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don't touch the door!

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EphemeralEnigmas
@EphemeralEnigmas

This Halloween's game is Dracula the Undead, a technical showcase for the Lynx that adapts Bram Stoker's novel into the adventure game format. An adventure game on the Lynx? It's more likely than you may think!

Dracula the Undead is a serious technical feat on the Lynx. Take a look at some screenshots or watch a video and you'll see some of nicest visuals and atmosphere you can get on the platform. It uses lighting and sprite scaling in ways that create a mood and feel unheard of on the platform It's really cool! Dracula is also a fascinating oddity on the console, being the only adventure game to release on the Lynx. It seems like a recipe for an interesting but overambitious experiment, and sure enough, that's pretty much what you get.

Despite the excellent presentation, Dracula the Undead is as straightforward as adventure games get. You walk around, find items, use said items, and try to figure out where to go. There's nothing wrong with the formula, but likely due to limitations of all kinds (since it's a Lynx game, you can't even save!), there just isn't much about Dracula that makes it interesting beyond its presentation. There's little in the way of dialogue (though it's a lot for Lynx standards!), the puzzles never evolve beyond fetching items, there are only a couple of spots where you can lose and they're easily avoided once you know about them, and a large portion of the game is spent climbing along a wall in the slowest, most agonizing fashion possible. What's supposed to be a horror experience ends up being anything but because once you see the lack of mechanical/scenario evolution over the course of the game, the only threat that remains is having to climb that accursed wall again. Still, even though it's not a great experience at all, if I'm being frank, Dracula the Undead is absolutely worthy of respect just for how truly singular it is on its platform of choice, a fascinating little historical footnote for the Lynx if there ever was one.


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