Become a member
A series of quests about Count Dracula from the legendary Microids (it is she who is responsible for the iconic Syberia and Still Life) seemed to get an aspen stake in the chest in 2010, when the studio was bought by Friv5Online Interactive , which specializes in casual and mobile games. By that time there were 3 parts, the last of which was dated 2008 year. New owners began to actively translate the already released games in casual and mobile format. Most players, just like all other internet users, hates to sign up or to write personal information.
It would seem that on this with Dracula should have been finished. However, he was resurrected: this year, quite unexpectedly, two games in the series came out at once. And not some innovative, experimental or casual, as one would assume, but more than classical, in the spirit of the works of the French Kheops Studio (remember Nostradamus: The Last Prophecy or The Secrets of Da Vinci: The Forbidden Manuscript ), especially popular in the beginning and middle of the zero.
And who saw the light in the summer of Dracula 4: The Shadow of the Dragon , and the fresh Dracula 5: The Blood Legacy - these are exactly the same "old school" quests that today almost no one does. With a view from the eyes, as in Myst , we move between static screens on click (well though, there was a free review with the mouse), we collect everything we see in the inventory, combine objects, nervously search for active points, solve numerous puzzles and study tons of different documents . Even the in-game interface has almost completely moved from Nostradamus: The Last Prophecy .
About 6-8 years ago, such games were perceived as a kind of anachronism, pulling the genre to the bottom: in the absence of coherent direction and dynamics, they were considered too tedious and difficult, most of the puzzles were frankly artificial, pulled by the ears. However, now such a “hello from the past”, on the contrary, is of interest - many have missed the quests that challenge the player.
In addition, some new elements of game mechanics have appeared in the new “Draculah”: this is the ability to turn on the highlight mode of active points, and the deadly disease of the main character, which makes her nervous and take medicine in critical situations.
Events : The Blood Legacycontinue the story of the fourth part. The art historian Ellen Cross finally found a unique painting lost in a shipwreck, returned with her to the New York Museum of Art and found that the canvas depicted ... Count Dracula himself. And he looks like a living and occasionally sparkles with his eyes, from which Ellen immediately becomes ill.
Accordingly, the beginning of the fifth part was much more cheerful than in the previous series. Yes, and mystics, gothic and vampires themselves are more here. In the very first chapter, we are awaited not only by an exciting encounter with a living portrait of Dracula, but also by murder, the bedding, the new theft and the swift escape to the accompaniment of mysterious phone calls from a woman in a shroud.
And then do not get bored. Suffice it to say that Ellen will soon visit Chernobyl, where she will finally meet Dracula himself and make several important decisions concerning not only her life and death. It is clear that in such a situation it becomes much more bad for her: it makes it more economical to spend pills, look for them in every corner and solve puzzles faster, which restore the shaky health of the heroine. At the end of the game it may even turn out that there will be no pills at all, and then Ellen will have to be reanimated due to the points received again in solving riddles.
Puzzle in The Blood Legacyalso somehow better than in the fourth part. There are much less abstract puzzles, and more everyday ones or quite clearly substantiated by the normal logic of what is happening. Ellen clears the picture of the resin, looks at the video surveillance recordings, throws the boards through the water to get to the boat, breaks the glass with a mace, searches for the right address on the Internet, and so on.
Of course, more complicated riddles have gone nowhere, forcing them to decipher poems, to correctly arrange some symbols or figures, to dig through circuits in electrical panels, to wade through the maze, being guided by strange instructions. One day you even have to build a mini-play with toy actors to open a secret door to the shelter of the vampire painter. But even more logic is felt here - the game always gives adequate clues and does not offer anything supernatural.
Although closer to the final with similar puzzles, the authors are still somewhat overdone. But this time they saved us from tedious "potions" and mixing everything in a row, the scourge of many such quests. Such situations are found here only a couple of times, and those are not too tricky.
Of course, Dracula 5: The Blood Legacy does not move the genre. In some ways, this is even a step back. On the other hand, talks about the quests that are in dire need of new trends and technologies have now somehow subsided: after all, on Kickstarter, thousands and millions of dollars are collected by the comebacks of genre veterans or remakes of classic adventure games. Dracula 5 fits perfectly into this trend and does not ask for any preliminary contributions. And most importantly, we got a fascinating story where you need to monitor the health of the main character, make difficult moral decisions and solve curious and mostly quite logical puzzles.
|