Vampire Legends: The True Story of Elizabeth Bathory

That's right, there's a second Vampire Legends! This time it's an Elizabeth Bathory tale - excited yet? Well, you should be, it's darn good. Review below!

Vampire Legends: The True Story of Kisilova

So take the title with a grain of salt. In the first place, I'm relatively certain that whatever happened in Kisilova, there were fewer sliding block puzzles involved than the game would suggest. Still, the game presents an intriguing premise - people are dying in a remote village, vampires are blamed, and it's the job of some Viennese bureaucrats to get to the bottom of the mystery. Unfortunately, the bottom is beneath a huge pile of mediocre hidden object screens.

(Yes, that's me trying to brush a snake.)

Criteria 1: To what degree do the puzzle screens look like a thrift store vomited on my monitor?

It's terrible. Every surface in the game is piled with random nonsense for no discernible reason and with no apparent theme. Yes, the titular village is worried about a vampire, but that's no reason to start dumping assorted garbage and priceless antiques on every flat surface. At least the game is decent about keeping the items in question from being too anachronistic - it's set in the early 18th century, after all, so the occasional piece of plastic is incredibly out of place. Rodin's 'The Thinker' even makes a brief cameo, despite being sculpted two hundred years after the game takes place.

Criteria 2: Are the searches justified by the premise/story?

It's 12:1 screens this time around, with the player asked to sift through fairly generic locations - dungeons, graveyards, kitchens - for predictably bland items. I would be less hard on the game's HOSs if any attempt was made to link to the story at all. I would even be kinder to them if they were just a little better designed. The graphics are unattractive at best, and while there's not a huge clash in art styles between environment and the items, almost no care was put into the screen layouts. Size and gravity cheating abound, with too-large or too-small items placed randomly around the screen to little effect.

Criteria 3: How well do the various puzzles and object searches meld together to form a coherent whole?

The story is a simple enough affair - there's a murderer running around, making life hell for the inhabitants of Kisilova, the player has to figure out who the vampire is and deal with them. This is accomplished through a decent number of HOSs and some fairly simple puzzles. While the HOSs may not be up to snuff, the puzzles fit the setting quite nicely, reinforcing the myth that old Europe was filled with lockmakers who had entirely too much time on their hands. Also, the villain, who only became a vampire months earlier, seems to have gone all in on their new identity, hiring someone to craft an unbelievably on-point vampire-themed door lock.

Vampire Legends is harmless enough - it's not especially long, and the plot has a decent resolution in the bonus chapter. There's just nothing special here, and even the core gameplay is presented without flair or creativity. The most interesting part about the game are the bonus features, which include photos of the present-day Kisilova, and interviews with Serbian government officials about the true events upon which the game's story is based. The 'based on a true story' thing may be a stretch, but it's fundamentally the best thing the game has going for it.

Check out my playthrough of the game at this YouTube playlist!

Vampire Legends can be purchased at this link!

Portal of Evil: Stolen Runes

Portal of Evil opens with Vanessa Helsing discovering that her grandfather Abraham has gone missing, and quickly thereafter learning that her family is part of an ancient order tasked with protecting the world from a demon invasion through the titular doorway.  This quest takes her first through the bowels of the fake Vatican, then to a series of ancient times, where the door's seals have been spirited to by a mysterious villain. It's a great premise, and the game makes good use of it, switching from time to time and location to location, ensuring that the player will never have a chance to get overly familiar with a given location.

Now, how about some Hidden Object Criteria?!

Criteria 1: To what degree do the puzzle screens look like a thrift store vomited on my monitor?

Oh god, it's bad. Really bad. The first screen I came across was set in the garden of the almost-Vatican, and it was just a mess. Random, out-of-nowhere objects tossed on every surface, hanging off of walls, seemingly hovering in mid-air. Throughout the church location, there's screen after screen of items that have no reason to be together in places that shouldn't be messy, dropped on the screen to create a completely arbitrary obstacle. The game does much better with its historical locations, keeping anachronisms to a minimum and developing much more logical item placement. Still, it's about as mixed a bad as one can get.

Criteria 2: Are the searches justified by the premise/story?

It's all standard 12:1 gameplay, I'm sorry to report. The screen might be well-drawn, but the developers haven't done a great job of giving me a reason to go scrounging through them. Even worse, its features an object placement screen for every HOS. While I can understand the appeal of these screens in theory, they just don't make sense within the world of the game. Where did I get this armful of items I'm placing with others on the screen? Why on Earth am I doing it? Maybe someday a game will combine these two types of puzzle screens, and have me pick up 12 random items on one screen and then use them to complete 12 broken items on the next, but until they do, I'll keep judging these screens harshly. It's called the HOG genre for a reason, people, and it's not because I'm supposed to be putting angel statues together.

I don't know why, but the angel statues turn up a lot.

Criteria 3: How well do the various puzzles and object searches meld together to form a coherent whole?

It's actually a fairly well-structured narrative. While I may have been hard on some of the HOS design, it's all in service of a good story that moves relatively quickly. Likewise, the puzzles all fit fairly well into the story - Vanessa moves exclusively through ancient hideouts and secretive enclaves, so the elaborate traps and locks all don't come anywhere near stretching believability. Also, the game features two of the easiest puzzles I've ever encountered in the history of Adventures. They're so easy they barely count as puzzles. It's actually quite remarkable.

Portal of Evil offers a strong story with acceptably solid gameplay to support it. The HOSs could have been tighter, and a couple of the puzzles are a little more finicky than I'm used to, but the hint/skip button recharges quickly enough that it's never really a problem. The problem arises in a puzzle that turns up in the bonus chapter - which by the way, isn't really a bonus chapter at all, it's really just the end of the story. I can't stress enough that this game's story, without the bonus chapter, is not complete, and releasing a version of the game without it would just be insane. Back to the problem - there's a keypad-based puzzle that's flat-out broken. Vanessa encounters two halves of the code, but when she enters them into the pad, they don't do a thing. I entered them half a dozen times, but couldn't get a reaction - sure that I'd done something wrong, I finally skipped the puzzle, only to discover that I'd had the right numbers in the right order - the game just refused to acknowledge them for some reason.

It absolutely a decent game and I have no problem recommending it, but don't be afraid to use the skip button here and there.

Check out my playthrough of the game at this playlist!

Also, Portal of Evil is available on Steam!