Accidentally named this post “Invasion of the Brian Snatchers.” I don’t know who Brian is, but he had better watch out!

Most of your inventory is dumped at this point: money, medallion, key that easily could have been removed after you used it but they let you keep it anyways, Dr. Egleton’s phone number, matches you may have tricked the game into letting you keep by skipping the torch puzzle… However, at the same time, your documents archive is updated to include the letter from Procop if it didn’t already, strongly suggesting that it used to be mandatory! 

Like I said, at this point, you want to head back into the hall and find a lamp, which you can light with your new lighter. Now that you have the light source, you can… barely see anything. But more than before!  The poor lighting from the hallway is back for revenge, assailing you even though you have a fucking lamp.  It’s wretched. It gave me a headache so bad that I had to stop writing and go to bed at one point! 

Returning home, we get an uncomfortable look at William’s individually-modelled teeth as he talks to Egleton again. We get some audio trouble served up alongsides: a voice clip clearly cut off mid-sound, and some kind of echo or reverb that you can hear when Egleton says the word “house” in the next line.  But enough about bugs and glitches: without any further input from the player, we go to commit Edgar against his will, including two cops whose models are never seen in any other scene!  Edgar shouts literal curses at you, including what I’m pretty sure is Gasman saying “Azanoth” instead of the Lovecrafitan god “Azathoth,” and we get a look at Egleton’s individually-modelled teeth, which is so hideously lit among the shadows that he looks even more demonic than ever. I swear this man is supposed to be one of the heroes, but I am fighting uphill every step of the way.

(After seeing those teeth, again, I originally titled this post “Maws of Doom,” but I didn’t think anyone would realize what I was talking about. After all, you aren’t looking at them right now!)

After some needless advice that you rest before doing the next step (you can’t), you have to search Edgar’s house again, even though we don’t have access to any new rooms. Instead, you have to re-search one of the drawers with no incentive to do so!  I begrudgingly concede that someone can put things into drawers that weren’t there before (wild, I know), but are we sure that’s the way you want to play it in your video game?  After moving a canister of something to the side via a rare, “move to one side” cursor that feels like overkill, you find a small key, and a hand-drawn map indicating a new location.

You knock, and Sir Chrisopher (Pollard again. we’ve been seeing a lot of him) answers the front door. The sinister music picks up here again, and he even sounds like he’s giving you a guilt trip when he says you and Edgar used to be close, even though I’m pretty sure this is just meant to be an “as you know”-style block of tacky exposition. Are we sure Christopher and Egleton weren’t meant to be villains? Why does this keep happening? I think the problem is that the devs think we’re playing evil music because we’re talking about the horrible fate of your former friend, when their timing keeps making it happen whenever these “good” characters try to “help” him?

Sir Christopher recites Edgar’s career as of late, which anyone familiar with the tropes will recognize that Edgar, an archaeologist, must have learned some dark and evil secrets in the field, and become obsessed with them, as you do. Sir Christopher steps out briefly to get you a soda (presumably meaning a cocktail, not a coke, although we do seem to be having a theme of “things you forgot were old enough to be popular in the 1920s,” don’t we?), and the game uses this as an excuse for you to poke around, although there’s no obvious reason why: you don’t accomplish or find anything of value before you stand in front of the fireplace and Sir Christopher comes back, trailing his evil BGM behind him.  He sits down, and for the first of many times, we’re expected to continue the conversation not by clicking on the other character, but by doing something of your own accord, even though it feels external to the conversation. Normally, this involves handing them something from your inventory, but not today, and so it might take a while for you to realize you’re supposed to continue searching the room, something you were just doing behind his back, but that the devs interrupted as though you were finished! If you’re like me, you might assume you missed something while he was gone, and be worried that, if you poke around, he’ll accuse you of spying or stealing! You have to click the portrait over the fireplace, which is of Edgar’s maternal ancestor, Gregor Herschell (sometimes spelled, “Herschel”), who supposedly resembles Edgar, to the point of being “uncanny,” but the contrast between 2D art asset and horrible, 3D puppet-man is, shall we say, a step too far to be “uncanny.”

I’m still stalling for time while I prep for a new project for Sundays! Can you tell? Today, I’m going to return to the subject of the Dracula games, to look at the original creator’s other horror title based on a public domain title.

After the success of Dracula, index+ and its successor, Wanadoo Edition, published several 3D adventure games, and it’s a little hard to say if those games used their own engines, or if the publisher passed around the familiar Dracula engine. As such, I won’t attempt to create a definitive list. Only index+’s own games can be 100% confirmed: Dracula 1, Dracula 2, another game sometimes called The Messenger, and finally Necronomicon: The Dawning of Darkness, aka Necronomicon: The Gateway to Beyond – two titles that refuse to stay in my mind of even one second. I have glanced back at this doc three times in a row just trying to type it into IMDb, it’s embarrassing, though I’ll leave it to you to decide if it’s more embarrassing to me or the game.  Necronomicon is the one that follows in the footsteps of Dracula’s public domain horror angle, so that’s what we’ll be looking at today.  It’s also the only one available for sale at the moment, since The Messenger never reached GOG or Steam for whatever reason. The game was developed concurrently with Dracula 2, and was pushed out a mere two months later!