Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Honourable Mentions: A Vampyre’s Story

gameBack 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.

vampire huntersBe 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.

in bat form with FroderickThe 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.

Mona at the graveyardThe 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.

4 comments:

Dracenea said...

I ran across this game the other day and it looked like it would be a lot of fun. Thanks for your review of it! I'm wondering though...are the pictures you posted pics from actual gameplay? I get sick on first person viewpoints and even third person views if they are too close to the character. Kind of rules out a lot of games for me. : (

Taliesin_ttlg said...

Dracenea, the first two are out of cut sceens but the third picture is fairly much how the gameplay looks. It is pure point and click fair (think monkey island I guess)

Gabriel said...

I've been looking forward to this game since discovering an article about it online. I'll have to scoop out my local game store to see if they can order it in, though at the moment I just did the vampire quest in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on the PC which is fun, two more days of staying away till I turn!

Is this game also similar to Dracula: Origin in gameplay? have you played that? I didn't mind it, but I was a bit put off with the lack of combat, it was all problem solving and Drac only was in it once or twice, playing Van Helsing after all you think there'd be lots of staking, though it did have a vampire bride *sigh* :p

Taliesin_ttlg said...

I've not played Dracula Origin but it is the same sort of game, thus the same sort of gameplay, I'd assume.