From Sierra
You manage to ride into the town of Cyclone, past a rock slide, to join up with your friends who are in the rock band Trip Cyclone. The manager of the motel isn't very friendly, you have the weirdest dream in your room and when you wake, you'll find the town of Cyclone is now deserted. Exploring the motel carefully will be your first step to discovering what happened.
The goal of the game is to become a warrior so you can free your friends who have been trapped. To become a warrior, you must find the bahos hidden around town. You must then wake their power by matching them with a petroglyph in the nearby canyon. Then you need to place them in the kiva. There are 12 bahos, each much be carried into the canyon separately. The only direct help you will get is from a ghost in town.
The second Shivers game has a fairly different feel from the first. I liked this game a lot better except for what happens when you get a bahos (more on that later). The rock videos by the band are very good, and would certainly pass on any music video station. Some of the colours are weird, and so is trying to get through the canyon when you are looking for a petroglyph.
The basic interface is fairly standard. The game allows you to turn, go forward, get closer to things, pick up some items. You can carry around a number of items, examine one more closely, use inventory items on the mainscreen and occasionally combine inventory items. The interface also includes an Internet button, a Map function, a Flashback function and the Options.
The Internet button is for online gaming, chatting and sharing of puzzles. You can create your own versions of puzzles for other fans of Shivers 2. The Flashback button lets you review important clues and videos. Almost everything you need to remember will be saved here.
The map interface allows you to jump directly to any building you have previously been able to enter. Some buildings do require that you solve a puzzle for entry, others will let you just walk in.
As in the previous Shivers there is a distinct disadvantage to touching everything. Namely, this may easily cost you some of your life essence. There may be no warning either, you touch this item and get bit by a snake. Do that and something explodes. However, many hints and clues are under/behind/above/within other objects. You will need to be willing to look at everything to piece together what happened in town and why.
A couple of major hints about solving this game.
When you find a bahos, save the game just outside the canyon. It may take you a couple of times to find the correct petroglyph in the canyon and wandering around there is very dangerous for your health.
Find the way to watch the music videos early. They have some clues you need to progress in the game.
Find and place all bahos before you do much in Max's cave. You will regret it otherwise.
The key gripe is there are some linear puzzle solutions that don't need to be that way. Like solving one of the cemetery puzzles, you must have first viewed a music video. I could work out what needed to be done without the video, but it didn't have the desired effect until I had viewed the video. Or being able to find a rock which obviously should hold a key, but doesn't until you've been told about it.
I do not like the fact that from the moment you pick up a bahos, you start losing life essence. Plus the need to move fast in the canyon or the petroglyphs start attacking you. Between the two of them, you can lose your life very easily.
The end puzzle is one of the most annoying I have ever met in an adventure game. You have very little time in which to solve it or you die. Plus you have just changed CDs, and you can't save the game at any point on CD2. So when you die, you have to change CDs again as well. This is such a bad combination, it is hard to contemplate.
Hard to make any real conclusions about this game. I quite enjoyed some aspects of it, but really hated others. I can't even say that fans of the first game will love this one, I've seen the opinion of one person who liked the first and loathed the second. I had more fun with this one than Shivers. I liked the puzzles a bit better, they had a bit more variety then Shivers 1. And the story behind the game was more interesting.
How odd for a Sierra game. I ended the game with 899,000 point out of 800,000. I guess persistently looking at everything and saving before going into the canyons helped me a lot for points.
The manual was wrong, there are four possible endings to the game. You will know if you find the best one by the last message in the game. Two of the four are obviously wrong, since death follows.