The Shadow Realms Arcade

## Background/story

   In **The Shadow Realms Arcade**, the player, on their last day at work at the fictional Lone Star Arcade, is going to try to gain access to the back room that has always been locked and has been off limits, as their boss had stated that it has a gypsy novelty machine that will grant the player whatever wish they want.

The online game was created by Carmel Games and MouseCity.

## Gameplay

Starting in the first room of the Lone Star Arcade in The Shadow Realms Arcade game, the player can only move in between three rooms (and the back room if they are able to unlock it). They must hover the onscreen cursor over areas searching for clues; if there is one, the cursor will turn into a gears icon, along with clicking on the area will bring up in-game dialog explaining what the player is looking at. The player must piece together clues and use various mechanisms in order to ultimately access the back room and view the game ending.

## Extras

Game dialogue can be read and heard from 11 different languages, the player has the ability to turn off the sounds and music, view a walkthrough and enable a color blind mode, as the majority of the game's puzzles are color-related.

## Controls

* Move cursor--mouse
* Click on clue area/activate puzzle mechanism--left mouse button

## Trivia

* Although there are machines similar to the Test Your Love and the Whack A Zombie games in real life as depicted in the Lone Star Arcade, all games in the arcade are fictional except for Polybius, which was thought for years to being an urban legend, which stated that it was only tested in a few arcades, men in black would empty the machines occasionally, the game would track data and patrons who played the machine had nightmares and some gave up video games for the rest of their lives. Most of these rumors would end up being untrue/unproven, although research found years later that the game actually existed but did not get much distribution due to causing some players seizures. The Polybius machine in the Lone Star Arcade did not function as a game, but rather as a puzzle mechanism needed to beat The Shadow Realms Arcade.
* It is unknown if the Lone Star game room is actually supposed to physically exist in a real world country or not. Texas in the U. S. A.’s nickname is “the Lone Star state”, so it could exist somewhere there. The game’s description (and during the end scene) also tells of how the arcade exists in the “shadow realm”, a possible off-world location that defies the laws of physics and/or space and time. If the player is able to get to the game’s ending, they will either find a person trapped in the back room or they are the trapped person themselves. It could be the latter, as the trapped person can be seen on a “missing” sign shown at the game’s introduction and ending scenes. It is also assumed that the arcade has been closed, as during its intro it states it is the player’s last day at the game room, which could mean that they quit their job. However, if the player is indeed trapped at the very end, their boss could be closing the location down and it could be assumed that they are trapped in the arcade forever.