Dracula: Origin review (PC)

Frogwares has been quite busy of late, what with Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis being released recently, and its stable mate, Dracula: Origin (DO), following hard on its heels.

This time around, Frogwares has gone back to basics. There is no first-person view in DO, with the game played from the traditional point-and-click perspective.

Elsewhere, the tried-and-tested staples are all still hanging about – the inventory system is the same as in the Holmes series, with items, dialogue, documents and texts being stored for future reference.

So, we are in familiar territory with DO then. Interestingly, what won’t be completely familiar is the Dracula tale itself. Those of you who are aware of Bram Stoker’s novel and the subsequent adaptations will find that DO deviates quite substantially from the traditional story.

Without giving too much away, the story takes you to various locations not mentioned or visited in the book, including Egypt. It also deviates in terms of the characters involved, to an extent.

Abraham van Helsing is the key protagonist, on a quest to save Mina (Jonathan Harker’s bride-to-be) from the clutches of the evil vampire. Seward is in there too, but that’s it – none of the other places from the book, barring Transylvania, are explored.

This is actually quite refreshing and a bold move from Frogwares. The story is so familiar that to merely retread it would be both lazy and less interesting for the player, especially one that knows Stoker’s version by heart.

As for the game itself, it works very much like Frogwares’ Silver Earring game from the Holmes series. Point, click, combine inventory objects, have short conversations with non-player characters – all the usual stuff, really.

Like Silver Earring, DO is a solid, well-built adventure with the emphasis on puzzle-solving, and there are a LOT of puzzles.

I was taken aback by the sheer number of logic and other puzzles contained within the game’s relatively short (when compared to old school adventures) lifespan. It seems that every scene has a logic puzzle connected with it and, while this is an exaggeration, it is only a slight one.

Observant readers may have noticed me railing against the logic puzzle in previous reviews, but I’m going to confound them with a U-turn of New Labour-esque proportions here by saying that the ones in DO were actually quite fun.

Some of them are a little fiddly and require a thorough poring over of collected documents in the inventory, while others require a substantial amount of lateral thinking to divine what the game wants you to do.

However, despite these little faults, I found myself actually SOLVING puzzles for once, despite some being relatively obtuse. Nobody will sail through the game easily completing each puzzle, but neither will anybody reach more than a couple of points where there is a need to refer to a walkthrough.

I would say 90 per cent of them just require a bit of logical thinking and then the solution becomes apparent. A little patience will help too.

The puzzles are good then, which is nice. The dialogue and acting are next up on the list of things guaranteed to ruin an adventure game experience. With some criticism levelled at the latest Holmes series for employing … less than able voice actors, how DO matches up has been a cause for concern in the adventure community.

Thankfully, there are no atrocious performances in DO, although the gravedigger is potentially one of the worst characters in adventure history. Grit your teeth and bear his hideous performance and you will have left the worst the game has to offer behind.

Other than that, things are competent at best throughout. Van Helsing occasionally hams it up out of the blue on viewing certain objects, but he and the other major characters are passable and won’t annoy.

With Frogwares managing to succeed on every level, it may perplex you that I’ve not given the game a higher score. This is really because, while no one element of the game destroys the rest with its inadequacies, neither does one lift it up to the next level and to classic status.

Dracula: Origin is a solid, interesting adventure game for fans of the genre. It takes the core ingredients and mixes them up to create a pleasing vampire-based broth, with a unique take on an old tale. You won’t come back to this after finishing it, but you’ll enjoy it while it lasts.

7.5/10

David Brown

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If you get stuck, our friends over at Gameboomers have come up with a handy walkthrough, which is here.