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Fury of Dracula 3rd Edition Review

November 16, 2015September 3, 2022 Matt Thrower 1 Comment

The original Fury of Dracula was a seminal game of my childhood. Whisked off the shelf as a curio on a trip to get some gaming miniatures, it quickly became a staple. Van Helsing and his pupils spent hours sweeping Europe, seeking for the Count. Instead they often found feral wolves and savage gypsies as the vampire secretly spun his wicked web of intrigue across the continent.

That copy is tattered now, worn down by love. The chits are soft at the edges, the box battered and the figure of Dr. Seward snapped off at the knees. He still struggled manfully after his quarry, those paired feet creeping into my adult years like the memory of childhood sins. Yet a little of the magic had gone. The game could be frustratingly random, and it needed an aggressive Dracula player to make it work.

A second edition fixed those problems at the cost of bloated rules and play time. It wasn’t a worthy trade off. Worse, the balance had shifted toward the hunters. Dracula was constrained by bizarre rules that made it hard for him to double back on himself, so the hunters had an easier time to box him in. He didn’t seem much of a Prince of Darkness when he couldn’t even cross his own trail to escape.

Here, now, is a third edition. The box cover might a laughable vampire Liberace but I had such hopes for the contents. Somewhere in the fog between the those two flawed editions was an incredible game. A game that smoothly wove deduction and strategy with thrills and theme. I knew that game existed, but I wasn’t sure there was a designer on the planet who could tease it out.

Inside the box, disappointment. There was still a location deck. There was still a six-card trail. Yet promise gleamed at the bottom of the card stack in the form of special power cards. There are several ways now for the Count to confuse his pursuers by moving twice or not moving at all. The best is Misdirect, a new card that not only lets Dracula double back but removes a link in the trail. Many unsuspecting hunters can stumble in the resulting hole in the chain of clues.

This is just the start. It seems that the developers thought the best way to get the best of both previous editions was to re-arm Dracula. Not with greater strength or fangs but with the powers of lies and obfuscation. At each place he visits, Dracula can place an encounter. Some of these are there to hurt the hunters but others exist to thwart or bamboozle them. They can lose turns, get moved away, prevented from searching the town for vampires. One, if allowed to “mature” by spending six turns on the board, even clears out half the card trail, leaving the hunters chasing after ghosts.

I would never have thought that adding misinformation was the way forward for this game. But it works. It works brilliantly. The hunters are grasping at endless tendrils of data with a variety of tools and cards to help them get more. Everything they need is there, but piecing it together demands method and skill. So much so that having one player run all four hunters can be too much to handle, remembering who found what, where. The Count meanwhile is doing everything in his diabolical power to muddy the waters.

Combat has had a major overhaul. Hunters now only fight vampires and Dracula himself. This allows the combat system to be boiled down to simple icon matching with a few special effects. It’s crude but effective, allowing a balance of luck, bluff and skill without slowing down the game. Facing a vampire at night is a stream of hot terror, cards flashing past and damage accumulating at lightning speed.

Dracula felt too weak in the previous edition. Initially, it felt like he’d gone too far the other way in this one. With his newfound combat prowess and slippery box of tricks he ruled our first games like the dark prince he ought to be. It seemed unbalanced, frustrating for the hunters. But it’s a testament to the skill of this design that we wanted to keep searching. Not just for Dracula, but for a way to beat him.

When we found some, it revealed yet more layers of excellence to the game. Dracula can coast against unskilled hunters. They, in turn, have the harder time of it, and never get an easy win. They have to learn to behave like pawns in a chess game. As a group, they can triumph, but only by making individual sacrifices when needed.

When they learn this, games become agonisingly tight. By the end Dracula will have been lost and found repeatedly and Europe will be awash in the blood of hunters. Although the focus seems to have moved away from action to deduction, this edition might actually be the most brutal of the three.

The production evokes a fine sense of gothic grandeur. Yet the real period feel comes from the way that the mechanics evoke the characters of hunters and Dracula alike. The former are puritans, calculating efficiencies, working through probabilities, forming plans to ensnare their quarry. The latter is the very devil. A terrible, charismatic liar who must use all their powers of cunning, bluff and misdirection to put his pursuers off the scent.

This version of the Fury of Dracula is a triumph. It’s become something greater than the sum of its previous editions. Where one was short and the other long, this walks a satisfying line between. Where one was cast as a hunt and the other a chase this can be both. Where one was seen as a combat game and the other a deduction title this can be both. And as the game captures your imagination like the mesmeric eye of the vampire, you can be sure of enough repeat plays to see it in every one of its many guises.

Euclidean Review

October 1, 2015September 3, 2022 Matt Thrower 1 Comment

Falling is the primordial nightmare. Plunging into the abyss, then wakening with a jolt just before the impact is a fear we’re all familiar with. Yet Euclidean is the first horror game I’ve played which taps that shared terror. Then amplifies it with deliberately clumsy controls and freakish environments beneath your sinking feet.

Its in the design of these other worlds that Euclidean reaches its apogee. Lovecraft’s old saw about impossible geometries is, obviously, impossible to visualise. Yet Euclidean does a fine job of putting you into some truly bizarre places.

It’s unclear if you’re under water or in outer space, or possibly both. Strange patterns and bits of Escher-esque scenery flash in and out of view through the murk. One level sees you descending an enormous spiral staircase. Another is almost completely obscured in blood-red mist. The visual design is fantastic and disorientating in equal measure.

The confusing environments are very much part of the play. Touching anything as you fall will kill you, instantly. So will missing one of the soft blue portals you’re aiming for and ending up on the level floor. The are monsters wriggling round the levels too, and they’re equally deadly and harder to avoid.

Your defences against absolutely everything are some sluggish WASD controls. Plus the ability to phase out which makes you briefly invulnerable to monsters but lasts for less time and takes longer to recharge on each use. You fall at a steady rate, and use the controls to avoid bumping in to things. That’s it. Euclidean might qualify as the world’s first falling simulator.

The limitations on what you can do in-game are at once both essential to its atmosphere and its biggest issue. The scenery and the monsters move in predictable ways but the sheer oddness of the environments and the unresponsive controls makes them hard to avoid. You don’t have much agency in the game, and many of the very many deaths you’ll suffer won’t really be your fault.

Euclidean is not a great game. It might take you a couple of hours to complete. Then, if you’re not fed up of the limitations and fancy a bit of maschoism you can try the permadeath mode. But it is a very imaginative, unique and fairly cheap game. That might be enough to make it worth dipping your toe into whatever otherwordly goo fills Euclidean’s levels.

Knock-Knock Review

October 25, 2013September 1, 2022 Matt Thrower Leave a comment

Knock-Knock is the latest game from Russian developer Ice Pick Lodge. That may mean nothing to you: it meant nothing to me when I first downloaded the game. Some of their previous titles did chime a little as names I’d heard now and again – Pathologic or The Void. However I soon came to understand that for those more familiar with this studio and its titles, the name presages a unique combination of inventive gameplay and jarring oddness.

Almost everything you need to know about Knock-Knock can be gleaned from one brief anecdote. About halfway through the game I spent one level wandering aimlessly around a darkened house, turning on lights and began to grow pretty bored. Then I opened a door, walked through and found myself in a dank corridor which I had to wander up and down through a series of more doors before discovering I was back at the start of the tedious level again. Infuriated, I wanted to stop. But I kept on playing.

You’ll spend a lot of time doing nothing in Knock-Knock. Pretty much every other level consists of you walking through a series of perfectly safe rooms to a clock, starting the mechanism and then wandering out into a perfectly safe forest where you’ll perambulate aimlessly until you find yourself back at the same house again. On the alternate levels where a little more is demanded of you, play involves walking into rooms, holding space to fix the lights and occasionally coweing behind furniture while ghoulish haunts drift by in a freakish parody of hide and seek.

The game tells you virtually none of this. You’re left to find out almost all all the mechanics for yourself by guess and by trial and error: what I’ve revealed is the obvious stuff that will become clear after a level or two. And there is more to it than I’ve described. Indeed it’s entirely possible given the way the game offers you absolutely nothing on a plate at all that there are vast abysses of labyrinthine mechanical complexity hidden beneath this simplistic surface.

But I doubt it. I think that play wise, it’s often grindingly repetitive and frustrating, occasionally bordering on the tedious. So why was I compelled to play through to the end?

Your avatar in Knock-Knock is some sort of hermetic insomniac who clearly seems himself as a scientist or academic of some kind. What he actually is, it rapidly becomes apparent, is completely deranged. As he makes his nightly rounds through his randomized and ever-shifting house, he whispers to you in an unsettling soprano gibberish about his past and his current predicament. But it’s never clear what, if anything, is reality and what is the creation of a mind badly unhinged by lack of sleep and the suppression of guilty secrets.

You can play through to the end and you won’t get all the answers to the questions that plague the game. You can play through to the end more than once – there are different endings – and you’ll still be wondering what the hell it’s all about. About why there’s a freakish ghost who drags a wheeled leg behind her as she shuffles through the rooms searching for you, or the pitiful apparition of a crying child whose sobs follow you through every level where she appears. About the unsettling inferences to authoritarian dystopias, or the bizarre “fragment of reality” cut scenes you’ll stumble onto occasionally. There are never concrete answers. It isn’t that sort of game.

What it does give you is a lot of intrigue puzzling over the narrative scraps that you’ve been fed and also in marveling over the creative manner in which they’re delivered. It’s kind of hard to describe the way in which the game uses its unreliable narrator and the fourth wall to really communicate the idea of a mind in turmoil. But here’s one example: a missing diary is a crucial component of the plot, and sometimes the game will interrupt the narrator’s ramblings with flashes of diary pages that actually make sense in the context of the conversation. You feel like you’re talking to yourself for no good reason.

While the plot does most of the grunt work in terms of pulling you on through the more turgid bits of gameplay, it’s aided and abetted by the visual and sound design. Don’t let the cartoon graphics fool you: when the lights fizz and go out and eyeballs start coming through the walls you’ll still jump like a five-year old. And the disembodied voices of the phantoms that stalk your home, searching for you, whisper messages you may prefer to forget.

There was more than one occasion in Knock-Knock when I wished that ephemeral things like the narrative and the sound weren’t quite so compelling and I could abandon the game over the poor mechanics. But they are, and I couldn’t. Whether this can really be recommended, especially at launch price, depends strongly on how patient you are with repetitive play. Sadly there’s no demo version to try and find out. But perhaps that’s all part of the mysterious and alienating themes that pervade the game from the outset.

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs Review

September 9, 2013September 1, 2022 Matt Thrower 1 Comment

The first Amnesia title, The Dark Descent, was acclaimed by many as the scariest game ever made, an assessment with which I concur. Its success was down to getting simple things right: atmosphere, cunning set-pieces and depriving the player of the ability to fight back, making every monster encounter a wellspring of terror.

That immediately creates two problems for this sequel. First, the bar is already set incredibly high: to outdo the most horrifying game ever created. Second, to make it interesting and new without adding too much and spoiling the stripped down formula responsible for the original’s success.

Astonishingly, the answer that A Machine For Pigs has for the latter question is to become even more straightforward, putting less mechanics between the player and the sinking pit of their stomach. It’s a bold move and, largely, a successful one. In the original game, for instance, light sources were limited and standing in the dark made the protagonist hallucinate. A clever mechanic but one which, in practice, was often more annoying than atmospheric.

It’s gone. Now you have a lamp you can use whenever you want. Player agency is restored, there’s one less mechanic to learn and, most importantly, the developers now have full control over all your light sources. You’ll learn what a difference that makes the first time you descend into a pitch dark, monster-filled cellar to the sound of freakish chanting and find your trusty lamp suddenly begins to flicker uncontrollably.

However the removal of the inventory backfires. The game retains its unusual physics engine which allows you to grasp doors and items and push, pull or otherwise manipulate them with mouse movements. It’s a great adventure mechanic, but without an inventory you have to put down whatever you’re carrying every time you want to open a door. You won’t end up carrying items around often, but it’s still irritating.

While the play style will be familiar to veterans of the original, A Machine for Pigs was actually developed by The Chinese Room, the studio behind Dear Esther. It’s better looking than its predecessor but seems extremely resource hungry. My laptop with an i7 and a decent mid-range graphics card found some frame-rate stuttering even on the lowest settings.

The much-vaunted new outdoor levels aren’t so much different from the indoor ones, but they to add to the considerable range of environments you’ll encounter as you descend into the bowels of the machine. Most of the levels have their own distinct look and feel, offering a lure of curiosity to pull you forward.

Everything you’ll come across has been ruthlessly engineered to cause unease. Apparently normal paintings that are actually twisted parodies, caged beds with bloodstained sheets, drawers that turn out to be full of human teeth. Psychological buttons are pushed relentlessly: vulnerable children, attic stairs, rattling doors.

However, a new engine isn’t the only thing The Chinese Room have bought to the Amnesia franchise. Their influence is heard in the soundtrack, too. While there’s plenty of droning bass, mechanical creaking and distorted screams, masterfully blended to unsettle the player, there’s also bursts of melancholy strings, very reminiscent of Dear Esther. There’s also lots of silence, used effectively as a launchpad for sudden scare effects.

But the new developer’s biggest contribution is to the plot. Although largely told through a series of found notes, just like the original, the narrative here is more interesting and, arguably, darker. It’s a tangled tale which begins with love and the desire for a better world but ends in tragedy and takes in a lot of grotesque body horror along the way. It’s a clever piece of work, redolent of allegory and inviting deeper analysis.

While more concrete than the jumbled story snippets that made Dear Esther so interesting, it’s told in a similarly fragmentary manner and leaves plenty of ambiguity. Just like the best macabre writing, the mind fills in the blanks with horribly suggestive detail. The story might not be hugely imaginative, but it’s compelling and shocking nevertheless, helped considerably by a sympathetic protagonist.

Oddly, one of the biggest problems with the previous game was that it was almost too effective. Being disturbed to the point of recoiling at small noises and refusing to play in the dark is almost the antithesis of fun. And while the threat of tripping over a creature in the gloaming and having it immediately eviscerate you added to the fear factor, it was also frustrating. Especially so if you were trying to work your way through a puzzle at the time.

A Machine For Pigs is still scary. Once, after playing, I walked into a dark kitchen and jumped in whey-faced terror at what turned out to be a white tea-towel. Even early on, where you’re under no threat whatsoever, you’ll still be tormented by a constant itch of mortal peril. But I don’t think it’s scarier than the original game. Perhaps I’m jaded after playing that, no longer shocked by what’s essentially the same mechanics, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

You won’t encounter that many monsters in A Machine For Pigs. Some seem to mysteriously vanish should you fail to get past them a couple of times. The puzzles are varied, but not especially hard, and you’re generally allowed to solve them without creatures trying to bite your face off. Later, there are extended sections where, Dear Esther-like, there’s little to do but explore and wallow in the bleak atmosphere.

Basically, it’s not too frustrating to play. But without the thorn of annoyance to vex the player, it’s also less immediately terrifying. Plenty of titles can make you jump out of your skin, but A Machine For Pigs aims deeper, worming inside and making you uncomfortable with your very humanity. It might not be scarier than the most frightening horror game ever made but does manage, by porcine whisker, to be a more interesting, memorable and likely more divisive game overall.

The Occult Chronicles Preview

July 5, 2013September 1, 2022 Matt Thrower 3 Comments

Haunted house type horror board games like Mansions of Madness and Betrayal at House on the Hill tend to suffer from one overriding problem which is that they’re pulled in all sorts of different directions by their requirements. How do you create a game that’s full of both mystery and well-informed decisions? How do you give it variety and replayability with limited tile stock and table space? How do you make it competitive and exciting without giving one player too much power?

The answer, obviously, is to make it into a computer game instead, and have the CPU handle all the fiddly bits for you. Enter upcoming game The Occult Chronicles, currently available to purchase as a playable beta-test. But in a twist worthy of the dark and disgusting gods that inspired the game, developer Cryptic Comet (also responsible for indie strategy titles Armageddon Empires and Solis Infernum) has seen fit to breed in elements of a Rogue-like as well.

In some respects the result is no more than what you might expect. After creating a character with a points-based system and choosing from a number of loose scenario templates, you’re unleashed into a large mansion populated which in turn unleashes eldritch horrors upon you. As you’d expect from a title inspired by Rogue and board games, it’s a turn based affair where you move from room to room on a geometric grid, trying to reach the bottom cellar of the house and defeat the ancient evil lurking therein.

That simple framework could have been a disaster. It could have been a re-run of the most laughable elements of ZAngband where your overpowered paladin squared up against Cthulhu, triumphed and looted gold pieces from his stinking cephalopod remains. It isn’t a disaster. It’s a game where you’ll gnaw frantically at tender fingernails as you wait to die horribly for merely trying to open a door.

A big part of what makes it work is the writing and presentation which are absolutely top-drawer. The game has a wonderfully self-aware line in dry parodies of Lovecraft and other popular horror tropes, and balances perfectly between the yawning pits of becoming ludicrous and becoming comedy. There’s a lot of text, and you’ll learn to read almost all of it, because it’s excellent.

The words are well supported with comic-strip style pictures which walk a similarly fine line between humour and horror. And the designer has crammed in not just every Lovecraft reference you can imagine, but sucked in everything from the realms of literary and televisual terror too. I spotted sly and often amusing homages to a number of popular horror memes, and I probably missed many more.

There are an astonishing number of different things to stumble over in the dark, which translates as an astonishing number of different ways to die. I’ve been killed by doors, ghostly ballerinas, zombies, rats, fire demons and talking pediments. But together with the random mansion layout and choice of scenarios, it helps ensure that no two games are the same.

Mechanically, it’s currently a mixed bag although I suspect that’s more down to bad documentation and minor usability niggles than it is to actual problems with the system. Most challenges are resolved with a trick-taking game using, slightly predictably, tarot cards. The number of cards in your hand, the number of tricks you can attempt to take and the number you need to win are determined by your stats and what you’re trying to do.

You get choices. So, if some nightmare denizen of the outer planes comes slithering in to view you might be given a choice to fight it with sorcery or flee. Mentally capable characters will get more promising numbers for the former, while dexterous ones will have an easier time with the latter. But success is never guaranteed, and as the available tricks tick down without a win the sense of tension that builds up is palpable.

The problems start right afterwards. Following a challenge you pick a number of cards to find out how good or bad the results are, depending on if you won or lost. This seems a slightly pointless extravagance, eating up play time for no real benefit.

You can earn experience tokens when you win, and spend them on improving your character, but they’re not tracked on the central screen and it’s easy to forget about the ones you’ve collected. Likewise with the item and trait cards you character can start with or acquire: you need to frequently check your personnel file on a separate screen to properly track your character.

Various other tabs and screens hold other important pieces of information like traits, heroic feats and “bones” (dice). This is where the current documentation and the game interface get confusing. It’s not always clear when and how to use these things. Many of them require dice rolls, but you have to have the right kind of dice before you can roll. It’s all as mysterious as the plot of the average horror novel.

In that respect I guess it’s not that different to a lot of Roguelike games, but it seems a little basic by modern standards. You can’t even use the arrow keys to move: instead they scroll the map and you have to click around like a lumbering elephant.

This is, remember, a beta, so there’s plenty of time to sort some of this stuff out before the final product goes live. And I hope some of it does get smoothed over, because playing this you really get a sense of how a haunted house game really ought to be done, and why none of the current crop of board game contenders have never quite lived up to the billing.

For starters, it’s a Roguelike, and that means permanent death, which is far more terrifying in and of itself than any plastic miniature of a tentacled horror from outer space. The huge variety and random room tiles means each game is a true mystery and creates believable layouts without heavy-handed preparation. Your character can gain and track the progress of quests as you creep through the house, without shuffling new cards into decks or worrying about the right item being in the right place.

Speaking of quests, they’re mere sideshows to the main event, Banishing Elder Gods Back From Whence They Came. But as if the game wasn’t mean enough already, you can’t just build up your character and plunge down. Instead there’s a timer ticking down on each and every move. Every so often these trips a story event based on your choice of scenario which adds a nice sense of metagame to the proceedings. But tick off too many and time runs out, ending your game in ignominious defeat.

The Occult Chronicles suffers from some very rough edges at the moment, but it’s an inventive and addictive take on an old genre, which has the potential to please board and video gamers alike. If you’re interested, get in there now and starting sending feedback to help the developer sandpaper down the splintery bits