Review of A Vampyre Story by emric

So after many many years since the demise of LucasArts adventures, some of the people behind all those great games formed their own company (Autumn Moon Entertainment) and have begun making adventure games again. The first of these is ‘A Vampyre Story’. It feels very very much like a LucasArts game, so fans of their previous classics will most likely be pleased.

For me though, it kinda reminded me why i usually preferred Sierra games to LucasArts games way back in the 80s & 90s. It’s a comic and light-hearted experience which is very very heavy on inventory puzzles. I know inventory puzzles are one of the main staples of adventure gaming, but I begin to get frustrated when the puzzles are illogical enough that you end up just clicking random inventory combinations or every combination of inventory item on random hotspots just to work out what to do next. And for me, this was the experience all throughout ‘A Vampyre Stroy’. However, if a game’s characters and story are strong and engaging enough, then there is still motivation enough to work through these puzzles and the experience is less frustrating. But sadly, I didn’t find that was the case with ‘A Vampyre Story’ either. It did fail to capture much of the charm and wit of earlier LucasArts classics.

One of the biggest issues is the writing… it’s supposed to be witty and funny, but it just isn’t. Instead it’s cringingly try-hard humour much of the time.

The voice acting is somewhat controversial also. Mainly because the main character, Mona, has such a high-pitched whining voice, that probably suits her character, but I found it terribly difficult to listen to and almost relented into turning the voices off altogether. I settled for turning them down to 50% volume just to take the edge off her voice.

But the issue with her voice acting is deeper than that. I found in almost all her sentences the accent would be strong at the start and then disappear towards the end—of each sentence! As you can imagine this produced a very odd listening experience.

Thankfully the voice acting problems end there and all of the supporting cast put in very strong performances.

Where this game really shines is in the graphics/art direction. It’s comic stylings look brilliant and the colouring is superbly lush!

The music is also quite good.

I did also come across one gameplay bug involving the perfume bottle/refill inventory items which makes it impossible to complete the game. Thankfully I found some help in an online forum that enabled me to edit save game info so that i didn’t have to restore way back and replay. but the existence of such a bug shows some unfortunately sloppy testing! hopefully it’s been patched by now.

Overall I guess I just found that I didn’t care much about the main characters—a somewhat dim and whiny, vampire-in-denial and her try-hard wisecracking bat sidekick. Autumn Moon have announced a sequel (which is kinda necessary cos they left the story quite unfinished) but I hope they’re able to expand so they can work on two projects at once… cos I’m still interested to see what else they can produce outside this first franchise.

Read the review »

Time Played: 10-20 hours