Title: Dracula (resurrection)
Genre: Adventure
Big Word: (sucks)
Strap: Suddenly having the blood drained from your jugular sounds so attractive (doesn’t it?)

Right, that’s it, I’m putting my foot down. Here is me, here is the end of my tether, here is Dracula (resurrection). No more. I won’t have it any more. The next time someone tries to put out an obnoxious pile-o-tat like this onto the market, there will be the unpleasant sounds of fists meeting squidgy flesh.

[Heavy sigh] There are a number of ways to make adventure games. You can follow the Lucasarts example: cartoony, puzzle-based gaming, with clever humour. Or perhaps take /The Longest Journey/’s epic story-based approach, with great acting, and an engrossing, book-like appeal. Or alternatively you could draw some intricately rendered backgrounds and then make the player click on it occasionally.

Why is it that this last example dominates so heavily? Who is providing the market for so many of these horrid, joyless messes? And why aren’t those people dragged out into the streets and stoned by all the clean-thinking members of our rotting society? A game like this seems to appear every month, yet none of us have ever met anyone who has liked any of them. (Mums who liked Myst don’t count. It is a genetic irregularity. For them, there is no hope).

I suppose a mention of the game should go in here somewhere. It’s a reworking of the Dracula myth (funny that), this time told out through the magic of fixed-point, point and clicking. As in: legs stuck to the ground, only able to rotate on the spot, until the immovable, centre-fixed cursor detects the 0.6 nanometer-wide region for jumping to the next position. There is, on average, about one item to click on every three or four locations, and then there is so little interaction that it isn’t even possible to "look" at anything. The game is all conversations, and these are linear and uncontrollable, told out through some excruciatingly bad acting that would make Biker Grove proud. And it’s French.

And that really is all you would want to know. The review? Don’t buy it. Don’t talk about it. Don’t commit it beyond your short-term memory. If you see it in shops, hide the box behind a copy of /Lula/. If a relative gives it to you as a gift, cut their photos out of the family albums. If your dog chewed on it, take him to the vet with urgent haste. And by the way, what is that parenthesis thing in the title all about? Please.

Margin Note:
Is that your face…