Shadowgate. Undoubtably many of us played that classic adventure game on our first consoles and computers. Well, many of you may not know that it also had a sequal: Shadowgate 64: Trials of the Four Towers. Released on the N64 in 1999, it was sadly overlooked by many gamers, and garnered wildly different reviews. For good reason.

Shadowgate 64 is set a century after the lord jair (hero of the first game) defeated the warlock lord and climbed onto the throne of the kingdom. You play a young halfling named Dell, whose caravan is attacked by bandits while crossing the plains near Castle Shadowgate. It appears that in a century the castle has fallen to being a den of thieves instead of a home of magic. The game then follows Dells tribulations as he tries to escape the castle, and solve the mystery behind it.

Gamplay is the same as the original Shadowgate: a mix of adventure & puzzles. The differnece being that Shadowgate 64 gives you a fully 3D world to explore, from a first-person perspective. The controls are a bit hard to grasp at first, and remain rather touchy throughout the game. Not a good thing, given as there are hundreds of ways for Dell to die in this world, all accompanied by (often) gruesome descriptions. There is a very deep storyline behind the game, delivered both through a large amount of readable books, and through conversations with various NPC's. The world is dark and gloomy, and as you wander through the ruins of castle shadowgate, you will no doubt feel...something...in your heart. A wondering of what happened there? A sadness at glory lost? A thirst to delve into the past of this place?

In the end, the game is really a forgotten masterpiece, often overlooked both for it's rather low-end graphics and for its quirky gameplay scheme.