Adventure Gamers - Forums

I have never played this game, but was watching a youtube video of underrated adventure games and it popped up. My wife who is not really a gamer walked into the room and was smitten with the visual style. So needless to say i bought it for 8 bucks on steam. It is on sale right now bc the game just was patched, which is odd bc it is a 14 yr old game. Anyways i got it booted up and working. I love the visual style of it, prob bc it is from the same guy that did monkey island 3. The humor made me chuckle and i liked the voice acting enough. Wife and I will be diving into this one together. Wish us luck. Hope it holds our interest. Gray matter and 9 noir lives did not hold mine.

Let me know how it goes. This was one of the few adventures I haven’t finished due several reasons, but the most annoying VO for the main character was definitely up there, so I’m glad you liked it - she was way too irritating for me.

I was just blasted on Steam with notifications for patches for this game as well, which surprised me. I wonder if they are moving somewhere with the second part.

We played a bit of it and like the game so far. I think the humor lands more than it misses. The puzzles are fine so far. Music is great, voice acting is pretty good to me, especially the bat sidekick. The art is gorgeous, wife said the game reminds her of the Wednesday show on netflix. Right now we are talking to a gargoyle about a key.

diego - 03 August 2023 06:17 AM

Oh yeah, Froderick’s voice actor nailed it, one of the better sidekick voices in the genre.

Yeah love the running gag of him and her arguing on rather or not she is a vampire. Wife laughed out loud at him doing the fiddle line to the devil in the dungeon. We are from georgia, so we know the song “the devil went down to georgia,” very well.

Oh yeah. Sideckicks are the best. I love Crow in Longest Journey and Oscar in Syberia. They give a very good aspect to the game. If someone knows a game with good sideckick, let me know.

UruBoo - 05 August 2023 07:52 AM

Oh yeah. Sideckicks are the best. I love Crow in Longest Journey and Oscar in Syberia. They give a very good aspect to the game. If someone knows a game with good sideckick, let me know.

Crispin in Primordia is a great sidekick.

The game is clearly not finished. It just stops suddenly after 5 hours. A sequel was planned, but it never happened.
Besides that, there are some good puzzles here and there, but nothing memorable.
Also, I personally don’t like the 3D models. The game was originally planned to be full 2D.
Overall, it’s… ok. The characters are a bit bland.

I ended up playing it not too long ago. Dunno if I posted about it here or somewhere ^^; I enjoyed it, largely. I think it got all the main things right; it looked nice, controls were good, solid puzzles, characters are fun, even a bit of story.

If I recall correctly I was vaguely bothered by three things: one is of course the unfinished story. It’s what it is, though I guess Bill Tiller will never give up (maybe one day? Game recently got an update on Steam). Another is that Mona’s denial of vampirism felt a bit inconsistent. Obviously she does actually know, but it’s sorta ... sometimes she makes a big deal out of it, sometimes it’s kinda ignored. And the third one is kinda typical for comedic adventure games but it felt like the brutality that’s sorta in the background sometimes just really clashes with how everything’s just silly. There’s a lot of casual mentions of murder (and possibly rape?) and it’s just sorta glossed over. Which is of course part of the joke. But I’m not sure it always worked too well. It’s a bit of a “don’t think about it” thing ^^

Wife and I played a good bit more today and while we love the art, the voice acting is good to us. we think the script is funny, the jokes land most of the time and the music is great. The puzzles are some of the worst I’ve seen in a long time. Either they’re not clued at all, terribly clued,or asinine and insane and not in a fun way to me. There have been one or two that I liked, like you had to do a combination puzzle that involved books that I thought was clever, but pretty much everything besides that has been laborious to say the least. And while I appreciate them wanting to animate everything, im now on the Hobbss barrow side instead lol, of just using black screens. I feel like there’s transition animations for transition animations, it’s time consuming. And the back tracking back and forth between the same seven scenes is so tiresome. Plus when you do finally solve a long puzzle chain there is no reward, your immediately blocked with another puzzle less than 10 seconds later, so there’s no sense of accomplishment. We have used a walk through several times and I don’t regret it at all. My wife basically feels the same way as I do, a lot of interesting Concepts that are poorly executed in our opinion.

tomimt - 08 August 2023 06:23 AM

While there’s a lot to like about Vampyre Story, it suffers from the same problems as every Bill Tiller-designed game: he just isn’t a game designer. A gifted artist, yes but a game designer he is not.

This is my takeaway from playing A Vampyre Story and Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island too.  Bill Tiller would be far better served concentrating on drawing the art and coming up with an overall story and narrative arc and then leaving the details and puzzle design to other creatives.  It’s kinda like the difference between Lucas’ work and collaboration on the original Star Wars trilogy and Lucas’ creative stranglehold on the Star Wars prequels.

Yall might have a point. I know he did work on monkey island 3, and i love most of the puzzles in that game, so i dont know.

All i do know is the puzzles in vampyre do nothing for me at all. One puzzle had us go back and forth I want to say three or four times, get a line of dialogue from a cat and then a line of dialogue from the rats and then back for another line of dialogue from cat. this “puzzle” really serves no purpose, it is just for them to tell you to reverse two books on a bookshelf. That is my definition of time waster and trying to extend run time for a game to me. Plus as much as I love the art style I am so ready to leave the castle and the same seven scenes.