★★★★
I have a kind of sexual thing for priests and nuns, so I was excited when the opening movie introduced the main character as a nerd priest receiving a quest from the kindly pope. The pope sends you to investigate potential canonization of a recently-deceased doctor for her healing miracles. The setting is between the world wars in a small Romanian village. This is an adventure game, where you must hunt for clues and deduce how to implement them in puzzles.
Story
Along the way, you can’t stop thinking about the town’s new, sexy doctor, and her role in everything. You travel to two other locations in the course of investigation. When you learn the potential saint was a vampire hunter, you realize that disqualifies her, since a saint can’t be crazy. However, the town has real, unexplainable deaths and illnesses, and knowledge poisons you with the urge to vampire-hunt too.
Gameplay
This is a game about studying. You collect many documents to organize, analyze, and compare, to eventually take a final exam, which will allow you to confront DRACULA. DRACULA delivers the second section of the exam, where your responses must align to his own edgy taste.
The graphics are beautiful and atmospheric, and touches like animated mirror reflections and deep breathing when you’re scared or short-of-breath add immersion. I had to use some walkthroughs towards the end when I wanted to progress faster. It was often because I got stuck thinking a puzzle should be done a certain way, and I overlooked every clue in the environment. It was a difficult online class, and I barely passed, but I feel smarter for it.
Setup
I purchased this game from GOG. It was running at 5fps when I tried it. The solution for me was to use DgVoodoo 2, made to help run older games. Here are a couple posts that helped figure out how to get it working:
GOG forums 1, 2 and Reddit instructions on DgVoodoo
- A puzzle I had to use a walkthrough for
- Your crush
- Cute little town
- Who might live there?
Return to the study?