A couple of decades back, it was still rare to see a game that is such a direct sequel to its predecessor as Dracula 2 is. It's so direct, in fact, that its opening movie is the exact ending cinematic from the first game, where Jonathan and Mina escape Dracula's castle with a flying machine designed by Leonardo da Vinci. Cue to London a week later, where Jonathan is trying to find the way of ridding the world of Dracula for good, while ol' fangers is thirsting after Mina. Jonathan has been working with Dr Seward, who also has been studying the Dragon Ring Jonathan found in the first game.
The game itself begins from a Carfax Abbey, the former London residence of Dracula. From there, Jonathan hopes to find some clues of the current whereabouts of his nemesis. A couple of puzzles later, we stumble on one of the biggest differences between the first game and its sequel: you can now die. At Carfax, after locating a corpse of an unfortunate fellow called Peabody, Jonathan is attacked by a group of humanoid vampire monsters. This sets the game on a timer and if you are not able to figure out how to defeat the monsters, you'll get a game over. So the scenes are not action-based, they are just timed puzzles where the fail state is death.
The previous game let you explore the locations and the puzzles very freely. While the atmosphere was brooding, there was no, at least to my knowledge, the possibility to actually die in it, so saving was often wasn't a prerequisite. With the sequel saving while entering a new location is advisable, as otherwise, you might lose a good chunk of progress.
In any case, after some monster killing, Jonathan finds himself from the London sewers, which lead him back to Seward's Asulym, where Mina is being treated. Seward informs that there is a piece missing from the Dragon Ring. This piece could be used against Dracula, so finding it is vital. There's also a bit of news of Dracula having bought a local movie theatre called The Styx. Seward then proceeds to place Mina under hypnosis, under which she recalls the nearby location, Highgate Cemetery, where she saw Dracula entering a tomb.
Jonathan goes there and manages to find Dracula's hideout. He is, however, unable to enter it, as it is being guarded by three stone gargoyles that emit some sort of protective spell, rendering him unconscious. The next morning, Jonathan returns to the asylum, only to find everyone missing. He snoops around and manages to find the Dragon Ring as well as a member of the hospital staff who has been turned into a vampire.
But all is not yet lost. Jonathan also finds a recipe for a vampire repellent, which he manages to brew up. Then there is a patient called Hopkins, who has been a servant of Dracula. He agrees to help Jonathan if he gives him the Dragon Ring for safekeeping. In return, Hopkins gives him spectacles that help him see things usually hidden from mortal eyes.
The next stop is the Styx theatre, where Jonathan learns that Dracula is a budding horror movie director. He's also promptly gassed after which he wakes up from Dracula's bedroom in Translyvania. The wrinkly face demands to know where the Ring is hidden. Jonathan refuses to tell him a thing and Dracula leaves him for the time being.
It doesn't take long for Jonathan to figure out that they are still in London, on a movie set to be exact. There he is chased by a mechanical Dracula which he destroys and legs to Carfax after Seward in the midst of being turned into a vampire agrees to destroy The Styx. Jonathan's task is to burn Carfax to the ground. He does exactly that and goes back to the asylum, where he finds a note left by Hopkins telling him a way of entering Dracula's tomb at Highgate. First, he has to build a device that can diffuse the statues guarding the tomb. Luckily Seward had designed just such a device. What an incredible plot-related coincidence!
At the cemetery, Jonathan does get in the tomb but soon learns that Dracula is off to Transylvania with Mina, so the next destination is obvious. There he meets, again, Dorko, who tells him how to repair the Dragon Ring before she is offed by one of the brides of Dracula who steal the ring. This means Jonathan has to go through several traps before he can finally take the cable car Dracula has for some reason installed to his mountain sanctuary.
Now the final encounter draws near. Jonathan takes care of Dracula's lackeys and proceeds deeper into the castle. There he finally finds Dracula and Mina, who is slowly forgetting her past with Jonathan. He proves their love with a wedding ring which infuriates Dracula who tells him he is going to kill both of them. Jonathan thinks on his feet and plunges the missing piece back to the Dragon Ring, causing it to thwart the evil it radiates. Dracula's sanctuary collapses, killing him and his brides in the process.
But is this truly the end?
If the first game was more interested in being an interactive movie, Dracula 2 is trying to bring more emphasis on being a game. It has more puzzles, some of which are actually quite hard, and many of the locations are designed to be puzzle environments instead of just being there for the atmosphere. As such, if you were expecting Dracula 2 to be the same kind of experience as the first, you might be sorely disappointed. Not only because of the added difficulty but because the story does make very little sense towards the end. In general, the story never quite manages to fit together the more serious tones of horror with a bit more whimsical nature of magic and science. Because of this, some locations feel they are there just for the sake of getting nice set pieces with puzzles instead of a genuine narrative need.
Another, perhaps the most annoying aspect of the game, is the even increased difficulty in finding hotspots. This goes down to every aspect, be it finding objects from the scenes or just plain navigating around. Often this goes down to pixel-hunting while you are just combing the 360-degree scenes for a hotspot that helps you to proceed. This was already bad in the first game, but here the developers have doubled down on it.
Graphically, Dracula 2 is more or less on par with the previous entry. This isn't surprising, as there was roughly only a year between the two games. This quick development cycle is visible especially in the latter half of the game in Transylvania, where many of the backgrounds are recycled from the first game. The character models are, as well, taken from the first game. The animation quality has suffered a bit, especially on facial closeups, where some tearing and artefacts can be quite clearly seen on the models.
The gameplay is more or less the same as it was in the first game. The scenes are shown in 360-degree locations you can freely pan around. You hunt for hotspots, find items and puzzles and watch a lot of cutscenes in the process. The biggest addition is the timed sequences during which you can die. All in all, relatively standard fare for an adventure game like this.
As a whole, Dracula 2 was clearly meant to be a conclusion for the 1st game. You can also say, it feels like a game that should have been a part of the first game but was cut out because of time and budget reasons. In a sense, the two games form a larger episodic game. Dracula 3 takes its cues from here and jumps forward in time, giving the stage to new characters and a story, where Dracula and the locations act as the connecting elements.
I liked Dracula 2 less than the first game. It has a feel of being rushed and the gameplay suffers greatly because of it. While I liked the atmosphere of the game, the story takes some rather silly turns and while there's more game in Dracula 2, it feels somewhat inferior in comparison to the first game.
If you do get a kick out of games that try their best in obscuring your progress, you might get a kick out from Dracula 2. Now, I don't mind hard games, but with Dracula 2, the difficulty stems more from the general technical clunkiness instead of a genuine challenge most of the time at least. Some puzzles are very difficult, even unfair, but more often than not, there's just the frustration of not finding the right hotspot despite you know there should be one.
With that in mind, if you do want to see the ending of the tale of Jonathan and Mina Harker versus Dracula, you can get the game from GOG and Steam. But you can consider yourself warned.
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