The fourth game in Quest for Glory series brings our hero to a small town, Mordavia. Of course, the town (and the countryside) are in a need of a hero, it's just that they don't know it yet :) . The land is decaying, the people are miserable, the evil is spreading, and yet no-one asks for help. But, real heroes don't wait for an invitation, right? Once again, your task is to find out where all the evil is coming from, and put an end to it. Unfortunately, it's not that easy - the villagers don't like strangers (and you're pretty strange :) ), the villains will not reveal themselves to you, and the countryside is a dangerous place to be (as you will, no doubt, find out).

Shadows of Darkness is not a pure p&c; adventure. Rather, it's a RPG-adventure hybrid. On one hand the game has everything you would normally expect from an adventure game by Sierra (or any other p&c;, for that matter). On the other hand, the game has some RPG elements - your character has different characteristics (strength, agility, climbing, stealth, communication, intelligence etc) which develop through character's actions. For example, fighting monsters will increase your strength and agility, talking with NPC will increase your communication skills, solving puzzles your intelligence, etc. One additional RPG element is choosing the hero type (fighter, wizard and thief) at the beginning of the game. Every type of hero has different skills - the fighter can use sword and shield, the wizard can use magic and the thief can pick locks and has some useful acrobatic skills. The difficulty of your game will somewhat depend upon the hero that you've chosen (if you choose the fighter you'll let you brain rest, so to say; the thief is your choice if you like more puzzle solving, and less fighting).

Enemy encounters are pretty much random (save for a few, which you can't avoid). The number of enemies is not that big (three types of them during the day and four at night), but their difficulty varies. An interesting detail concerning the fights is the fact that you can choose whether to fight an active fight (which is the 'arcade' type of fighting) or a strategic one (you merely set the level of aggression, defense and usage of special skills, and your hero fights on his own). After you gain a few strength, agility and intelligence points, the fights become easy (and somewhat boring). Of course, if you do not wish to fight, you can (almost) always runaway.

My favourite part of the game (and, actually, the part where p&c; fully comes to view) are the puzzles. They are not particularly difficult to solve, but some of them are quite clever. If you choose to play as a thief, the number of puzzles which you can solve increases. The only part about the puzzles that I did not like was that some of them had to be solved every time when you wanted to access a certain screen in the game (for example, dr Cranium's front door puzzle).

The graphics are quite good. All the backgrounds are hand-drawn, and you can really see that a lot of effort has been put in the making of characters' close ups. The music score is good, as well. The interface (and the gameplay) are similar to one from Wages
of War, the previous game in "Quest for Glory" series.

This game (as well as it's predecessors) has a lot of easter eggs. Some references to A.E. Poe, a lot of quotes from "Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy", cleverly put into the dialogues, etc (no, no, I won't give all the eggs away ;) ).

And now for the flaws? The game has a lot of bugs - jumping into DOS and/or Windows without any (obvious) reason, crashing in different parts of the game, inability to save the game (I've noticed that this happens when the number of the saved games (that can be displayed without scrolling down the list) is reached) - so, better prepare yourself for some frustration. Some parts of the game can to be played again (even though you've completed them), some puzzles have to be solved again and again (dr Cranium's lab). One other flaw is the lack of replayability. Even the possibility of playing different types of heroes doesn't increase the replayability.

I found the game to be good (even though is has a tad bit predictable plot), with really good graphics and music score, but all the bugs and the lack of replayability somewhat spoil the overall feel.

As far as I can tell, the game doesn't require slowing down your PC (I've ran it on Duron 750 Mhz, and had no problems) and runs well (as well as it can, considering all those bugs) under Win95 and Win98 (I don't know what's the case with WinME, Win2000 and XP)