Those that go looking for death often don’t get rewarded for it. Recognising this imbalance, Zojoi will reward Shadowgate players that discover novel ways to be offed by the castle’s defences. The developers have been adding hidden deaths which players will need to search out for achievements. That’s not the only reward for being cut in two by a heavy door: the sound team have created some of the most gruesome eviscerations I’ve heard. And I’m no stranger to evisceration sound effects.
Back in November, Zojoi found funding for its remake of the classic point’n’click adventure. The team are rescoring, redrawing, and redesigning, modernising some bits and wholly creating new areas, too.
Speaking to us during the campaign, the game’s original creator, Dave Marsh, said that “We didn’t want to just port the title over to the newer devices out on the market. What we wanted to do was to re-imagine and update the game and make the title in a way that we had always envisioned – relatively free of the delivery constraints of the past. […] We also wanted to add a ton of new puzzles and re-visit every puzzle in the original game, making sure they hold up. We wanted to do all this while paying homage to the parts of the game that older fans cherish.”
Part of this is tapping into one of the joys of Shadowgate, death lurked behind every corner. Almost anything used at the wrong time or in the wrong way could end with you dying. “Since Shadowgate is synonymous with dying in multiple ways,” writes Marsh in a recent Kickstarter update, “Karl has added a feature that we are calling ‘hidden deaths’ to the game. These deaths have to be unlocked through game play and will require you to think of creative ways to, er, die. Fun stuff all around!”
This will be tied into the game’s new achievement system which, if the game gets through Steam Greenlight, be integrated with Steamworks, letting you show off how mortal you are to all your friends.
Oh, for that grizzly sound effect, scroll down to the bottom of this post.