This game has a lot going for it. Nice atmosphere, smooth gameplay,
and I experienced no technical glitches at all (the more I play these games, the
more I’m beginning to appreciate this virtue). It also has humorously ghoulish
touches, like a hilarious scream every time you save the game. In addition, there’s
an extremely helpful feature that allows you to take a look back at any important
document that you’ve previously seen. Every game should have this feature.

The
museum that you spend the bulk of the game in is immense and full of entertaining
eye candy: gruesome torture and execution equipment, eerie Greek statuary, odd
plants and animals, ritualistic masks, etc. These items are indeed fun to look
at and, at times, interact with.

The game consists of collecting ten pot
lids, ten pots, putting each together, and then finding and capturing the appropriate
evil spirit in each pot. And things are pretty fun for awhile, scurrying here
and there in the museum, getting a pot and a lid put together, finding the appropriate
spirit and trapping it … I played this game with a friend for an entertaining
13-hour stretch one Saturday.

After a while, however, I realized that there
was nothing more to the game. Just a protracted scavenger hunt punctuated with
irrelevant puzzles. Some of the puzzles are fun: an African drum puzzle and a
few interesting picture puzzles. However, several of these stumpers are just twiddleware,
and two of them were quite simply infuriating. A Chinese checkers puzzle? Please.
The designer wasn’t exactly in creative overdrive the day that put that in the
game.

However. There’s a lot of roaming around to be done.
What’s more, you can only carry one object at a time. Plus, the game has
no map feature, so after a while I was absolutely bloody exhausted from tramping
back and forth through the same rooms over and over and over and over.

I
have to say the ending of Shivers is a complete letdown. After all the
work I’d put in, I felt I deserved a bigger reward than that! To make matters
worse, there were several extremely interesting elements in the museum, in particular
some intriguing doors in the basement with wonderful skeleton hands and skulls
for doorknobs, that never get used in the game. I thought this was a tease, and
it irritated me.

By the time I finished Shivers, I was ready to let
an evil spirit get me just to put me out of my misery.

Final Grade: C

If
you liked Shivers:
Watch: The House on Haunted Hill
Read: Shadowland by Peter Straub Play: The 7th Guest

System
Requirements:

Mac:
Color
Macintosh
8 MB free memory
System 6.07 or higher
CD-ROM drive

PC:

486 SX 33 MHz or faster
Win 3.1 or better
8 MB RAM
2x CD-ROM drive

640×480 at 256 colors or better
Hard Drive
Mouse