Game Review - Dracula: Origin
Dracula: Origin is an adventure game released by The Adventure Company, a company that unsurprisingly released only adventures. Of course, through the load of games they publish in very short intervals, few are those that are worth playing more than five minutes. Is Frogware’s game one of those? Let’s find out.
Story 7/10
The player assumes the role of the popular vampire hunter Van Helsing. The story begins when a frightful letter arrives at his office, sent by Jonathan Harker, a friend and colleague of his. Jonathan had traveled in Transylvania under disguise, at Count Dracula’s castle, in an attempt to approach and destroy him. Not only he failed, resulting in his capture, but he also gave information about his wife Mina, making Count Dracula particularly interested in her and wanting to travel to London to make her his.
With this letter Jonathan reveals to Van Helsing his curse and he begs him to protect Mina. But instead of doing just what he’s been asked, Van Helsing takes the initiative and starts to chase after Dracula, whose arrival there is proclaimed by several murders and is already looking for Mina. Of course, everything goes wrong and the adventure begins.
Graphics 7/10
The graphics of Dracula: Origin is perhaps its best part. This of course doesn’t mean they’re perfect. Being a classic point’n’click adventure, it offers many pre-rendered locations, from London and Vienna to Egypt and Transylvania, the quality of which are undoubtedly very good. The colors are accurately as vibrant or as dull as they need to be depending on the location. A nice surprise comes in the form of animations in the background, like leaves and bushes moving by the wind, which bring the scenes to life.
Unfortunately we can’t say the same for the characters. While their 3d models are better then average, they completely dead. They’re not only expressionless, but they don’t even move their mouth when they talk. The only time they show expression is in the videos between each chapter but even those are few in number and almost all show the protagonist talking in his head (which means he doesn’t move his mouth there either). Their animation (walking for example) is satisfying and sometimes even funny, if not exaggerated, like for example Dracula’s minions.
Sound 3/10
This is the section where the game fails. From the first seconds you’ll come across with perhaps the worst voice-acting of all times in a video game. I’m talking about the hero’s voice in particular. He tries so hard to assume the role of the wise and fearless vampire hunter that the result achieved is downright tragicomic. Three things can happen at that point. You’ll either get so annoyed that you’ll quit the game and never play again for an indefinite amount of time, continue with the sound turned off or continue as is by taking it as a joke. You’ll under no circumstance be casual about it though, since it’s so bad that even a deaf guy would be turned off.
His dull and hoarse voice contains absolutely no color nor feeling. The only passion you’ll hear from him comes at completely irrelevant situations, like for example when you encounter a locked door. His full of complaint exclamation “Closed!” in these moments sound like it’s the first time a locked door is found in an adventure game! The other character voices come as a relief since, contrary to the hero, they’re just uninteresting.
Van Helsing and Dracula are curiously voiced by the same actor, undermining the second one’s image as an important figure. Fortunately, the Count only delivers five lines at most throughout the whole game, so the loss is cut. Besides, why would Frogwares hire another actor for five lines?
The music is where the game fails even miserably. It’s comprised of looped orchestral pieces played not by a real orchestra of course but through a synth instead. This by itself would not be much of a problem if the actual music was remotely connected to the plot and the atmosphere. A good example is that when you explore a secluded cemetery for Dracula’s traces, the feeling you’ll get from the background music is that you’re fighting the orcish horde outside Mordor’s gate. Or when you’re gathering information from the locals in a Egyptian plaza, you’ll feel like being in Prince of Persia slaying sand monsters.
Gameplay 7/10
Hopefully, the game’s gameplay is decent and contains several smart puzzles of many sorts. There are of course some standard illogical puzzles, inventory-based in particular, that you’ll most likely solve only after trying to combine every item you have with each other. In the other hand, the game offers a wide range of puzzles, like item hunting and combining, clue hunting in documents and classic Myst-like shape, color and word puzzles.
The help the game provides to the player could be a little more than necessary, since it never allows him to even try a keylock combination for example, if he hasn’t previously gathered all the clues required to figure out the solution.
Except the inventory screen, the player has access to three more screens throughout the game. The first one is the document screen, where all the newspaper clips, notes, letters and anything readable is saved. Then there’s the dialogue screen which contains every previous dialogue for future reference. The last one is something like a quest log, designed to help the player keep track of his current goals and to provide a summary of previous events.
There are no useless transition scenes in Origin, that is, locations you can only walk through, lacking any objects to interact with and only serving the purpose of making you admire the artist’s work and adding length (and frustration) to the game. I every location you can and you have to do something and when the action leads you somewhere else, the game changes to the new screen automatically. For example the destination of a trip through the desert is only a loading screen away and you don’t have to cross fifteen useless screens to get there (like you would in Sinking Island).
An appealing feature that has become the latest trend in recent adventure games, is the capability of revealing all the clickable hotspots of a location in the press of a button. This solves the problem of pixel hunting. Besides, people who think this makes the game extremely easy, have the option not to press this button (space in this particular case).
Conclusion
In the end, Dracula: Origin is an average to relatively good game, if we don’t take the sound problems under consideration. Two more negative parts of the game is its short length and its ending. The final confrontation with Count Dracula under no circumstance corresponds to the tension built throughout the game. You just approach him… and everything is done automatically. I think today’s adventure game writers should pick up the Monkey Island series from their dusty top shelf and study the epic battles against LeChuck in the ending of each game, where he dragged you like a sack of potatoes from one location to the next and you had little time to figure out how to devise a trap using your surroundings. Do we ask much?
Pros
-Beautiful Backgrounds
-Smart and well designed puzzles
-Good Story (based on a book and all)
Cons
-Sound from another planet (planet Failure)
-Deflated ending
-Some illogical puzzles
Final Score 6/10
Story 7/10The player assumes the role of the popular vampire hunter Van Helsing. The story begins when a frightful letter arrives at his office, sent by Jonathan Harker, a friend and colleague of his. Jonathan had traveled in Transylvania under disguise, at Count Dracula’s castle, in an attempt to approach and destroy him. Not only he failed, resulting in his capture, but he also gave information about his wife Mina, making Count Dracula particularly interested in her and wanting to travel to London to make her his.
With this letter Jonathan reveals to Van Helsing his curse and he begs him to protect Mina. But instead of doing just what he’s been asked, Van Helsing takes the initiative and starts to chase after Dracula, whose arrival there is proclaimed by several murders and is already looking for Mina. Of course, everything goes wrong and the adventure begins.
Graphics 7/10The graphics of Dracula: Origin is perhaps its best part. This of course doesn’t mean they’re perfect. Being a classic point’n’click adventure, it offers many pre-rendered locations, from London and Vienna to Egypt and Transylvania, the quality of which are undoubtedly very good. The colors are accurately as vibrant or as dull as they need to be depending on the location. A nice surprise comes in the form of animations in the background, like leaves and bushes moving by the wind, which bring the scenes to life.
Unfortunately we can’t say the same for the characters. While their 3d models are better then average, they completely dead. They’re not only expressionless, but they don’t even move their mouth when they talk. The only time they show expression is in the videos between each chapter but even those are few in number and almost all show the protagonist talking in his head (which means he doesn’t move his mouth there either). Their animation (walking for example) is satisfying and sometimes even funny, if not exaggerated, like for example Dracula’s minions.
Sound 3/10This is the section where the game fails. From the first seconds you’ll come across with perhaps the worst voice-acting of all times in a video game. I’m talking about the hero’s voice in particular. He tries so hard to assume the role of the wise and fearless vampire hunter that the result achieved is downright tragicomic. Three things can happen at that point. You’ll either get so annoyed that you’ll quit the game and never play again for an indefinite amount of time, continue with the sound turned off or continue as is by taking it as a joke. You’ll under no circumstance be casual about it though, since it’s so bad that even a deaf guy would be turned off.
His dull and hoarse voice contains absolutely no color nor feeling. The only passion you’ll hear from him comes at completely irrelevant situations, like for example when you encounter a locked door. His full of complaint exclamation “Closed!” in these moments sound like it’s the first time a locked door is found in an adventure game! The other character voices come as a relief since, contrary to the hero, they’re just uninteresting.
Van Helsing and Dracula are curiously voiced by the same actor, undermining the second one’s image as an important figure. Fortunately, the Count only delivers five lines at most throughout the whole game, so the loss is cut. Besides, why would Frogwares hire another actor for five lines?
The music is where the game fails even miserably. It’s comprised of looped orchestral pieces played not by a real orchestra of course but through a synth instead. This by itself would not be much of a problem if the actual music was remotely connected to the plot and the atmosphere. A good example is that when you explore a secluded cemetery for Dracula’s traces, the feeling you’ll get from the background music is that you’re fighting the orcish horde outside Mordor’s gate. Or when you’re gathering information from the locals in a Egyptian plaza, you’ll feel like being in Prince of Persia slaying sand monsters.
Gameplay 7/10Hopefully, the game’s gameplay is decent and contains several smart puzzles of many sorts. There are of course some standard illogical puzzles, inventory-based in particular, that you’ll most likely solve only after trying to combine every item you have with each other. In the other hand, the game offers a wide range of puzzles, like item hunting and combining, clue hunting in documents and classic Myst-like shape, color and word puzzles.
The help the game provides to the player could be a little more than necessary, since it never allows him to even try a keylock combination for example, if he hasn’t previously gathered all the clues required to figure out the solution.
Except the inventory screen, the player has access to three more screens throughout the game. The first one is the document screen, where all the newspaper clips, notes, letters and anything readable is saved. Then there’s the dialogue screen which contains every previous dialogue for future reference. The last one is something like a quest log, designed to help the player keep track of his current goals and to provide a summary of previous events.
There are no useless transition scenes in Origin, that is, locations you can only walk through, lacking any objects to interact with and only serving the purpose of making you admire the artist’s work and adding length (and frustration) to the game. I every location you can and you have to do something and when the action leads you somewhere else, the game changes to the new screen automatically. For example the destination of a trip through the desert is only a loading screen away and you don’t have to cross fifteen useless screens to get there (like you would in Sinking Island).
An appealing feature that has become the latest trend in recent adventure games, is the capability of revealing all the clickable hotspots of a location in the press of a button. This solves the problem of pixel hunting. Besides, people who think this makes the game extremely easy, have the option not to press this button (space in this particular case).
ConclusionIn the end, Dracula: Origin is an average to relatively good game, if we don’t take the sound problems under consideration. Two more negative parts of the game is its short length and its ending. The final confrontation with Count Dracula under no circumstance corresponds to the tension built throughout the game. You just approach him… and everything is done automatically. I think today’s adventure game writers should pick up the Monkey Island series from their dusty top shelf and study the epic battles against LeChuck in the ending of each game, where he dragged you like a sack of potatoes from one location to the next and you had little time to figure out how to devise a trap using your surroundings. Do we ask much?
Pros
-Beautiful Backgrounds
-Smart and well designed puzzles
-Good Story (based on a book and all)
Cons
-Sound from another planet (planet Failure)
-Deflated ending
-Some illogical puzzles
Final Score 6/10
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