Publisher: The Adventure Company
Developer: Crimson Cow
Minimum requirements: XP/Vista; 1.6 GHz P4 or equivalent; 512 MB RAM; 3 GB HD space; 256 MB graphics card; DirectX 9.0c or higher
Genre: Adventure
Release date: Available now
Review by: Michael Smith

Recent point-and-click adventure games have been of varying quality, from mildly intriguing to tedious, obtuse and boring. The Adventure Company and developer Crimson Cow try to raise the bar a few notches with A Vampyre Story, a new adventure that features colorful graphics, spooky music and a snarky sense of humor. But just as you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, it’s also dangerous to judge a game by its first few minutes.

Baron Shrowdy von Kiefer is a very bad vampire. For years he has been abducting beautiful women, turning them into the walking undead and confining them to his castle, built in the middle of a Draxylvanian lake guarded by a hideous monster. His latest victim is Mona, a curvaceous Parisian opera singer who seems to be in serious denial about her status as a creature of the night. One night, Shrowdy flies off to the mainland to hunt for blood donors for his precious Mona and is staked by local vampire hunters, leaving Mona to try to figure out how to escape the castle (and the monster guarding it). Fortunately, Mona has a faithful companion in Froderick, a sharp-tongued vampire bat with a Brooklyn accent. Together they find clues and solve puzzles to first get to the mainland, and then to gather the things she needs to make the long trip back to the City of Lights.

Even though A Vampyre Story’s menus offer no control-customization options, the setup should be very familiar to adventure-game veterans: simply left-click where you want Mona and Froderick to go. Moving the mouse cursor to the edges of the screen turns the cursor into an arrow, indicating that there’s an exit to an adjoining area. What’s different from other games of the genre is the conversation/use interface. If the cursor turns red, it’s resting on an object that can be examined or used in some way. Holding down the left mouse button reveals a cross-shaped interface with four options: examine the object, talk to the object, pick it up or fly to it. Items that Mona picks up are placed in a coffin-shaped box that can be accessed by right-clicking anywhere on the screen.

A Vampyre Story makes you wait to get started (install time was more than 10 minutes), but this is a small price to pay for the ability to play the game without the disk in the drive. The option menu is sparse, offering only a few customization options beyond the usual load game\save game selections (conspicuous by its absence is a screen-resolution adjustment; those of you with big, widescreen monitors are going to be very disappointed). An extensive introductory cut scene, complete with a tease leading to the opening credits and Pedro Macedo Camacho’s creepy, pipe organ-soaked score, leads you into the story. The colorful, cartoon-style graphics have the look of a Scooby Doo episode, and the occasionally hilarious script (performed with goofy panache by the excellent voice cast) contains a few pop-culture in-jokes that adults will recognize but younger players will miss (a fountain named Ozzy with an addled-sounding British accent, and references to Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack).

All of this looks great from the start, but after an hour or two the cracks in the presentation start to show. Mona walks really slowly (understandable, I suppose, considering the Morticia Addams dress she’s wearing), and there’s no way to speed her up, so moving her from place to place can take a frustratingly long time. This problem is even further magnified by the amount of time spent backtracking to previously visited areas to solve puzzles, and a strange inventory convention in which Mona only remembers where certain items are placed rather than picking them up as they’re found. When she needs to use these items, she has to transform into a bat, fly back to the item’s location, turn back into a human, pick up the item, battify herself again, and then fly back to where she started from. All of this takes so long that from time to time I started to forget my ultimate goal. Also, there are dozens of things that can be examined that have absolutely nothing to do with the story, but you have to look at them all, since skipping something can come back to haunt you later on. And, although the dialogue is witty and entertaining, there’s far too much of it. All of this conspires to stretch a four-hour game into easily twice that length, assuming you exhaust all narrative threads and examine all items. As for the puzzles, they start out simple enough, but they get progressively tougher until only the most experienced adventure gamer will be able to solve them without a walkthrough.

I had high hopes for A Vampyre Story. The first hour or so made me think that I had finally found a point-and-click game that didn’t take itself too seriously and had a great balance of attractive graphics, engaging sense of humor and gameplay that was just challenging enough that I didn’t want to throw my mouse at the screen. Unfortunately, the game’s mind-numbingly slow pace and tedious gameplay mechanics turned a colorful, entertaining adventure into a boring, soulless affair. But I still have hope: somewhere out there, someone is crafting the perfect adventure game. Hopefully they’ll finish it before the fans stop caring and move on.

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