Re: Shiver Vanishing Hitchhiker Hack
Sharolyn Uriegas
Driving home one night in the pouring rain, you decide to stop and give a lift to a young woman standing shivering on the side of the road. She's pretty, alone, and very, very quiet. It isn't until after you drop her off at the edge of a rundown little town that you realise she's left you something: an old teddy bear in the backseat of your car. The very same teddy bear you remember from your childhood, in fact. But will you be prepared for what you find when you go looking for her? Shiver: Vanishing Hitchhiker from Artogon Games is an atmospheric, creepy, and unsettling hidden-object adventure, and is also one of the best examples of horror and mystery in a casual download title to date.
Have you ever heard the urban legend of the "vanishing hitchhiker"? The young woman you drop off in a sleepy little town apparently vanishes, leaving you only with a forgotten teddy bear in the back seat. This reminds you of someone you once knew, so you immediately turn around and begin looking for the woman to give her bear back.
After playing this game, you'll think twice before taking hitchhikers in your car!
This "Shiver" is as awesome and scary as "Poltergeist", and IMHO, to rank among the best HOGs you can find.
Thanks to its superb graphics, its hazy and disturbing atmosphere, its exciting story, its excellent soundtrack or its perfectly realized cinematic, this game will keep you in suspense until the dermière minute.
You pickup a young woman standing shivering on the side of the road. After leaving belongings in your car, you drop her off at a little town down the road. Track her down and return her things in Shiver: Vanishing Hitchhiker. Explore a spooky landscape as you figure out where the mysterious woman has gone in this exciting Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure game. Dive into a deeper mystery and reveal horrors.
Shiver: Vanishing Hitchhiker opens with the familiar urban legend of, what else, a vanishing hitchhiker. You stop and pick up a young woman on the side of the road and drop her off in a remote town. As you drive away you realize she forgot a teddy bear in the back seat, a teddy bear that reminds you of your childhood and a girl you once knew. You immediately turn back, and thus you enter small town of Gordon Creek, a town that appears to have been abandoned some time ago. Will you find the mysterious hitchhiker? And what connection does she have to your past?
You pickup a young woman standing shivering on the side of the road. After leaving belongings in your car, you drop her off at a little town down the road. Track her down and return her things, one of which is a teddy bear you remember from your childhood. Explore a spooky landscape as you figure out where the mysterious woman has gone in this exciting Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure game. Dive into a deeper mystery and reveal horrors.
After leaving something in your car, a hitchhiker vanishes! Track her down and return her things in Shiver: Vanishing Hitchhiker! Explore a spooky landscape as you figure out where the mysterious woman has gone in this exciting Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure game. Dive into a deeper mystery as you progress through incredible locations and scenes!
Download size: 252.5 MB
After an unknown hitchhiker leaves a memento of your childhood in your car, you must track her down through an eerie, desolate town filled with ghosts that hold the keys to a secret that only you can uncover.
The vanishing hitchhiker (or variations such as the ghostly hitchhiker, disappearing hitchhiker, phantom hitchhiker) is an urban legend in which people travelling by vehicle, meet with or are accompanied by a hitchhiker who subsequently vanishes without explanation, often from a moving vehicle.[1]
What was probably the first vanishing hitchhiker legend can be found in the 400-year-old manuscript Om the tekn och widunder som föregingo thet liturgiske owäsendet, which translates approximately as "About the signs and wonders that preceded the liturgical event". The author was Joen Petri Klint, a priest in diocese of Linköping, Sweden, and diligent collector of omens.
A common variation of the above involves the vanishing hitchhiker departing as would a normal passenger, having left some item in the vehicle, or having borrowed a garment for protection against the cold.[6] The vanishing hitchhiker may also leave some form of information that encourages the motorist to make subsequent contact.
In such accounts of the legend, the garment borrowed is often found draped over a gravestone in a local cemetery.[6] In this and other versions of the urban legend, the unsuspecting motorist makes contact with the family of a deceased person using the information the hitchhiker left behind and finds that the family's description of the deceased matches the passenger the motorist picked up and also finds that they were killed in some unexpected way (usually a car accident) and that the driver's encounter with the vanishing hitchhiker occurred on the anniversary of their death.
Not all vanishing hitchhiker legends involve ghosts. One popular variant in Hawaii involves the goddess Pele, travelling the roads incognito and rewarding kind travellers; other variants include hitchhikers who utter prophecies (typically of pending catastrophes or other evil events) before vanishing.
The Beardsley-Hankey survey elicited 79 written accounts of encounters with vanishing hitchhikers, drawn from across the United States.[7][8] They found: "Four distinctly different versions, distinguishable because of obvious differences in development and essence." These are described as:
Beardsley and Hankey were particularly interested to note one instance (location: Kingston, New York, 1941) in which the vanishing hitchhiker was subsequently identified as the late Mother Cabrini, founder of the local Sacred Heart Orphanage, who was beatified for her work. The authors felt that this was a case of Version 'B' glimpsed in transition to Version 'D'.
Beardsley and Hankey concluded that Version 'A' was closest to the original form of the story, containing the essential elements of the legend. Version 'B' and 'D', they believed, were localized variations, while 'C' was supposed to have started life as a separate ghost story which at some stage became conflated with the original vanishing hitchhiker story (Version 'A').
One of their conclusions certainly seems reflected in the continuation of vanishing hitchhiker stories: The hitchhiker is, in the majority of cases, female and the lift-giver male. Beardsley and Hankey's sample contained 47 young female apparitions, 14 old lady apparitions, and 14 more of an indeterminate sort.
The incident contains all the hallmarks of a "vanishing hitchhiker". It fits well with Beardsley's and Hankey's B and C categories (when the hitchhiker disappeared after making a prediction). The beer's transformations match Baughman's category E332.3.3.1(b), when the maid left behind seed, acorns and blood, and category E332.3.3.1(d) when she predicted the future (however, Klint does not mention whether the prophecy was correct), as well as category E332.3.3.1(e) because she wanted something to drink, and E332.3.3.1(g) because she was on her way home.
Paranormal researcher Michael Goss in his book The Evidence for Phantom Hitch-Hikers discovered that many reports of vanishing hitchhikers turn out be based on folklore and hearsay stories. Goss also examined some cases and attributed them to hallucination of the experiencer.[11] According to Goss most of the stories are "fabricated, folklore creations retold in new settings."[6]
Skeptic Joe Nickell, who investigated two alleged cases, concluded that there is no reliable evidence for vanishing hitchhikers. Historical examples have their origin in folklore tales and urban legends. Modern cases often involve conflicting accounts that may well be the result of exaggeration, illusion or hoaxing.[6]
Tropes for Shiver: Vanishing Hitchhiker
- Chekhov's Gun: The teddy bear left by the hitchhiker at the start of the game. Near the end we discover it contains a plot coupon.
- Demonic Possession: The antagonist is a boy possessed by the spirit of an Indian shaman, made creepier by that fact that he seemed to be a willing host.
- Creepy Basement: There are two - the protagonist falls through the floor into the first; the other is the hospital's morgue - and the power's out - and the door slams shut behind him.
- Everybody's Dead, Dave: The protagonist is the only living soul in the entire story. Even the titular hitchhiker is long dead. It's arguable whether the boy survives at the end of the bonus chapter, however.
- Evil Orphan: The possessed boy, John Rossi, became this when he discovered "his new 'friend'", the spirit of the shaman. They both seemed to share the same aim - one of John's notes in the bonus chapter reveals that he fully intended to go on a killing spree as soon as he could.
- Indian Burial Ground: The source of the evil.
- In the Style of: This game is more or less an unofficial Silent Hill IHOG, right down to the creepy abandoned town, the everyman protagonist mysteriously drawn there (by an equally-mysterious girl), the Abandoned Hospital, and a helping of Mind Screw.
- Jump Scare: A notable one occurs early on, when returning to the old woman you met at the start.
- Nightmare Fuel Coloring Book: Several child's drawings depicting people being killed/murdered in various ways appear throughout the game. From notes left by the townspeople, it's revealed that each drawing was discovered just before the event depicted actually occurred. It turns out that the drawings are modern versions of those on the wall of the shaman's tomb, recreated by the possessed boy.
- Paper Key-Retrieval Trick: how the protagonist escapes from the morgue.
- Scenery Gorn: The game takes place in and around a derelict, depressing, long-abandoned town, and it's dark and rainy the whole time.
- Shout-Out:
- "Silent Lake".
- A photo of paranormal researcher Harry Price and the Foyster family, taken at Borley Rectory, appears as a "family photo" which needs to be completed.