Disturbing Video Game Music 231: Awakened Evil - Shadowgate 64: Trials of the Four Towers

Published 2022-10-05

Shadowgate was a first-person point-and-click game made for Macintosh computers, but is most well known for its strong NES port. In the game you played an elf named Jair who was sent by a wise old wizard to go to the cursed Castle Shadowgate and confront the Warlock Lord before he can summon the dreaded Behemoth. The game retains a strong cult following for its memorable dark fantasy world, mostly solid puzzles, and just how many ways your character can die horribly. Unknown to many these days, the game got two sequels; the first on the Turbografix CD, of all consoles, called Beyond Shadowgate which was a more traditional point-and-click game.

Probably the more well known sequel is Shadowgate 64: Trials of the Four Towers, which went the first person route like the original. After Jair beat the Warlock Lord and became king of the land there was centuries of peace, one day though darkness suddenly begins to return to the land and the kingdom is soon overrun with monsters and undead. Enter Del Cottonfoot, a wandering halfling merchant who now finds Jair's once prosperous kingdom in ruins and finds out some dumb idiot is trying to revive the Warlock Lord. Del then needs to go to the titular four towers, guided by the friendly ghosts of the now mostly deceased populace of the kingdom, and assemble an artifact to destroy the Warlock Lord once and for all.

You know how Super Mario 64 is really unintentionally creepy due to how empty everything is? Shadowgate 64 does the same thing from a first-person perspective and in much more intentionally eerie environments including filthy sewers, an abandoned village, the often surreal insides of the towers, and of course Castle Shadowgate itself which you must go to once again. Shadowgate 64 overall does a really good job building up a lonely and paranoiac atmosphere; the foggy graphics of the N64 add to the grim environments, most of your allies are spirits who can't directly help you outside of advice and guidance, and while Del is certainly clever he isn't a warrior and can't defend himself at all from the various threats that wander around. Then you get to this song which begins to play in the some the last areas of the game where the Warlock Lord is now fully back from the dead and your opposition gets all the more dangerous, the tensions reach an all-time high and the song happily exploits this.