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Shivers-PC-Box

Shivers is a single-player horror-themed PC adventure game, released on CD-ROM by Sierra On-Line in November 1995. It was developed with Sierra's Creative Interpreter. Being the first Sierra first-person adventure game, Shivers was compared to contemporary Myst and The 7th Guest, gaining praise mostly for its atmosphere. The game takes place in a fictitious haunted museum.

Plot[]

Sir Hubert Windlenot was a peer of the British nobility, and as an archeologist, a member of the Royal Society. His interest in controversial fringe topics such as ancient astronauts, hollow earth, Atlantis and cryptozoology brought on him the reputation of a mad scientist. Renouncing his life as a noble, he moved to America, and attempted to open "Professor Windlenot's Museum of the Strange and Unusual" in Mt. Pleasant, Ohio, dedicated to his findings and theories. Construction took two decades to house both exhibits and thematic installations with several puzzles to entertain the visitors (such as an Ancient Egyptian-themed artificial lake, an underground maze that leads to a Dero installation, a greenhouse, or a diorama dedicated to Atlantis). The museum was never completed until the Professor mysteriously disappeared.

The player steps into the shoes of a teenager dared by his friends to spend the night on the grounds of the museum, that has been considered haunted.

Upon entering and exploring the museum, it is discovered that "fifteen years ago", in 1980 and while the Professor was in one of his excursions, two nerds from the local high school had broken into the museum and accidentally released evil spirits from an exhibited set of ceramic vessels from the Moche Valley. These spirits, known as "ixupi", drew the "life essence" or "Ka" from humans until trapped by a fictional South American indigenous people, the Zapana. Furthermore, the Ixupi are associated with chemical elements and materials, such as sand, metal, wood or electricity, which they can inhabit. These led to the demise of the unfortunate teens, and eventually of the Professor himself.

The player becomes tasked with finding a way to capture the ten spirits before the sun rises (though no actual time limit is imposed on the gameplay), and free the trapped ghosts of the Professor and the teens. This can be done by finding each vessel and its corresponding talisman/cover throughout all the museum, and where the respective Ixupi is hiding in order to trap it. In order to find all these items, the player has to explore the whole museum by passing puzzles of varying difficulty, mazes and secret passages. Along the way, the player can find in-game texts and documents chronicling the exploits of the Professor and the belongings of the two students expanding their backstory, with elements hinting at their lives, relationships and motivations.

At the end of the game the player captures the Ixupi of electricity from the power generator, causing an explosion. From the destroyed ruins, the player sees the friends approaching, looking for their friend, as the dawn breaks.

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