Shadow of the Beast 3: Out of the Shadow – surely one of the most in depth and accomplished games to be created on the almighty Amiga platform.
Published by Psygnosis in 1992, the successor to the incredibly successful Shadow of the Beast and Shadow of the Beast 2, SOTB3 earned high praise for its advanced (although no longer ground-breaking) appearance. Reflections Interactive had also tweaked the gameplay since SOTB2 to provide a more gentle learning curve, as well as extending the puzzle-solving element – tending to lean away from the emphasis on action that the previous two instalments relied upon more heavily.
SOTB3 was split into four sections (rather than just being one long section as before). These four sections were the Forest of Zeakros, Caves of Bidhur, Fort Dourmoor, and Nosthomak. Each of these played host to an item, (The Skull of Louq-Garou, the Quintessence of Being, Pendek's Mace and the Crystals of Hodag), that you, as Aarbron, must collect in order to face the beast lord Maletoth for the final time.
Maletoth kept you as a slave beast and used you as a messenger in the first Shadow of the Beast. In the second, you had evolved slightly and become more human. You were to rescue your sister from the evil grasp of Zelek. The final instalment of the Shadow series saw you restored to an Indiana Jones style
human form in order to collect the four items, create a spell and defeat Maletoth once and for all.
Graphically impressive – employing 8-way parallax to display the eerie and sometimes twisted backgrounds, grim and replete with mutant statues to enhance the atmosphere – and with a soundtrack to boot (credit to Tim Wright, who composed both SOTB2 and 3’s music, although David Whittaker’s score to the original Shadow of the Beast is probably the most famous of the three), SOTB3 really had a lot going for it. Perhaps it was simply the fact that there was nothing spectacularly new that lead to it being only a cult success. As a game, it is technically adept: taking the best parts of its earlier incarnations and tweaking them to create one accomplished game. However, having nothing to really “Wow” the audience with, it was doomed to play second fiddle to the fond memories of its earlier embodiments.
Not as revolutionary as its predecessors, Shadow of the Beast 3 still rocked many people’s gaming world – even if only for a short time.
