Review

Dracula 3: The Path of the Dragon

First off, I’ve got to say that my knowledge on the subject of vampires is extremely lacking. In truth, I had no idea that Dracula 1 and 2 even existed previously. So, despite being based on it, this game doesn’t seem to require any previous knowledge about Bram Stoker’s universe, although I’m sure it wouldn’t have hurt.

You take the role as Father Arno, a priest visiting a little village in 1920ish Transylvania on a mission to find out if a nurse is worthy of sainthood. You end up switching gears, however, when you find out there are some mysterious circumstances surrounding her death. Accusations of vampires pop up and the church asks you to investigate them and disprove their existence.

If you come in expecting lots of vampire action (however you choose to interpret that) you are going to be disappointed. It’s about vampires; don’t get me wrong, they just don’t make much of an appearance. Of course, this is an adventure game. Action just doesn’t come into play. It’s all about the story and the puzzles.

The story is slow. It starts off promising and it even drew me into the world quite nicely. But as it drags on you’ll be wondering what the point is and when they’ll be getting to it. It’s classified as horror, but it’s not scary. The atmosphere is no more than eerie, though they do throw in a few “jump” parts for good measure.

The voice acting is decent, which surprised me. It’s good enough so that it’s not distracting, at least. The graphics are pleasing to the eye and contribute to the general mood. One gripe I have is that the town seems to be in a constant twilight, always dark and misty no matter the time of day.

I seemed to spend a lot of time on the telephone early on. While I’m sure that’s how a real investigation would go, it’s not very entertaining. Call this person who tells you to call that person then call this person back, etc. Basically, it felt like a copout way to introduce new plot points. At one point I had about five phone numbers to juggle. Luckily, the game keeps track of them for you.

Dracula 3 has traditional adventure game puzzles (traditional being the kind of puzzle that forces you to think abstractly about the uses of various objects) as well as some that totally threw me off. I didn’t enter the game with in-depth knowledge of roman numerals over 100 or a solid grasp of the Fibonacci sequence. And both are required on numerous occasions. At one point you are asked to decode some letters using an Enigma Machine. It’s not nearly as exciting as it sounds, trust me.

And while adventure games almost always become tedious, Dracula 3 takes it to a new level. Multiple puzzles require large investments of time and backtracking through the volumes of documentation found throughout the game. There is a full version of the bible and Bram Stoker’s Dracula you can read in-game, I kid you not. I’d like to meet the person who got through Dracula 3 without any aid from a walkthrough.

By the end of the game I was glad the ordeal was finally over and left unsatisfied. It was quite an anticlimactic finale for all the drama leading up to it. The big reveal of the mystery at the end seemed thrown together haphazardly in a hasty dialog. Perhaps if you have a thing for vampires and the lore surrounding them (and also happen to like adventure games) this is the game for you. Otherwise, you aren’t missing much.