“Dracula” is a name most horror fans immediately recognize, perhaps for his role as the antagonist in the Castlevania franchise, or for his numerous appearances in other horror media. This classic vampire monster was based on a real-life person: Vlad Tepes of the House of Drăculești, who ruled the Romanian region of Wallachia during a war with the Ottoman Empire. Today’s game is an interactive graphic novel that provides a fictional “what if?” scenario that somewhat combines the monster stories based on the man with a little truth and fantastical elements.
During the rising conflict between Vlad Tepes and Sultan Mehmed II, a series of strange events begin to haunt the beautiful city of Istanbul. The player is presented with a choice of playing as either an explorer, a warrior or a mage, but no matter which character you choose, the story proceeds the same: a letter from an old friend requests that you travel to Istanbul to discover the root of the darkness that has claimed a hold of it.
The game bears a remarkable similarity to The Yawgh, an interactive graphic novel from 2013 that was nominated for several awards. Both games have you arrive in a city with various locales to visit and give you a set number of turns to acquire information, build up your character’s skills and fulfill side-stories. After these turns are over, in the case of Vlad the Impaler you get fifteen, the game will move on to a final, linear event.
Each turn you select which area you want to visit, such as the square, the docks, or the palace. You are then presented with a list of events you can undertake there, after which a number of screens will tell you what happens. Each event also has a few choices you can make that change how your character responds and these choices will affect what skills (strength, magic, charm, etc.) are upgraded at the end of the event. Success in future turns will be determined by how high these skills are, so building up the proper ones is quite important. For example: when faced with a cultist trying to attack you, as a warrior with high strength you are probably better off fighting back than a mage with high intellect and magic would.
These decisions are the only real gameplay present and the rest of the experience is purely a novel. Since the RPG elements are immediately tied to the decision-making, it’s important not to go into this game expecting to get any other form of interaction; every fight is played out in text, you have no direct control over dialogue and you only get to see the areas you go to in pictures. A lot of people who bought the game on Steam were clearly left disappointed and confused, so be wary.
What I like most about the game is that the writing sucks you in; it’s not too difficult to read, but at the same time it has a nice level of detail to it and each event is well-described. Istanbul is filled with cults, corruption and intrigue, and chasing all of it down as a lone foreigner and eventually rooting out all the evil one by one felt empowering, which made some of the occasions in which I failed and died feel like a punishment for my rashness. The story is not afraid to handle and show gore or deal with more satanic elements, which is only appropriate for a game that has “The Impaler” in its title. It does suffer from numerous grammatical errors, though, which often shattered the atmosphere for me.
The game also suffers from not having enough proper flags in the story that dictate how later events will play out, which is exactly what made The Yawgh so interesting. During one playthrough I was given the option to raid a certain ship that housed slaves, but in a later session I noticed that I was supposed to learn about the ship in an earlier event that I had never done before. This means that it doesn’t matter if you learn about the ship or not, since you will be able to attack it regardless.
A similar issue becomes apparent when you notice that the choice of class doesn’t really matter. I was excited when, during one event early on, my explorer character spotted an assassin and smashed them through a table, but I was perplexed when my frail, old mage character in a later session did the exact same thing. That mage character would subsequently end up being the only one that made it through the story and it was weird when in combat scenarios it referred to my staff as a “weapon” and the writing indicated I was using it to smash my opponents, rather than cast spells with it.
A final issue that dampened my enjoyment of the story were the frequent occasions at which the game froze up, which varied from ten seconds to permanent. The aforementioned mage character also failed at defeating Dracula, not because I had the wrong skills or made a dumb decision, but because the game just crashed on me in the final battle. I had to try again and restart the game after every action to fix the crashing issue during his battle.
On a more positive side, the art in the game is pretty fancy and has a nice, grim style to it. Each event has different drawings to accompany it and some are even animated to an extent. Because this approach allows designers to show you exactly what they intend, this means you don’t end up with long strings of text that describe environments, people and monsters. The pictures scale properly when you switch between fullscreen and windowed mode or alter the resolution too. I am less fond of the sound, though, which tends to have the same tune on loop for long periods of time, and a brief introduction at the start uses an uncanny, almost digital voice to read a letter for you, which is luckily the only voice-acting present in the novel.
The art used for your character is nice as well and there is a morality system in place that changes based on the choices you make, just like the regular statistics. While this system doesn’t seem to have much effect on the moment-to-moment story and gameplay, there will be a point at which your morality is calculated and your class will evolve based on how you played. My friendly and kind mage would become a priest, whereas my violent warrior turned into an assassin. The design of the character changes to reflect this and the moment at which your class is decided makes for a fun story-moment.
I played through the game three times and only got to the end once, which adds up to almost two hours of gameplay. I noticed that, once you know what events will give you, there is a tendency to skip the text altogether and just get the results. Your first two times through the game will be lengthy and intriguing, but after that you just know what to do to get the best results. This growing familiarity can be less of a problem if it helps you reach Dracula for the first time, since dying before you find him on your first few attempts is likely to happen, but after you do that once there is little reason to return. The lack of flags that initiate side-stories also means there is little reason to experiment and play around with different options, so you will probably grow tired of this game rather quickly.
The entry price of $4.99 is appealing however and for its fun story and nice art, I’d say it’s worth a look. Many technical, lingual, and mechanical issues will annoy you as you play, but this is one of the rare opportunities to witness a story that frames Dracula in a somewhat sympathetic light, even if barely any of it is historically accurate. It might not be the best it could be, but it’s still enjoyable, short and inexpensive.
(7 / 10)
Good
(7 / 10)
