A surprising change from the typical Sierra blueprint, this graphic adventure aimed at teens is more like Myst or The 7th Guest than Mystery House or King's Quest VII, offering an intricately detailed world to explore and plenty of classic puzzles to solve.
Shivers is set in Professor Windlenot's Museum of the Strange and Unusual, an abandoned collection of strange artifacts from around the world. It seems you've been dared to spend the night in the dilapidated old museum, which was never open to the public due to a bizarre incident that took place many years ago. Two teenagers and the professor himself disappeared under unknown circumstances, and you must solve the mystery if you're to survive until dawn.
Basically, your task is to collect a series of mischievous spirits, or Ixupi, which have been unleashed from the urns which held them. The urns and their accompanying lids are scattered throughout the grounds, and you must find the correct lid/urn combination to capture the corresponding Ixupi. Finding these objects is made more difficult by the fact that the professor was an eccentric who filled his museum with plenty of puzzles and secret passages.
These puzzles aren't particularly challenging, and many of them must be repeated every time you need access to an adjoining area. (This occurs all too frequently, since you can only carry one object at a time.) Fortunately, wandering around the museum is, at least for a while, an interesting experience. The displays are eerie and fascinating, and the mystery surrounding the museum is unveiled through the personal belongings of the missing persons. Unfortunately, once you've seen all there is to see, traipsing back and forth searching for objects you've already found becomes a repetitive chore, and the game loses some of its allure. In the end, Shivers is a game that has a look and feel guaranteed to get your attention, but may lack the depth of play to keep it for the long run.
