If you want to know exactly the kind of adventure game that annoys the hell out of me, you needn't look further than Dracula 3. It's in one, fine package, a game that manages to rub me the wrong way almost constantly the longer you play it. What's worse is, that it starts out somewhat interesting, but soon turns into a collection of puzzles of which some of which are more or less filler material or padding unnecessarily to lengthen the game.
So, about 8 years after the release of Dracula 2, the series was picked up by Microids and Kheops Studio. Surprisingly enough, the gameplay was kept somewhat similar, so again, you get to play a tale of horror from a 1st person perspective with 360-degree backgrounds.
The story begins in 1920 in Rome. Cardinal Briganti has asked father Arno Moriani to join him to discuss an assignment he wants the young, PSTD ridden priest to embark upon. Arno, who still sees nightmares of his time in the 1st World War is to go to a small village of Vladoviste in Transylvania, where he is to commit research in the role of the Devils Advocate of the possibility of promoting Martha Calugraul into sainthood. She was a doctor and scientist, who after her death, is already seen as a saint by some of the local folk. It would be a great boon for a Catholic church to grant sainthood for a local Transylvanian, as that would give them a better footing among the people.
Vladoviste is still a place suffering from the aftermath of the war. Parts of the village are in ruins after the bombings and many people have died or left the ruins to look for something better. Besides the village, a point of importance near the city are the ruins of Castle of Twilight, an ancient castle of Vlad Tepes himself.
After speaking with many locals, Arno begins to worry, that Martha's canonization could be problematic. The good doctor held superstitious beliefs about vampires, believing them to be real. This is confirmed by the local priest a well, who has left the village to a sanitarium because of his ailing health. This twist leads Arno into another investigation: Briganti asks him to write a study dispersing the vampire myth once and for all.
After the murder of a local reporter Stephen Luca, Arno begins to see the vampires as a genuine threat. Luca had tried to convince Arno of the reality of Dracula, but he had dismissed the man. He had his mission and the people he spoke to, seemed to think of Luca as an untrustworthy character who was even kicked out by the newspaper he worked for. What convinces Arno is, that Luca claimed powerful entities not wanting Dracula to be researched and the fact that he was murdered just before he was about to embark on a trip to Turkey to walk the Path of the Dragon. This is the path those who wish to find Dracula have to follow.
Arno decides it's up to him to put an end to the terror of Dracula. He goes to Turkey to walk the path. There he learns some clues on how Tepes became the monster he is. During his imprisonment in Turkey, he was shackled in a cave, which was used as a pantry for a monster living nearby. Instead of being killed, Tepes made a deal with her and escaped. The priest returns to Vladoviste, where things have taken a turn to worse. Iron Guard has ransacked the place. They've even placed a bomb into Arno's hotel room. Furthermore, the young doctor who had replaced Martha, Maria Florescu has gone missing and there's only a bloody garb of hers to be found in the clinic.
With the help of a gipsy woman, Arno finally learns the true nature of his enemies. A young archaeologist Janos Pekmaster is a member of a Thule Society, sent to the village to seek the Path as well. He is working with doctor von Krüger, who had disguised his interest in Vladoviste as an attempt of finding a cure for a rare blood disease ailing the local folk.
Knowing now that the secret society is seeking Dracula for their own nefarious reasons, Arno heads to complete the Path of the Dracula, finally confronting the old bloodsucker in the caverns beneath the crumbling castle. There he also learns that Maria is actually Martha, who had successfully walked the path and become immortal. She wants Arno to succeed as well, because of her own feelings towards the young priest. Arno is, however, willing to sacrifice himself in order to stop Dracula and he blows up the path to his tomb, preventing Janos and Krüger from entering. The final curtain takes place in London during the 2nd World War, where Janos has been captured as a spy. There, the brass wants information about Project D he and Krüger took part in Transylvania.
During writing the summary of the game, I came to the conclusion that it's a shame the game doesn't match the story it has, as it is actually a pretty solid story in its own right. There's a lot of intrigue and mystery about it and it has, at its best, a great atmosphere. It's really the design that brings the game down.
What I mean by the design bringing the game down is, that Dracula 3 is more interested in beginning a puzzle game. It has the kind of puzzles that would work just as well with no story connected to them. Even the puzzles that are seemingly connected to the story, feel overly convoluted. Then there's the tedious Enigma machine puzzle and a couple of blood testing puzzles which are nothing short of busywork. In many places, you also have to be very aware of how Roman numerals work. If you do, some puzzles are considerably easier. So, you know, keep those at hand.
Another big problem with the puzzles is the highly fluctuating difficulty rate. Instead of having slowly increasing difficulty, one point in-game can have puzzles with a high variety in difficulty with, at worst, very little indication on what you should actually do. The halt of progress is at times made worse by the fact that you know what you should do, but have very little idea on how to actually approach it. And while there are documents that do provide hints, the surprisingly messy inventory system doesn't make perusing them a simple task.
Let's talk about the inventory system for a moment. It's odd. I don't really know what the developers were trying to do with it, to be honest. When you pick up items they do go to your inventory, but not to your main inventory. No, they go to some sort of "Transit Zone", which is a single slot at the right corner of the inventory screen. The items pile up there and you can arrange them to your main inventory either manually or automatically. There's no actual use for it, even as a quick slot. It's pointless, utterly pointless.
The document inventory is somewhat cumbersome to use and I personally found navigating it somehow harder than it should have been. You can also tag the documents, which benefits the final puzzle the most. I don't know, in theory, it's usable, but in practice, it is just something that feels like a chore to go through.
There's also a To Do-list, which is, again, in theory, a good thing, but in practice doesn't really provide that much help. At best, it has several points you need to complete, but usually, it just has the recommendation to peruse the Bible at random to find help. This literally means you should read the in-game bible by pressing the RANDOM button to see what passages it provides. These passages are the developer's idea of a hint system. And believe me, this is the kind of game that would need a much better system than that.
So, it's not only the matter of the game leaning more towards being a puzzle game in a disguise of an adventure, but also the poorly implemented difficulty range, as well as the games inability to properly hint on what you should be doing. It's the kind of design I personally find exhausting as many of the puzzles feel more like padding rather than something that flows genuinely from the story itself. I find this kind of style less rewarding what comes to progress as you are doing puzzles for puzzle's sake, not as something that feels a genuine part of the world and story the game is set in.
The way this comes even more evident is, that the game can introduce you to an element, for example, Arno gains an extra sensitive hearing at one point that can be used to solve a lock puzzle. But this element is almost completely forgotten after the moment the skill was opened, despite there being other lock puzzles after it. The game just invents excuses on why the hearing can't be used as the designer wanted to chuck different kinds of puzzles into the mix instead.
I'm sure there are people who will find this kind of gameplay well suited for them. If you enjoy solving puzzles and piecing together clues from various sources, including ones that come from outside the game itself, you might like Dracula 3 despite its design issues. If you, however, want the game to be more self-contained in terms of what kind of help it offers for solving the puzzles, it's likely you won't like it.
As a warning about the technical state of Dracula 3, the current versions sold may have problems when run under Windows 10. These problems range from not being able to run the game on full screen (which means playing it on a small window), to the graphics flickering and menus disappearing. Using dgVoodoo wrapper helped me, but might not work for everyone. Another option is to fiddle with compatibility settings, which is something that helped me at first, but stopped working around when I got to Turkey.
Dracula 3 doesn't have much to do with the two previous games and can be played without any knowledge of them. That said, even with their flaws, I find the first two games vastly better at least as far as game design goes. As for the story, Dracula 3 is the best of the three.
Dracula 3 is available through GOG and Steam for those who want it.
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