View All (5)

Through London, Egypt, Vienna, and the darkest recesses of Europe you will chase the vile, Prince of Darkness. Each locale is wonderfully rendered. The art is creative and looks fantastic. The locations are a bit small, but Frogware has done a great job of packing a sizeable amount of content at each location. So it may be a slightly smaller area, but you will explore every shadowed corner.

Not only do the environments get the great, updated, treatment, but the characters look fantastic as well. Dracula Origin is easily the gold medal winner for character design in the adventure world. Each character is fully 3D, with perfect shadows, specular lighting and adequate animations. Sure this is standard in the general circles of gaming today, but in the past adventure yarns usually fall back to sprites, or very simple, unlit, 3D models with a camera panned way out so you don't catch the lack of detail.

There are no new surprises to the Dracula: Origin gameplay. You point-and-click to move through the environments, solving puzzles that range from "make you think", to "make you scream in frustration". Some players may find this repetitive or boring after the first few hours as you are never in direct control of your character. But fans of adventure games will be on edge as they explore each dungeon, house, and city street.

The pacing of the puzzles is perfect. They begin on the easier side, getting you into the mindset of the game. Almost like a crash course on thinking like Dracula: Origin. Then slowly ramp up to those mind-numbingly difficult experiments in obscure critical thinking.