Before anything else, I do believe it's best to state, that even if you do like A Vampyre Story, there's very little chance that there will ever be a conclusion to the story that is kicked on gear here. A Vampyre Story is the first part of what was meant to be a series. It even ends with a cliffhanger, so you might be doubly disappointed after the end credits start rolling and you realize, that the game came out in 2008.
Mona De Lafitte has a couple problems. A serious problem, she's not that keen to believe in, of being a vampire after the second problem, Shrowdy, her overly obsessive captor, turned her into the creature of the night. Shrowdy has prevented Mona from leaving the castle Warg they now reside in, but as a woman, who knows she belongs into the Parisian opera houses, she's not one to take the situation sitting down. With her sidekick, a vampire bat Froderick, she is rolling her figurative sleeves to find the way to escape the creep that kidnapped her and find her way back to Paris.
The first half of the game takes place in the castle Warg. The objective is as clear as you'd imagine: find a way to escape. The problem is three-pronged. The first thing is to find a way of obtaining the key to the rest of the castle including the boathouse, the second is to find a way of finding the means of transportation over the lake and the 3rd is to find a way of getting rid of Inky, the monster that lives in the lake, eating everyone foolish enough to set sails on the lake.
The second part of the story takes place in the town near the castle. From there, Mona has to find the means of travelling to Paris. Her being a vampire does cause some issues with this, as to travel, she needs dirt from her own grave, a coffin and horse and carriage. Getting the grave dirt is a tad hard, as she needs to go to the graveyard, but the place is covered with crosses, so Mona needs a way of getting around them. For a horse, she has to find a key the owner of the old nag lost and the wagon she can get only if she manages to find her way to the graveyard. So, those are the main puzzles to solve, really.
When A Vampyre Story was originally announced, there was some intrigued murmur around it, as it was designed by Bill Teller, who was responsible for the fantastic art style of Monkey Island 3. Not that being the lead artist on a good game makes someone a good game designer, but people were interested, nonetheless. After the release, it was met with something of a mixed reception, some praising it, some finding it mediocre and some rather poor.
If you've ever played Monkey Island 3 or Full Throttle, then the gameplay should be pretty obvious. It's a point and click game with a verb coin menu you can open by pressing a mouse button over a hotspot. You pick up stuff and use them to solve all kinds of puzzles preventing your progress. The puzzles generally are pretty fair, but not that interesting, which is a statement that goes pretty well with the overall script and design of the game as a whole.
Perhaps the most interesting gameplay idea of the game is Mona's inventory, which consists of items she can pick up and items she can remember. What this basically means is, Mona doesn't pick up everything she sees, she just remembers them for later use. You can then use those memories as needed and she then backtracks to get the item and proceeds using it. It's a kind of a solution to a problem, that doesn't really need to be solved. The problem is an adventure game allowing you to pick up everything not nailed down, no matter if the story has yet informed you of the necessity of the object or not. As a player, you probably have an idea that an item, you can pick up, is necessary, the problem only comes from the story side, as it might irk people if there's no story reason to pick something up yet. While the idea is cute, I'm not certain it was an actual problem that needed to be solved, as this whole thing just boils down on game design itself. You can always design puzzles that don't rely on picking up random junk.
The background art is really the best thing A Vampyre Story has to offer. The settings look fantastic, nicely painted and detailed. In many ways, it looks like I would have imagined Lucasarts and Sierra games to have evolved, had they kept designing 2D adventure titles. The character models are pretty decent and do have nice cartoonish aesthetics about them. The animation is mostly good as well. And that's the thing really, the game looks good and the soundtrack is pretty solid. Those just don't translate into the script and the puzzles.
A Vampyre Story has three big problems. The first is the script, which also reflects upon the second issue I had with it. The dialogue is horrible and while the voice cast does what it can, they just can't elevate the terrible writing above itself. And what's worse, the story can be, at times, very dialogue-heavy. Thank god for the possibility of skipping them. And speaking of skipping, you can actually skip walking between locations on the screen by pressing the spacebar and move directly to another screen by pressing the right mouse button on the exit locations on the screen. Thanks for the little mercies. The 3rd issue I had, is the puzzles. They are decent, but there's nothing really memorable about any of them. Through and through, the game is your typical point and click fare in every way imaginable. While Tiller did his best-known work with Lucasfilm games, a Lucasfilm adventure game designer he is not.
A Vampyre Story is a rather disappointing game. Even at best, it's merely a mediocre, forgettable title, that ends with a cliffhanger, teasing a second entry that will never be made. Bill Tiller has tried to make the sequel happen but has thus far fallen short and I don't really see why a sequel would happen now, over a decade later of the first game. The title was, according to some news, a sales disappointment, moving roughly 30 000 copies of the expected sales of 80 000. While some people liked it, it isn't thought of as some sort of a lost masterpiece. If it's remembered at all, it's more in the light of "oh yeah, that was a thing". Of course, a sequel could happen, but I can't really say I'm losing my sleep over the loss of one in this case.
If you want to check A Vampyre Story out yourself, it's sold at GOG. It's often in the sale there, so you can get it with less than a fiver. I can't really recommend it with its full price tag, but if you see it in a sale, then it's a decent purchase.
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