The Shapeshifter

The Shapeshifter is an adventure game, with the abilty to transform the player's character into an animal as one major gameplay element. You are playing as Elliot, a boy on a camping trip in the mountains with some friends, who is granted that said transformation ability until next dawn after helping an elf. The elf also asks Elliot to save his world, but that's obviously not that easy and causes multiple unexpected events and detours.

Most of the scene images are static, the player can change back and forth between them by leaving the scene on a path on the desired side. In the scenes you will move the player character around and talk to people, inspect objects or interact with them. Certain areas can only be reached when changing the form or after finding items, often requiring backtracking between these scenes. After certain key events the scenes will change completely, playing e.g. near the camp, on an icy mountain or under water; a map will show where you currently are.

Apart from the default adventure mode the game also contains several mandatory minigames which often change to a scrolling platform perspective, e.g. as a grasshopper you will jump on leaves and avoid spiders to reach a rooftop, as a bat you will fly through a cave evading obstacles or as a human you will ski down a slope. Very rarely the view also changes to a traditional point and select interface.

In general you can not die, instead the game will either transform you back into human form when in danger or simply restart the minigame. For saving and restoring a game state an 8-digit code will be shown when reaching certain key events, which can be entered at the main menu to resume the game from that point. As a specialty the game includes an actual "Dial-an-Animal" code wheel similar to the "Dial-A-Pirate" copy protection mechanism of The Secret of Monkey Island.