We never actually learn much about Dracula’s exile to the Chornobyl exclusion zone. Presumably he was kicked out of Transylvania during the events of the cancelled Operation D game. You might recall Friedlen mentioning Dracula’s exile in his sleep, and also that Dracula always “comes back stronger.” Both of those concepts are pretty interesting, but this game isn’t about either. Honestly, I’d kind of like to see both stories, so good on the writers for building my expectations, even if it hasn’t happened yet and may never!

Ellen sets out, and we cut to her arriving at a spot on the road outside the radioactive zone, near an overturned truck that she suspects just had a regular old crash just before the meltdown, at which point the owners reasonably left it behind. As you start raiding the truck, who should start speaking to you but Dracula himself using some manner of telepathic connection, instantly giving Ellen a headache, but it passes whenever he shuts up, so just give it a second (assuming you aren’t below half health as usual, anyways). He gives her cryptic instructions to “Follow the path of despair.” Finding a machete in the truck, you can use it on some nearby brambles to see that someone has painted a nuclear warning symbol on a rock, encircled by a painting of none other than the Dragon’s Ring! It’s back! Dracula repeats his message, giving the player a hint that the “Path of Despair” is related to radiation.

Continue reading “Dracula 5: The Blood Legacy – Exclusion” →

Yanek isn’t home. You can wander around his studio picking up painting supplies like the home invader you are (lampblack, shellac, kohl – some of you may know what we’re about to do), but that’s mostly for later. The only way forward is to interact with his puppet show again, which Ellen feels is different somehow, even though nothing has obviously changed. Nevertheless, she’s correct: after you re-complete the original puzzle from Drac4, a bird flies out of the box that you unlocked at the end, and now you have to start a second phase. Great, love me an iterative puzzle. Get a puppet to grab a garish, noose-like rope, and it’s revealed to be a pulley that opens another door in Yanek’s house. Ellen discovers shelves full of scrolls here, as well as a hand-crank printing press that’s only a few centuries old, but the real business is behind a door in the back. It’s time for this to actually get interesting.

Now well into the back of Yanek’s place, Ellen discovers two stone biers, one topped with a coffin. As Ellen looks about, Yanek sneaks up behind her, baring a set of vampire fangs. She only survives because, at the last minute, he mysteriously stops himself. Ellen has noticed him by now, and Yanek asks her what the fuck, lady. The fuck! This is the second time! When he suggests he might kill her, she quips: “Death will come looking for me anyway, I don’t need to tempt it.” Edgy, but still kind of badass? And really does show where she’s coming from. Yanek tells her that he’s been “told” about her illness, and that “He” has ordered Yanek to leave her alive. Ellen mistakes him for talking about God, but he confirms he means Dracula. Ellen, rapidly realizing Yanek is a vampire despite never seeing his fangs, deduces that Yanek is the original Kaneyek from centuries back, not a descendant. Yanek confirms, and then humble-brags about the painting being his “masterwork.” He comes to explain the nature of the painting: it’s Dracula’s “mirror,” a word we first heard from Friedlen the art thief back in Drac4’s prologue. The concept is clever: because vampires can’t be seen in proper mirrors, the painting is meant to serve as a reminder of Dracula’s appearance. It’s an incredibly maudlin idea, which vampires are great at, and I like it quite a bit.

Continue reading “Dracula 5: The Blood Legacy – The Magic of Art” →

We arrive at the Basilica, which is probably the point in this second game that most needs the Casual Mode hotspots, in my opinion. It’s not as bad as the cluttered shelf in Vambery’s library in Drac4, at least, but the hotspots are small here and there’s a janky flow, and that’s a different sort of trouble. You start at the security-station-slash-visitor’s-centre, which is this game’s “scene that’s so perfectly framed that I never realize it’s part of the panorama, and not a 2D close-up.” A security guard is here, watching TV and unaware that you even exist until you say hello. That might seem irresponsible… and it is… but it seems the basilica’s not very crowded today. Indeed, you’re the only one here. You soon learn why: all the popular attractions are under restoration and are closed – yes, all of them, some real site management going on here – leaving the basilica a somewhat boring hall of wet pillars that you can only really look at from a distance. This is a problem, because two of those major attractions are mentioned in Radu’s poem. Ellen tries to flirt her way in, but strikes out.

There’s a map of the place nearby, which shows real-life photos of the two famous gorgon sculptures, and the peacock eye column (Wikipedia calls this the “Hen’s Eye Column”), all of which are mentioned in the poem. In fact, the peacock eye column is also the source of the tear decorations on the poem, which is why I said you might recognize them. But there’s one other problem: Radu mentions a third gorgon that doesn’t exist in real life. Ellen isn’t sure what to do about this. You have to click a nearby locked door blocking access to construction on the peacock eye pillar (a step I always forget, because why would I click a door I know is locked? Even new players know the door is locked, because the place is closed!) in order for Ellen to get a plan: distract the guard and steal his keys.

Continue reading “Dracula 5: The Blood Legacy – Shadow of the Failed Puzzle” →

There are only two items left in your inventory, besides your remaining meds: your knife and your lighter. Well, urm… Vambrey’s knife and Lazlo’s lighter, anyways. There’s also a package in front of you, and if you wait for more than a few seconds, hotel reception will call the your room to tell you that… there’s a package right in front of you! The game will even let you miss this pointless call, which is hard for me to even wrap my head around. You use the knife to cut into the package and discover it’s from someone named Gerry. Given the phrasing in the letter, it’s easy to mistake Gerry as being your only known work associate, Mr. Philips (remember, we don’t even have the name “Philips” yet!), but Gerry’s actually a distinct character we’ll meet in Drac5, and shame on the game for not handling that better. The package contains a Polaroid camera for you to photograph any of Kaneyek’s works if you find them (Gerry is apparently unaware that Ellen has a perfectly good police camera stashed somewhere), and also some new meds that are apparently from your doctor, despite her previously claiming she gave you all she had left! And she apparently told Gerry the same thing again, so maybe we’re out of meds now for reals, pinky swear that the dramatic tension is real this time? ……Nope!

I don’t know what it is about the hotel room sequence, but for some reason I always think of it as an interlude between chapter. And it is, but for some reason I remember it as a hard interlude, with another fade to black at its end. In reality, you just turn around when you’re done and walk into the streets of Turkey, in the dead of fucking night! Ellen goes to the address from the scytale message and discovers the door unlocked. Because she’s an Adventure protagonist to the core, she breaks in. Oh, sure, she says “Hello?” a few times, but only after stepping inside and starting starting to scope the place for rubber chickens with pulleys in the middle. Ellen spots what appears to be one of the Vambery collection paintings, John Collier’s Lilith, when the house’s owner, Mr. Yanek, arrives in an understandable fury.

Continue reading “Dracula 4: The Shadow of the Dragon – What could be terrifying about puppets?” →

So, you’ve found the mysterious vault! But you can’t… you… c’mon game what’s the matter? You can’t?—interact? —with anything! For crying out loud, Ellen, say a few words about what’s going wrong! Oh, there we go, we had to place the torch in a sconce, that’s clearly so important that it should blockade everything else! While the vault door is obviously important, you may want to look at the opposite wall, where you’d find a dirt-encrusted plaque that you can scrape away at. The plaque contains a Latin saying, a prayer of protection hat Ellen only partially translates. You get your explanation for this when you check out the vault door and realize it has a circular slot in it: place your St. Dimitri medal, and not only will it slot in, but you’ll discover it’s covered in letters seemingly taken from the prayer on the plaque, letters at the front of every word, which the plaque marks in bold. Clearly they’re important!

The puzzle here involves a circle made up of curved plates, each marked with one or more letters. You have to arrange the plates in the same order as the plaque. You can get a close-up of the medal whenever you want by hovering over it in the middle of the puzzle, but it’s a little too generous with its hitbox and will block your view more often than you’d like. And it’s not even helpful beyond the first few letters because there’s a gap in the middle! Only the plaque’s version is complete. You can’t just remove the plates and put them wherever you want: there are buttons to rotate the outer wheel, and buttons to swap adjoining plates that are in certain slots. This sounds simple, if a little poorly implemented, but you’ve probably noticed that Drac4 likes little flourishes to make its puzzles more interesting. This is no exception.

Continue reading “Dracula 4: The Shadow of the Dragon – Safe Underground” →

Unfortunately, the trouble with dark rooms in video games is that you generally have to light them up. Despite having a workable look around the room with our flashlight, Ellen insists on fixing the nearby fuse box before she touches anything. It’s not enough to just use the fuses you’ve found on the box, oh no: there’s a two-part puzzle afterwards! The first half is a type that I’ve seen many times in various games, though it doesn’t seem to have an official name. The idea is that you have to rotate (or in some other games, move) various tiles decorated with straight lines, crosses, corners or T-junctions, trying to make sure that every line touches a line on an adjoining tile, forming a complete pattern. You’ve probably played something like it in the past. The oldest version I’m aware of is Zenji from 1984 (although the idea of a game involving similar puzzle pieces goes back at least as far as Loco-Motion from 1982), though I’ll always know it by the first such incarnation I ever met and played to death, the Flash version of loops of zen. The end result ends up looking like Pipe Dream, but mechanically, they’ve got little in common.

In this particular version, where the lines represent copper connectors, you want to to connect some sources on the left to the rest of the fusebox on the right. You can only rotate pieces, and dead ends aren’t supposed to be allowed, though I’ve seen the puzzle glitch on that at least once. But there’s a trick to it: you’ll quickly note that there’s no way to connect the moveable tiles to the bottom two jacks simultaneously. But look! There’s a barely-visible, unmovable wire just off the board, connecting the jacks all along! It’s a cheap trick, and you might very well discover it by accident and get confused by the results, but it works: just connect a closed circuit to #4, and you get #5 for free.

Continue reading “Dracula 4: The Shadow of the Dragon – Bury Me Cryptically” →

To get started with the “main game” you have to watch the opening cutscenes again for some stupid reason (I suspect the devs wanted you to know what was going on if you skipped the Prologue, but again: why encourage or even allow players to skip the Prologue?), after which you find yourself at Vambery’s scenic, cliff-side manor. You presumably step inside (although you can fuck around in the yard for a while if you want), and Ellen meets up with Vambery’s assistant, Adam Stoker. And, uh… wow, wow the character animation feels like it’s taken a dump here. If I’m being honest, the game barely has any character animation to begin with, but it suddenly seems worse! Maybe in an effort to put a good foot forward, Lazlo had a whole three – a whole three! – animations: sitting, standing, and rubbing at the back of his head like an anime character. But no one else has this many animations, or such complicated animations, outside of pre-rendered cutscenes, not even Ellen! In the prologue, Ellen was at least shot at varying angles, but from this point on, the game does a simple shot/reverse-shot pattern during dialogue, and everyone is just standing and… breathing. Like, really prominently breathing. I don’t know how to explain why it’s bothering me so much. And that’s it! I am editing the post here a few years later, after a recent playthrough, and I frequently walked away from the screen to do other things while people were talking, because I was missing zero visual content.

Adam Stoker is easily the worst animated of the lot, with his broad shoulders that make him look like a tombstone in a human suit, and a breathing animation that looks like he’s being inflated and deflated in turns. It also hurts that both characters in this scene are both supposed to be wearing some relatively loose clothing, but the clothes barely animate! They might as well be solid plastic! Adam’s coat is leather, so admittedly it should be a little stiff, but it’s like it’s stapled to his torso!

Continue reading “Dracula 4: The Shadow of the Dragon – Library Lock-Up” →

Okay, on to the final two! As I’ve already said, Dracula 4 and 5 are two halves of a whole, similar to 1+2. They’ll also be much shorter than those original two games, geared for the casual market, although arguably shooting a smidge tougher than their regular fare. The publishers did make the mistake of not declaring that the games would be episodic, which got them some flak after the release of the “incomplete” 4, but those years have passed, and the games are sold together on both GOG and Steam, so you’re less likely to miss anything (though that may not be universal, such as on smartphones). The games were developed by Koalabs, who have only made ports of games from the early-2000s since. The two games were published by Microids or Anuman depending on platform.

Continue reading “Dracula 4: The Shadow of the Dragon – The Soap is Mightier” →

The Final Trial completed, a hatch opens nearby and you descend down a ladder. Once again, the remake is about to skip a bunch of stuff (the remake has been peeling off course since the nonogram!), but oh well. You enter a spacious chamber, and in the original, you come across a sarcophagus, andit’s identical to the one in the cave at the start of the Path of the Dragon, once again advertising the body of “Vlad the Great.” This time, when you open it, there is a man inside. The coffin is filled with smoke, but you can see his body and hand, but strangely no face. It’s a very surreal moment and it’s only going to get weirder. You take out your hammer and stake, and set it in place… and the stake vanishes. You take out your cross, and it vanishes too! But wait: Dracula’s exposed hand is beginning to wither and fade away into a skeletal form. This process continues, one weapon after another, until you’ve used, but also lost, the host, the holy water, and even the wild roses, the rowan berries, and of course the garlic, which Arno even puts in the general direction of the vampire’s invisible mouth, in accordance with Stoker’s Dracula.

Seemingly based on a timer, another event can occur here, and it’s easy to overlook if you get to work murdering Dracula too quickly. The game will point the event out in a movement, giving you another chance to interact with it, but at that point, it’s a little too late for dramatic congruity. Someone starts calling Arno’s name from behind you. If you go back to the hatch, you’ll discover it was closed behind you at some point (specifically: after you opened the coffin), and it seems none other than Heinrich von Krüger is at the top, shouting down to you! Arno asks what the fuck, and von Krüger claims that Arno is suffering from hallucinations as a complication of his unknown P-syndrome variant. He mostly sounds sincere, even claiming to have secured Janos as a prisoner or something. Hrm… unreliable, hallucinating narrators are a horror staple! But he flubs it if you mention the documents that compromise him, stammering and claiming that he just so happens to have documents that will clear him, on his person this very second, which will clear him! Yeah, this guy’s full of shit and if you open the hatch using a switch at the bottom, he’ll shoot you. But at least you know he’s there, which is more than remake players can say, where he appears out of nowhere in the ending.

Continue reading “Dracula 3: The Path of the Dragon – I Entrust My Soul” →