Honourable Mentions: A Vampyre’s Story

Back into the world of gaming and the point and click adventure. Now, I have a confession – I am not a big fan of adventure games as adventure game logic seems illogical at best... it is just odd, what can I say. In this, for instance, there is a moment where you have to make three potions out of a base and two of three coloured sodas. Obviously, the colour you need to end up with is going to be based around colour mixing. So far so good... But one of the soda’s does not work and, after some head scratching, I realised it is a diet soda and I had seen sugar in another room. Time to undiet the soda and then it worked. There is a logic there but to me the leap to diet/undiet is a little odd.

Be that as it may the point and click adventure has generally died a death but a group of developers took the genre out for a spin – perhaps one last time – and used the theme of vampirism. It is the 1800s and the vampire Shrowdy Von Kieffer turned the French opera singer Mona De Laffitte (Rebecca Schweitzer). Mona doesn’t really except her condition – she is not undead, it is just a curse, she keeps saying. She wishes to escape castle Warg and return to Paris. Her opportunity comes when Shrowdy is staked by a pair of vampire hunters – though he does not die but becomes a spirit.

The first half of the game sees Mona trying to escape the castle, the second half is set in the town of Vlad’s Landing and sees her looking for the means to get to Paris (her coffin, a horse and cart and grave dirt are all needed). Helping her in all this is the bat Froderick (Jeremy Koerner), a wise cracking flying rodent. This is the joy of the game, the whole thing is played for laughs and the banter between Mona and Froderick is a huge source of the comedy and it works really well.

The game boasts a well working interface, though Mona walks from location to location so slowly that you’ll find yourself hitting the space bar to jump to the next location – a lot. Not much is hidden within the game as pressing the tab key will highlight all interfacable objects on screen. Thus we are left with the puzzles – and that adventure logic – a short gameplay (I completed the game in a day) but an undeniably lovely looking game and an amusing one at that. The game is written purposefully for a sequel.