Dracula the Undead

STORY / GAMEPLAY
Dracula The Undead is a gothic-style horror adventure for the Lynx where you play the role of Jonathan Harker visiting Count Dracula's premises to conduct real estate business. As the story begins, Jonathan awakes from an overnight sleep at Dracula's castle, ready to work. However, the Count has affairs to attend to and will be gone until evening. With a day of waiting and having nothing to spend his time, Jonathan decides to explore Dracula's quaint home. Your goal is to escape with evidence proving that Dracula is a danger to the mortal society and possibly destroy the Count himself. Of course, Castle Dracula is full of dangers, including its imposing owner...! The game's control is similar to the method in most computer adventures (not the point-and-click ones). Each room is almost in 3D and you use the joypad to move Jonathan around and explore it. Complex actions are done by choosing verbs and nouns from a scrolling window to form commands like "examine drawers", "open door" or "use lamp with tinderbox". Each room features several items that you can interact with and are indicated by having their description appear on-screen when you move across them. You can also talk to people by selecting a dialogue from a number of ready to use sentences. Dracula The Undead is a an old-style adventure game with lots of horror elements! Note that the game does not include a save-game feature which is a huge problem, unless you're using the Lynx with an AC adapter and have plenty of time (and battery) to play with it!

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The graphics are wonderful! Although based in shades of brown (!) the game uses impressively scaled images that look almost like digitized, old photographs. Most of the animation comes from Jonathan's movements, with a little gratuitous scaling as he moves towards and away from the player. On the other hand, the sound effects are a respectable mix of chip-generated and digitized effects, such as creaking doors and wolf howls, but they are few and far between. Instead, the game's most consistent sound is a moody background tune that plays continuously. Dracula The Undead is not a quite long adventure game. It can be finished in only a couple of hours, but it will definitely take you a while to figure out just what you're supposed to be doing from a room to another. It may not sport amazing 3D graphics but the details in the backgrounds are fantastic and it all looks so stylized that it's hard not to be impressed, even today.