effort, but for what it was, it remains an excellent example of a highly interactive adventure game.

Overall: 10/10

Final Recommendation: Buy, borrow, track down anyway that you can. It will be worth it.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 03/18/04