Description
A playthrough of Ultra's 1992 adventure game for the NES, Nightshade.
This video shows the game finished with a 100% completion rate.
The day Vortex fell, the people of Metro City lost their beloved civic protector and hero. With no one to keep them in check, the city's criminals quickly moved to take over the streets. When it becomes apparent that a new kingpin has emerged from the chaos, one man alone decides to step up and don Vortex's mantle. His name... Nightshade.
Or Lampshade. Or Nightcart. Whichever you prefer.
Nightshade is a puzzle-oriented graphic adventure that includes some one-on-one fighting scenes to accommodate the action-loving philistines playing console games. The story mixes noir detective mystery with comedy to excellent results - the dialog is witty, cheeky, and refreshingly un-American - and the dystopian setting is hilariously cynical without being depressing.
I didn't find Beam's 1991 https://youtu.be/vjI76JIFCuA adaptation particularly compelling, but Nightshade - the company's first original attempt at the genre for a console - was a genuine surprise in the nicest of ways. The game's graphics, controls, and scope were all tailor fitted to the NES's capabilities and fit like a glove. It sucks that the sequel teased by the ending never came to fruition, but it's hard to complain given that Nightshade paved the way for their evergreen cyberpunk classic, https://youtu.be/W6ckbBpSKhw, the following year.
If Nightshade had been released a year earlier, I think it would've been widely recognized as a standout in the NES library.
(For what it's worth, I feel the same about Ultra's PC-to-NES adventure, https://youtu.be/XEydkEz6tUQ)
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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