External Links

soggy97.zip *
Includes UHS hints plus, for some reason, LGOP hints
This game requires an interpreter program - refer to the game's documentation for details.
soggy.zip *
Original release
This game requires an interpreter program - refer to the game's documentation for details.
soggy.hnt
hints
sogpop.zip *
pop-up hints only. MS-DOS only.
Walkthroughs and maps
by David Welbourn
* Compressed with ZIP. Free Unzip tools are available for most systems at www.info-zip.org.

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Shades of Gray

by Mark Baker, Steve Bauman, Belisana, Mike Laskey, Judith Pintar, Cindy Yans, and Hercules

Surreal, Historical
1992

(based on 6 ratings)
2 reviews

About the Story

You wake painfully, from a fitful sleep, to find yourself surrounded by three shadowy figures… After a horrible dizzying moment, the shapes come into focus — vampires, they are vampires, and they are nonchalantly discussing your fate… The swarthy one wants to kill you out of hand. The second argues against. ‘He has tasted blood. He’s one of us now….’

The original Shades of Gray: An Adventure in Black and White, written in AGT was released in 1992, and updated in 1997.


Game Details

Editorial Reviews

Baf's Guide


WARNING: High Tarot content.

An imaginative psychodrama of self-confrontation and moral dilemma, by way of Haiti, Sherwood Forest, and an American Civil War battlefield. One of the most intriguing storylines I've seen in any game. You wander the city streets, or possibly the castle grounds, with a sense of temporal dislocation and confused memories of vampires, until a friendly fortune-teller helps you put your head back together through a series of visions about your past and what it means to you. Written by seven strangers, the game is divided into self-contained segments of highly variable style, subject matter, and quality. This is at once the game's greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Just about everything you hate in games can be found here - mazes, time limits, obscure "guess-the-word" puzzles - but the flawed parts fit into the frame-tale so well, the effect is dazzling. Given a better parser and the removal of some of the more annoying puzzles, this one would easily rate five stars.

-- Carl Muckenhoupt

SPAG
[...] a somewhat political, occasionally difficult, *extremely* well-written game which deals with the past, present, and future of Haiti. Beyond that I can say no more without spoiling the excellent plot, but take my word for it -- Shades of Grey is a game not to be missed. (Molley the Mage)

The use of seven authors leads to a rather segmented design, but linearity serves the story well. The individual episodes vary in style and quality (both in the writing and the overall design), yet somehow this creates the effect of many pieces coming together. And the whole of "Shades of Grey" is far, far more than the sum of the parts. (Christopher E. Forman)
See the full review

SynTax
There is a lot of hokum about you needing to rediscover your memory of things past, but I didn't feel it was worth the effort of trying to follow this plot. The American fascination with the Robin Hood legend rears its head once (or twice) again, and I sometimes wish that they would pick on another character or era from English History.
See the full review

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A large and powerful game in an old, rusty parser system, June 5, 2017

This game is famous as a cooperation between 7 authors at a time when e-mail was new and difficult to use.

The real story of the game isn't even actually apparent until almost the end. The middle parts have quite a variety, from Robin Hood to an urban setting to McCarthyism to vampires.

The game took me over 1200 moves to finish. There are 1001 points you can obtain.

The AGT parser is old and bad. I'd rather even have a Scott Adams parser, because those games have a true simplicity; but in this game KNOCK DOOR and KNOCK ON DOOR give different responses, with only one working; TIE ROPE and TIE ROPE TO TREE give different responses, one working and one giving you a generic message. And so on... I only discovered later that you can type LIST EXITS, which would have been very useful.

The ending has a moral choice that many have described as seeming ambiguous, but with only one leading to a successful ending.

One of the best games available pre-Curses!

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1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Eclectic, February 2, 2011

Much better than would be expected, considering that this game was designed by committee. On the one hand, it contains a few genuinely creepy moments, some clever puzzles and bits of evocative writing. On the other hand, it contains way too many disparate settings and the quality of the design, writing and implementation varies widely between the different story segments.

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Shades of Gray on IFDB

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My new walkthroughs for January 2021 by David Welbourn
On Friday January 29, 2021, I published new walkthroughs for the games and stories listed below! Some of these were paid for by my wonderful patrons at Patreon. Please consider supporting me to make even more new walkthroughs for works...

Noteworthy Games Which Aren't Z-Code or TADS Bytecode by Walter Sandsquish
So many text-adventure games have been written with some version of ZIL or Inform or TADS that we might forget other methods get used too. So, here is a list of noteworthy games which don't live on a Z-Machine or a TADS VM. By...

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AGT must plays? by Rovarsson
I've recently started playing Cliff Diver 1 and I quit because I got impossibly stuck. I don't want to give u^p on a potential treasure trove though. Recommendations for AGT games?




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