Shadowgate

Shadowgate is a first-person adventure game in which you explore a castle room by room, and the castle wants you dead. It is the NES conversion of one of the MacVenture games, and it keeps the structure that made that series work: a static view of the room, a list of verbs, and a cursor you move over the scenery.

The loop is Open, Look, Take and Use, applied to whatever the cursor is resting on, and solving a room means working out which object the designer intended. Where it distinguishes itself is in the number of ways to die - wrong door, wrong lever, wrong moment, and the game tells you so with a skull and a two-word message. A torch burns down as you play, so there is a genuine clock running across the whole game rather than a turn limit, and running out in a dark corridor is a real ending. Nothing is signposted, which is the point: this is a game designed to be mapped on paper with a friend, and it is one of the few NES titles that works better as a shared puzzle than as a solo one.

• ▸Static first-person rooms with a verb-based cursor interface
• ▸A burning torch that acts as a real clock across the whole game
• ▸A very large number of instant-death outcomes, most of them hidden
• ▸Save-anywhere structure built for mapping on paper