This low-budget game, with its many failings and a few surprising successes, is rooted firmly in the tiny township of "Dill Pickle," USA. Since it's a horror-style adventure game (as opposed to a horror-survival game), that's a good thing. The strange atmosphere Brendel conjures is in many ways the strongest element of Shady Brook. It's not the story; the story is a slight variation on an old horror trope passed down to the likes of S. King and J. Saul by way of Shirley Jackson. It's certainly not the graphics. They are mostly eyeball-assaulting depictions of a small town set in an L-shaped box canyon, the blocky buildings seemingly picked at random from other locales and dropped side by side. The puzzles are just okay, mostly direct lifts from hoary old adventure game boilerplates. You got your slider (which resets if you accidently exit before completion), your puzzle box within a box, a Pipe Dream bit that doesn't quite make sense given its context, a coded poem full of clues and an assemble-the-note-from-torn-bits-of-paper puzzle, among others. Puzzlewise, there is nothing here even the most casual adventure gamer hasn't encountered at least once.