[REVIEW] Dracula's Legacy

 

Hidden picture games used to be those casual things where you literally do nothing but find a load of hidden items and then move on to the next stage, doing the same thing over again. Now they’ve combined with adventure games and become something of a mix, with not just the classic “find a list of items from this mess onscreen,” but also puzzles and story progression.

Now, I haven’t played many hidden picture games in my time, and they’re not my preferred genre of game. But I’m a sucker (no pun intended) for vampires, so when I found Dracula’s Legacy on Steam, I figured it was worth trying out.

 
Developed by Jetdogs Studios, Dracula’s Legacy starts off with you and your fiance, Matt, running from a monster after literally following your dreams in the direction of an old abandoned town . You fall down a hole, and lose track of Matt, and your ultimate goal is to escape your situation, find Matt, and free yourselves from what is revealed to be a town cursed by vampires. You do so by searching for items, solving puzzles, shooting at townspeople who try to waylay you, and generally being an adventure-game veteran. (Or in my case, relative newbie.) There isn’t much to the game, to be perfectly honest, and I beat it in around 3 hours, though from what I hear, that’s too bad for a lot of hidden item games, so I won’t hold that against it. I didn’t expect this to be some expansive game that would require energy drinks to get through, after all.

The voice acting is tolerable, as are the graphics. Well, the obvious CG graphics, I should clarify. The pre-rendered backgrounds look fantastic, and I really love that style of art. But the characters themselves look… outdated. The game on the whole feels like it was a product of the early 2000s; it’s not going to win any awards for style, but it gets the job done, and I suppose that’s what’s most important.

PREPARE FOR TROUBLE; MAKE IT PUZZLES

I expected puzzles. I expected frustrating puzzles. I didn’t expect some puzzles to be tear-your-hair-out annoying. Some frustration, I can tolerate. Others, not so much.

Take this puzzle, for instance:

 
The goal is to get the coloured crystals to match the colour of the disc they’re connected to. That’s what’s stated in the game. If a crystal touches a connecting disc, turning either disc will move the position of the crystal.

As presented, this puzzle is impossible, since, for instance, if a red crystal can connect to a red and a white disc. You can’t have all the discs filled in with the right colours because of those connections.

What the game doesn’t tell you is that white doesn’t count as a colour here. Despite there being white discs and white crystals, they don’t really count. It’s just the non-white discs you have to be concerned with.

Thanks for the lousy instructions, game. I really do appreciate your lack of information.

Thankfully most of the puzzles aren’t this bad, and unless you want to gain the Puzzle Master achievement, you can skip any puzzle you come across and just continue with the rest of the game.

 
HINTS OF A LARGER TIMELINE

The woman you play as, Isabella, is said to have no memories of her past, that she just kind of woke up on a park bench one day and her now-fiance has been helping her make sense of life ever since. Interesting enough, but at the end of the game, the master vampire you kill calls you Vivian. Now yeah, he just woke up on fire, so maybe he’s a little confused, but there are definitely hints of a story that started before this game began.

Trouble is, I have no idea what game that might be. The developers have other hidden item games in their library, but none I can find that seem related to vampires, and I can’t find anything that states this game is part of a series. Coupled with the possibility that your fiance, after you rescue him, might be turning into a vampire, and oh, just what even was that box the master vampire (who might be Dracula, I don’t know, because it’s never stated outright) gave you?

The problem is that these dangling plot threads leave the game feeling disconnected, like it was once part of a larger whole but now it’s just sort of floating there without anything to tether it to something. Are there games that came before it, and if so, what are the games? Are there sequels, and if so, what are the games? Dracula’s Legacy has story progression without a complete story, and it left me feeling really unsatisfied at the end, like I had missed something crucial.

Now I will admit that the game only came out last year (2018), so maybe the developers are working on a sequel and the answers will become clear in a future game. That’s distinctly possible. But just from this game alone, I feel like I played merely a chapter of a larger story when the rest doesn’t even exist yet, and rather than making me interested in what comes next, I just feel disappointed that a complete story wasn’t given here.

I get that people don’t play these games for their rich engaging storylines, but come on. Give me something that can stand on its own, not half-finished sequel-bait.

In the end, this was… a game. It’s a game that ate up a few hours and was okay, no major game-breaking glitches, nothing to make me say the game is horrible or not worth it. But nothing to really make me recommend it either. It had some amusing moments of adventure game moon logic (of course I need the key to open this leather handbag, because naturally the straight razor I already have in my inventory won’t do the trick… for some reason), but otherwise, it was just a foray into a different game genre that I’m not likely to return to, even for completion’s sake. If you’re into hidden picture games, you might get more enjoyment out of this one than I did, but if you’re as new to the genre as I am, then there are probably better offerings on the market.