A Vampyre Story
Review
Return of the classic adventures
by Marko Susimetsä
reviewed on PC
Point-and-click (cntd)
Those items that are too heavy for her to carry around are put into the coffin also – but instead of packing up the item, you pack the idea of that item into the coffin. The only way this differs from carrying around the item itself is that when you use it, Mona or her bat companion will have to go back to pick the item in question up before it is used. As this is clearly a comic book adventure, I would have thought that some of those bottomless pockets type of things would have worked quite OK here, but the developers chose to go for this more realistic – so to speak – route.
In order to move around in the various rooms of the castle, you click on the items or doors that you want Mona to walk or fly to. In order to speed travel, you can right click on a doorway to skip the dull animation of Mona walking all the way across the room to the doorway in question. This became as a welcome relief, considering the amount of back-tracking that you end up doing as you try various things that come to your mind in order to solve this and that puzzle.
Difficult puzzles?
It has been years since I last played a point-and-click adventure, so it may be that I’m a bit rusty. Nevertheless, some of the puzzles that A Vampyre Story offers seemed to be relatively difficult ones. At some points the solution may be to find just that particular spot that you can click on that you missed the first three times around (a certain bird’s nest took me ages to find), but at others you really have to work your grey cells, and the Lady Luck, on. Of course, one option would be to just try every item and combination of items on everything that you come up against, but that would really be dull, so I prefer to let my grey cells do at least some of the work.
The game might have benefited from a sort of introductory sequence which teaches the player how they can use the bat familiar to do certain tasks for Mona. As it is, it took me a while to realise that you could use the bat to explore places Mona refused to go to. Naturally, this might have been mentioned in the manual, but who really reads them?
Mixed bag
On one hand, I’m giddy about finally getting my hands on another point-and-click adventure after all these years. On the other hand, A Vampyre Story falls short in the humour department – the very department that made the Monkey Island games classics. However, the good graphics and great soundscape make the game a pleasure to play. Likewise, the puzzles are mostly involving and fun to solve, although sometimes it seems that Mona manages to take one step forward only to take two back when an even bigger obstacle comes her way (but that’s the way adventures are supposed to go, until you cross the finish line).
Overall, I recommend A Vampyre Story to all adventure fans. We can only hope that this marks the arrival of more traditional adventure titles in the future!
8.0
fun score
No Pros and Cons at this time
