Quest for Glory IV
| Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness |
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CD Cover art
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| Developer(s) | Sierra On-Line |
| Publisher(s) | Sierra On-Line |
| Designer(s) | Lori Ann Cole, Corey Cole |
| Composer(s) | Aubrey Hodges |
| Series | Quest for Glory |
| Engine | SCI2 |
| Platform(s) | MS-DOS, Windows |
| Release date(s) | December 1993 (floppy version), September 1994 (CD version) |
| Genre(s) | Adventure game/role-playing video game (hybrid) |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness is an adventure game/role-playing video game hybrid. It is the fourth installment of the Quest for Glory computer game series by Sierra On-Line. It was the first and only game of the series to drop the numerals from the title.
Shadow of Darkness follows directly on the events of Quest for Glory III: Wages of War. Drawn without warning from victory in Fricana, the Hero arrives without equipment or explanation in the middle of the hazardous Dark One Caves in the distant land of Mordavia, a world full of undead that is "a mix of Slavic folklore and Lovecraftian horror". Upon escaping from the closing cave mouth, he meets a mysterious young woman named Katrina who assists him again several times in his journey. The Hero helps the townspeople with their problems. He encounters several old foes, including the not-quite-dead Ad Avis and the ogress Baba Yaga, and makes several bizarre new allies. The Hero is ultimately coerced into assisting Ad Avis' Dark Master in collecting the Dark Rituals that will allow Avoozl the Dark One (an obvious Cthulhu pastiche, and most likely a reference to the Slavic deity Chernobog) to manifest in Mordavia's world. Naturally, the Hero escapes this control and thwarts their plan, destroying Ad Avis in the process. During the celebration of the Hero's somewhat pyrrhic victory, the wizard Erasmus appears, along with his familiar Fenrus, summoning the Hero to the land of Silmaria.
The gameplay continued with Quest for Glory III's graphical, point-and-click interface, and also introduced a new combat system, which introduced a sideways perspective of the fights, and allowed players to check an option to let the computer fight the battles for them.
Quest for Glory IV features darker themes while maintaining the humor of previous games through such methods as incorporating Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre parodies. Revolving around a dark cult summoning an unfathomably large evil, the game was a far cry from earlier villains such as Baba Yaga. Additionally, the undead and Lovecraftian monsters differed significantly from the lighter monsters of earlier games (there were, however, vampiric rabbits reminiscent of Monty Python and the Holy Grail). The game was inspired by gothic fiction, "old horror movies and books about vampires and werewolves", as well as Anton LaVey's Satanic Rituals.
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