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Dracula Resurrection   Released: 2000 Manufacturer: Dreamcatcher Developer: Dreamcatcher In Brief: Short, easy, atmospheric and visually seductive, an ideal game for beginners.
 Having been conclusively killed in the book that bears his name, Dracula has been as active after his second death as after his initial entry into the world of the undead. In books and movies Dracula continues his reign of terror, the original unstoppable supernatural villain. "Dracula Resurrection" begins at the end of Bram Stoker's book, where Dracula is killed, and never explains how it is that years later Jonathan Harker must seek him out once again to save his wife Mina. We are so used to the concept of deceased villains reappearing in sequels that it is no longer considered necessary to explain just how they managed to escape destruction in spite of insurmountable odds and innumerable witnesses. The longevity of evil things is a fiction given in much the same way that bickering strangers will always fall in love is a given. There's no reason to even think about it, that's just the way it is.
One of the shortest and easiest adventure games ever produced, "Dracula Resurrection" is a game powered more by its story and pretty visuals than by the puzzles that are generally the primary reason to play this sort of game. Those puzzles, primarily consisting of the "find an object and find the place to use it" variety, show little ingenuity, but "Dracula Resurrection" redeems the simplicity of its puzzles by making them so easy that even the standard flaws of bad puzzle design such as pixel hunting and senseless solutions cannot prevent the player from gliding through to the end.
With nothing difficult to halt your momentum all "Dracula Resurrection" needs is enough of a push to get you going, and in its gorgeous and plentiful cut scenes you have just enough fuel to propel you forward. This game is cut scene crazy; almost every time you solve a puzzle you will be treated to a lovely little movie of the hero flying a plane or a bad guy getting clobbered, a little reward for a job well down. These scenes are pretty and stylishly animated and move the story along nicely. Especially nice are the conversations with the locals, most hideously grotesque. As the ugly, bulbous landlady natters on about the dangers of the night you can see the pores in her skin and the veins running through her nose. The detail is amazing.
"Dracula Resurrection" contains within it almost every flaw of puzzle design, but illustrates how these flaws can be minimized to the extent where they don't prevent completion of the game. There are sections where in a dark place you don't notice or even don't see what you're looking for and have to swing the cursor to and fro hoping to hit upon the object, but you usually have only a few places you can hunt for objects and won't be required to cover a great deal of area to find anything. At times a poorly thought out puzzle can only be solved through trial and error, but with only a handful of items in your inventory and only a few places they can be used it's not time consuming to find the right combination. Often you won't know why you've done something until you've done it, but the puzzles are so simple that you'll figure them out even without motivation.
"Dracula Resurrection" has a very good sense of atmosphere. Done in the first-person Myst style, although with 360 degree panning, you walk through deserted mansions and abandoned mines followed by mysterious creaks and squeaks. With such chilling and portentous atmosphere it seems odd that you cannot die in this game. Usually I like games where you can feel free to explore and try things without fear of death, but in a game this spooky I think a few danger spots are in order. To make it easy on the gamer you could, as some games have, automatically restore the player to the last position at which he could have not died.
But you won't have a death scene, and you won't ever see a cut scene if you fail. This is a problem in terms of puzzles, in that while some games will show you what happens if you only partially solve a puzzle, this one won't. There is one point at which an device opens and closes but no indication is given of what it is doing. If you set up other things in the room you will get a very rewarding little scene, but until then you'll have no idea what the device does. Some games would show you what the device did when you failed to have completed all the other steps, and one suspects that the lack of scenes like this is a budgetary constraint; a cut scene for both success and failure would take this modest little game from two to three or four CDs.
Even in simple games there is often one puzzle that for some reason you cannot solve, but I never got stuck for long with this one. While solving a great puzzle makes you feel very smart, solving the puzzles in "Dracula Resurrection" just makes you feel like you can do adventure games with your eyes shut. Which is not to say that no one will get stuck in this game, there were points when I was frustrated and came upon what I needed pretty much by accident. There are places where things are awkwardly placed or obscured, and there were even a few moments where I felt like I should go on the internet and find a cheat for the game. But with a little extra burst of effort I made it through every time.
A game this simple seems perfect as a game for adventure beginners, and I would recommend it for kids if not for the half-naked (at least) vampire demons that at one point threaten the hero while doing gymnastics in what looks like a Las Vegas floor show. I breezed through this game in 10 hours, a remarkably short period of time for a game. But in truth, there are games with as little content that manage to stretch themselves out by creating aggravating and unfair puzzles and throwing in aggravations like mazes, and I think it's great that "Dracula Resurrection" chose to not stoop to any cheap tricks to make the game seem longer. It's especially surprising coming from Dreamcatcher, who specialize in obtuse, difficult and visually bland adventure games. This is the first thing they've made that I've actually enjoyed. -- Charles Herold -2000
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