I grew up playing Infocom Text Adventure Games-these were great games. There was a bit of reading to do and you had to think and there was a lot of typing involved. Now adventure games are mainly of the floating hand variety-or more likely the floating multifunction cursor.
Dracula Origin is a typical The Adventure Company computer game. The seemingly endless locations are beautifully rendered and often have photographic quality images. But the images, such as the one of Van Helsing standing in a ruined library, are mostly window dressing. So it can be a challenge at times to the find the one or two active items you are meant find and pick them out of the cluttered rooms full of junk.
As with most modern adventure games the idea here is to pick up and steal everything that isn’t nailed down and solve the often baffling puzzles that block your way forward. These kind of inventory games often have humorous moments, as when Van Helsing finds himself in a great library and picks up a rolling staircase and puts in it his travel bag. There is a lot of combining items in Dracula Origin-many of these combinations not making much sense. A number of the puzzles can be solved by trail and error combining of all the items in the inventory to create new items.
Some of the puzzles are easy and can be solved with a few random clicks, others require more knowledge and skill to get past. With the internet it is easier than it used to be find the solutions to the puzzles, or to find out where that item your missing is hiding. But the fun, of course, is not to cheat but to solve the puzzles on your own. Dracula Origin is a very forgiving game-as opposed to many of the Infocom games where the motto was save early, save often. This is not a game where you die for opening the wrong door. Dracula Origin is a game where you are stuck in one location until you solve the problem and move onto the next location.
I like Dracula Origin, but I still miss the good old days of Adventure Games once in a while. Sierra Online and Infocom made some great games, but they were pretty low tech. Dracula Origin is like most modern games in that it likes a powerful machine with a lot of memory of every kind and the latest geewhiz cards and processors.
Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic was the last game I played that had a serious text interactive component and I really loved that game. Dracula Origin follows in the footsteps of The 7th Guest and Myst. Combine pretty pictures with occasionally challenging puzzles and have some fun solving them. I’ve played several other games from The Adventure Company and I have liked all of them, the two Siberia games were very good as they had a strong steampunk element to them.
I don’t play adventure games as often as I once did, but it is still fun to play around once in a while. I’m glad that they still make a few games for old timers like me.
