Shivers

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 earned him the reputation of a mad scientist. Renouncing his life as a noble, he moved to America, where he 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, and a diorama dedicated to Atlantis). However, Windlenot mysteriously disappeared before the museum was completed. The player steps into the shoes of a teenager dared by his friends to spend the night on the grounds of the museum, which is said to be haunted. Upon entering and exploring the museum, the player discovers that fifteen years prior, in 1980, while Windlenot was on one of his archaeological excursions, two students 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", draw the "life essence" or "Ka" from humans. They had been trapped in the vessels by the Zapana, a fictional South American indigenous people. The ixupi are each associated with various materials, elements and natural forces, such as sand, cloth, wax, and electricity, which they can inhabit and lie in wait for unsuspecting humans. The ixupi killed the teens, and eventually Windlenot himself, allowing three of the thirteen spirits to escape into the world.