The game takes place at Professor Windlenot's Museum of the Strange and Unusual, a "haunted" museum, after your so-called friends lock you inside the gates for the night on a dare. Two teenagers disappeared after sneaking into the museum one night and Professor Windlenot was never seen again either. When you eventually find a way into the museum, you learn that the kids took the lids off ceramic pots found in one of the exhibits, releasing evil, cartoonish-looking entities known as Ixupi. Ixupi are able to hide amongst different elements (such as water, ash, wax, etc.) and if you get too close to them, they'll drain your life essence. In order to survive the night, you'll have to find all the ceramic vessels, as well as their corresponding lids, and capture the Ixupi back inside them. This is no easy task, however, as each vessel has a different symbol on it and you can only capture that vessel's specific Ixupi inside it. That means that once you find the vessel and lid that fits it for ash, you'll have to carefully make your way through the museum looking for all the places that Ixupi could be hiding. (The music changes when you're near an Ixupi, so listen for that.) It's best to keep notes of the locations where you find/leave the pots and lids and which Ixupi they belong to, because you can only hold one item at a time (a pot, a lid, or a completed vessel).
This is a point and click adventure game, as I've already said. You're meant to explore a museum (depending on the room you're in at the time, the music can become extremely unsettling), collect clues, solve puzzles and survive. There is no combat. The extent of it is clicking on the Ixupi with a completed vessel equipped. (If you need help keeping track of where each pot and lid are located, this website has a helpful checklist.) One of the most interesting parts of the game is searching for clues, reading through the various books and notes and learning more about some of the exhibits the museum offers, such as Tombs and Curses, Funeral Rites, Gods and Religious Items, Myths and Legends, Man's Inhumanity to Man, Mysteries of the Deep and more. Once you've completed the game, you're free to explore the museum without having to worry about being attacked by the Ixupi.
Shivers is filled with puzzles, some easier than others. I'm terrible at solving puzzles, mostly because I don't have the patience to sit there and play around with them. One I really enjoyed is the Mastermind puzzle, which is basically just a logic problem. There are others though, like Chinese Checkers and the Pinball Machine, that I always look up the solutions to because I know I'll be there forever if I try to solve them on my own.
Shivers is the first horror game I ever played and to this day, it's still one of my favorite games of all time. I still have the original copy my mom bought me because, even though I haven't had a PC that could run it since my Windows XP PC died, I can't bring myself to part with it. For years, I tried to find ways to get the game to work on a 64 bit computer, but I was never successful. Finally GOG added Shivers to their website and I was so happy. I had been hoping they would sell it for years. And you can't beat the price, $5.99. To be honest, I would have paid anything for it. They could have charged $60, like it was a new game, and I would gladly have handed the money over because this game means so much to me.
I want to make something clear. I 100% recommend this game. No matter who you are. But you have to understand that 1. It's a very old game, so don't expect anything else from it and 2. My love for Shivers, at least in part, definitely comes from a place of nostalgia and the fact that I wish the museum existed in real life, so while I love the game very much, I'm not sure everyone who plays it for the first time now will appreciate it as much as I did then, and as much as I do now because of the memories I have of it.
If you're a fan of games like Myst and 7th Guest, you should give Shivers a chance. You can purchase it here.
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