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I spend way too much time on wikis reading about spin-off games made for handheld and mobile devices I will probably never play (there was a whole trilogy of Silent Hill: Orphan games that have lived up to their name by being orphaned on old phones). The Elder Scrolls Travels are a prime example—games made in the gap between Morrowind and Oblivion. The third in the series, Shadowkey, came out on Nokia’s N-Gage handheld—a cross between a GameBoy Advance and a mobile phone that lasted two years before being discontinued in 2005.
This first-person RPG is about to return thanks to Dan Whelan, whose Shadowkey Reforged project will let us play Shadowkey in widescreen with controller support and upscaled graphics. You can choose to play in classic or modern mode, but you can also toggle individual features one by one. Modern mode isn’t just a graphical upgrade as it also adds features from the later mainline Elder Scrolls games like stamina-based sprinting, stealth, and ragdoll physics.
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This is one of those times where I prefer the original game’s look, as the brutally abrupt draw distance leaves a lot to your imagination while the modernized version seems to show enemies looming unresponsively in the near distance. And it’s not like the upscaled character models actually look good, despite being beyond what Nokia’s taco phone was capable of displaying.
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While Shadowkey was never particularly well-ranked in the pantheon of Elder Scrolls games, people did praise its use of the Morrowind soundtrack, which Shadowkey Reforged will continue. Point it to your Morrowind install and it’ll borrow both music and sound effects from the best Elder Scrolls game.
To answer the obvious question, Whelan says in the FAQ: “I used AI to assist with coding and building the engine, and with debugging. I used AI image generation combined with Photoshop and some manual sprite editing to create most of the modern, higher resolution artwork.”
Whelan plans to release Shadowkey Reforged on November 11, which is just 18 hours away at the time of writing. You’ll be able to download Windows, Mac, and Android versions from the website, though you’ll need the original game’s files from your Nokia N-Gage as well, or whatever abandonware site you frequent.
