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
640x480 at 256 colors or better
Hard Drive
Mouse