The Elder Scrolls' most obscure adventure gets a 4K PC makeover

So, you think you’re an Elder Scrolls superfan? You say you’ve been there since The Elder Scrolls Arena on MS-DOS and have logged hundreds of hours in The Elder Scrolls Online? You say you’ve bought all of the roughly 5,000 re-releases and remasters of Skyrim that have been made available in the last 15 years?

Tell me, then: What do you think of The Elder Scrolls Travels: Shadowkey?

What’s that? You’ve never played Shadowkey? You weren’t there day one back in 2004, Nokia N-Gage in hand, ready to experience the game’s 176 x 208 resolution mobile hack-and-slash RPG combat for yourself? And you call yourself a real Elder Scrolls fan?

Well, don’t worry. Now you can fill in this crucial gap in your history without even having to track down functional, decades-old N-Gage hardware. That’s thanks to Shadowkey: Reforged, a free fan-made PC port that pairs updated art with the original game files and scripts for an upscaled, 4K experience that runs natively on PC, no N-Gage or emulator needed.

A few decades of upgrades

Moving from a pre-iPhone mobile game to a modern PC obviously comes with major graphical upgrades, powered by a completely rewritten PC graphics engine. What was once a cramped portrait orientation on the N-Gage has now been expanded for a 16:9 monitor standard that displays at up to 120 fps (though the game’s logic still matches the original game’s 25 fps). In addition to newly retextured character and environmental models, the new port also sports small touches like bloom lighting, rippling water, and an upgraded interface with sharper text rendering than was possible on an ancient mobile phone.