Extropia’s Retro-Gaming: ‘Shackled’

Regular readers of this series may recall that I once featured a game called ‘Beyond the ice Palace’ which was clearly inspired by that classic arcade game ‘Ghosts N Goblins’. Similarly, if you squint you may be able to draw similarities between ‘Shackled’ and a certain other game.

‘Shackled’ began life as an arcade game for Data East. Although it was not exactly a smash hit, US Gold decided to rush through a conversion for the Commodore 64. The gameplay consists of a top-down view of a prison complex. Your task is to guide what I assume is a person through a maze of corridors, with the intent of rescuing prisoners who are trapped in cells. But, in order to get to those prisoners and bring them to safety, you must fight your way through hordes of enemies.

At which point, regular goers of 80s arcades should be thinking, “ah, that sounds like Gauntlet”. And, yes, in a way Shackled is a bit like that classic 4-player game. But, in a far more important way they could not be more different. You see, while Gauntlet was a terrific game, Shackled is shit.

It’s not just shit in some ways, but in every way a game can be dreadful. The graphics are appalling. That’s why I could only assume you control a person; the sprite just looks like a blob, as do the enemies you fight against. Defeated guards drop ‘items’, and they are so badly drawn you cannot work out what they are meant to be. Assuming you’re meant to do some sort of management here, using the appropriate item for the current situation, this inability to figure what the hell an item is, is problematic to say the least.

Perhaps a quick check of the instructions cleared things up? Actually, no. There was no attempt to write up even the most rudimentary Dungeons And Dragons style inventory instructions. So you have no idea what the items are, what effect they are meant to have and that makes planning any management strategy around them impossible.

Despite this, the game is not a difficult one. The dungeon layouts don’t vary all that much, so once you’ve learned the layout of one, you’ve pretty much learned them all. Ok, there is some variety but not a great deal. So you find the requisite number of prisoners, and you take them to the exit, and then you repeat this sequence for the next 99 levels.

Oh, the C-64 version did have one added difficulty that was not a feature of the original arcade game. The prisoners you rescue do not faithfully follow you to the exit like they did in the arcade game, but instead have a habit of getting stuck behind walls whenever you turn one of the game’s many sharp corners. Somehow, I don’t think that was an intentional gimmick, but rather one more example of sloppy programming.

Shackled gives off every impression of having been a rushed job. It has crap graphics, crap sound, and utterly uninspiring gameplay. In fact, it might well be the worst game I ever played. I dunno, maybe ‘Custer’s Revenge’ or ‘ET’ for the Atari VCS, two notoriously bad games, were worse than this. I never played those games, so it’s not for me to say.

Thanks to US Gold for the images