The Hound of Shadow

The Hound of Shadow is a representative of text adventure games, very popular especially in the eighties. The program is loosely based on Howard Phillips Lovecraft's short stories about the powerful deity of Cthulhu. The action of the game takes place in England, just after the First World War. Our hero is entangled in a murder, which will soon turn into an occult chase for mythical creatures from hell.

The Hound of Shadow authors tried to make our character not completely anonymous, which is why we start the game from the arduous process of creating a hero. At the beginning we decide about basic things, so we establish gender, name, nationality and one of the nine professions. Then it's time for more practical things: we have to determine the level of sophistication of each of the forty-three skills. Among them we can find such diverse features as driving, climbing, swimming, dealing with various types of firearms, bluffing, persuading interlocutors to be right, listening, perception, tracking, knowledge of foreign languages - and that's just the tip of the iceberg. The worst thing is that you can't be good in everything, and as the authors assure, each of the skills has a significant impact on the game. For example, if our hero speaks Latin, he will easily and quickly translate ancient manuscripts. As the Hound of Shadow is a text game, it is obvious that all the information is given to us by the program using text. Admittedly, from time to time images appear (black and white and unfortunately not too stunning in terms of execution), but they are only an addition - what counts is what the screen presents us with letters. The plot is very good and can hold in suspense, the next elements of a complicated intrigue are discovered piece by piece. Riddles are excellent and solving them makes a lot of fun, especially that in contrast to other adventures of this type we have at our disposal a large number of basic commands (almost 50).

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Last updated on August 14, 2015