In Nightshade you have two meters, Health and Popularity.

You gain popularity by beating up villains and doing generally superhero-type things, and you lose it by being defeated in battle. There are certain events where you need to have your popularity built up pretty high to trigger. so what would you do if your popularity dipped too low, there was no more crime to fight, and you got stuck?

So what I do is, once my popularity is maxed out and I see some kind of thing that needs doing

I just pass it by until I need the popularity boost. Which doesn't sound like a Superheroic thing to do, but, hey, I'm a pragmatist when it comes to this stuff.

Bats in Nightshade are particularly annoying because they kinda swoop in and take some pretty healthy chunks of your health away when you're not really looking.

But if you've found the whistle, you can totally take care of them. Just find it in your inventory and OPERATE it. It turns out that bats in this game hate the sound it makes.

And they clear out of whatever room you're in

Making it much easier to walk through without the danger of getting rabies.

Once you finally make it to the end of Nightshade, you have to deal with the evil mastermind who's responsible for starting the mess, Waldo P. Schmeer, a.k.a. Sutekh. He really likes to hear himself talk.

You can use this to your advantage. Before you engage him, TALK to him

to ask him the question you're probably asking yourself in real life.

Which he'll actually answer

Though, to be honest, I found the Staff of Ra to be all but useless when I was fighting him. A better technique was to duck in the center of the room and punch him when he teleports in close.

A couple of times in Nightshade you encounter these mummies

Which are fairly annoying since they have zero health. Why is that annoying? Mostly because you can punch and kick the things all day long and you can't get rid of 'em.

So what do you do?

Well, it turns out that there are two ways to deal with them.

1. You could use the Staff of Ra to fire a fireball at it. But you won't get that until late in the game. Or

2. You can jump behind it and get really close, then punch it three times to do the ol' uppercut. Turns out that the mummies are weak to an uppercut to the back of the head

In fact, it just takes one.

In Nightshade you need to go around doing Good Deeds (tm) to gain popularity. The game's crammed full of them, and some are hidden better than others.

Take this dinosaur skeleton in the museum for example.

If you examine it, you find a loose bone, which you can TAKE, but it causes the skeleton to collapse, which causes you to lose popularity, which is a bad thing.

But, you can then OPERATE the pile of bones left on the floor to create:

The correct dino! Which nets you more popularity than you lost.

The bone you removed was extra, so you get to keep it to use later on in your quest.

Good luck!