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Originally Posted by Mira
Shivers. While the stupid spirits Ixupi looked really lame, the atmosphere, the shadows and the soundtrack really got me. Spooky.
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Hah, I had the same problem, Shivers really scared me when I was younger.
But there is a very good reason for that, namely my brother.
Back in the good old days me and my brother would play every Lucasarts and Sierra adventuregame together. Spending afternoons figuring out what to do next was loads of fun.
Whilst playing Shivers, however, we were stuck very early on in the game (near the gear puzzle... yeah really early on - we weren't even inside the museum, and when I played the game a few years later I solved the puzzle in one go)
After having tried to solve it for three days in a row with no succes, on the night of the fourth day I gave up and went to bed - my brother continued to try and solve the puzzle.
He managed to solve the puzzle and enter the underground entrance to the museum and play the entire way into the entrance hall of the museum. He was of coarse all too eager to show me what had happened from the gazebo with the gear puzzle up and until entering the museum.
(If you haven't played the game you probably won't understand what happens next)
We enter the underground passageway (which was very dark) I was about 7 or 8 years olf when we played it but I was used to scary games so the dark did not really upset me. We continue and eventually open a heavy door, bats fly out: a cliché but it does evoke a slight scream (nothing too bad)
We continue on to the boat and cross the underground river where the first (unavoidable) Ixupi sucks away some of our lifeforce. Now unknown to me my brother had cranked up the volume of the PC all the way to the top, so the Ixupi flashed up on screen with this huge piercing nerve-shattering scream.
I - naturally - begin to scream as well, but I manage to get a grip of myself. I shout at my brother and tell him to turn the volume back to normal, which he does (or so I tought).
We arrive on the other bank of the river and exit the boat where we find a corpse (Professor Windlenot) and if you've played the game you know what happens next: the ghost of Windlenot streams out of the body upon approaching it with a loud and ghastly ghostly moan, followed by a booming echoed voice. With the volume all the way to the top I simply cracked, I screamed and ran down the stairs where I continued to scream (to the great amusement of my brother)
Thanks for reminding me! I'm going to remind my brother of this when he returns next week... and perhaps I shall install Shivers again.
If you look up shivers on mobygames the screenshots archive has quite a few screenshots from the first part of the game (the gearbox puzzle, the river ixupi and Windlenot's ghost.
Another memorable part in Shivers is when listening to Windelnot's taperecorder, which manages to be funny as well as scary at the same time.
The things is Is till don't know if Shivers was supposed to be scary. I guess so, since they had all those burned corpses about.
I loved the fact that - after finishing the game - you could explore the museum again without having to solve the puzzles or being afraid of an ixupi hiding in one of the exhibits. At that point the game became an interactive museum of the strange and unusual ("welcome, welcome to Professor Windlenot's museum of the strange and unusual...")
