Making the entire game fit together with system software on two 400 k single-sided floppy disks proved to be quite a challenge and special image compression routines had to be written to accomplish this.
Unlike Sierra or LucasArts' classic adventure games, MacVentures are played in first-person perspective.
The series has a lot of detail put into the game environment, in the form of a multitude of objects being able to act on each other.
Possibly to counter this liberty, all MacVenture games have some kind of time limit woven into the story.
In Shadowgate, the player must collect torches to be able to look around, in Uninvited, evil forces gradually take control and create visions at unexpected times.
In Uninvited, Shadowgate and Déjà Vu II, the about box has an animated presentation of the development team in the style of the game, accompanied by music.
The Amiga and Apple IIGS versions were translated rather faithfully and only lack some graphics detail (the Mac had typically twice their resolution).
Due to limited resolution and memory constraints inherent to the NES, a lot of detour game objects and interactions as well as some critical ones were removed.
Leaving could only be performed on unnecessary game objects, this in combination with numerous changes uncalled for by technical constraints caused a much more guided and linear gameplay.
In Uninvited, the spells were turned into objects with names directly hinting at their use and the texts were also explicated to relieve players of unfolding the story by themselves.
However, graphics and sound were completely remade (save for the "Winchester Cathedral" record in Uninvited) with little effort to adhere to the game environments as depicted in the original versions.
Zojoi released a digital-only remake of Shadowgate for Windows, Mac, Linux, and iOS in 2014 via Steam, GOG.com, and the App Store.