![]() ![]() Unfortunately, the models also have several out-and-out problems. Another extended puzzle sequence refuses to start unless you put a mirror into an innocuous niche in another side of the room, with no mechanical connection whatsoever.Īs previously mentioned, character models have a jerky sort of animation, but this comes across as a limitation of the era and possibly a matter of style. One early puzzle involves calling one of Dracula’s servants into a trap: you have to go far away from him, discover a telescope stand, set the whole thing up, and then call him with music, which can only be done via a hotspot inside the telescope view. Unfortunately, despite the icon system pointing out all inventory puzzles, the game has several pixel hunt situations, and the logic behind the puzzles can range towards the bizarre, as often mocked about late 90s Adventures. Unlike Myst, the player has an inventory that they can access via right click, which features a ring of your collected objects. More often than not, it seems to exist to prevent you from getting into situations the developers hadn’t bothered to render, such as entering a darkened node without a light (despite it not looking so dark), or in one instance, to avoid placing an item that would cast different reflections than they intended. A particularly unhelpful icon depicts a red circle and slash, like a “No Smoking” sign, which indicates an element you can’t interact with for the time being: this particular icon almost always appears without explanation, and is extremely arbitrary. One icon indicates elements you can interact with, another for item-to-item hotspots, and so on. Unfortunately, Jonathan does little to comment on his environment, even in situations that would benefit from some clarification, and the game conveys most of its information with a set of frankly unhelpful icons. Because they’re pre-rendered, the spheres are also static: changes are largely restricted to items being added or removed as puzzles are solved, and in-sphere animations are rare to the extreme, which takes away from the game’s otherwise quality horror atmosphere. Even the game’s save and load screens take place in this spherical environment. ![]() The player moves through the environment from node to node, each represented by the inside of a pre-rendered semi-sphere that you can explore by pivoting in place. The theming is in every direction at once.Ĭontrols are similar to Myst III and IV, though the games predate those particular titles. ![]() But at other times, you’ll walk down dark and haunted hallways, expose a hellish underground prison, and face horrible nightmare trials for nascent vampires. The early 3D character models border on both, but others aren’t so ambiguous: Dracula’s actor is doing a Lugosi impression that ranges on parody, the vampire sisters start doing ballet and gymnastics in the background when they try to talk, and who knows why some of these strange decisions were made. The first two games have a strange contrast of camp and generally competent horror atmosphere. Her husband Jonathan will once again have to visit a village full of superstitious Transylvanian natives to locate a castle he suddenly can’t find any more, will face the three vampire sisters that were supposedly destroyed in the novel, and then returns to London to rout Dracula’s old hideouts, meet an insectivorous man who works for Dracula but has a different name this time… it’s all very familiar. Dracula is back from the dead, and has again taken control of Mina Harker, drawing her to his Transylvanian castle. The original two games cast themselves as sequels to Bram Stoker’s original novel, though they’re the sort of sequel that repeats as much old content as possible. Due to the wildly different development teams and the years between releases, each of the “three” feel very different, united mostly by a common interface and occasional plot connection. Dracula 3 is standalone, making a total of three umbrella releases in total. ![]() While the series nominally has five titles, the first and second are just episodes of a common game, and the same is true of the fourth and fifth. With an un-searchably common title, and differing publishing and development teams over the years, it’s impossible to give them a convenient label to let people know which games you’re talking about! The series began with Dracula: Resurrection in 1999, and continued to Dracula 5: The Blood Legacy in 2013. The Dracula series of 3D Adventure games has a curious pedigree. Dracula 4: The Shadow of the Dragon / Dracula 5: The Blood Legacy.Dracula: The Resurrection / Dracula: The Last Sanctuary. ![]()
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