Dracula's Underground Crypt

The game has a warning at the beginning saying (roughly) that the game is undertested and any bugs should be ignored. "Well," I thought to myself as I played it, "that's not a good sign." But I ignored the warning and played on anyway, and sadly found that the warning was absolutely right.

What kind of bugs are in this game, you might ask? Well, trying to avoid spoilers, an npc can be described as dropping something that he already dropped and is lying on the floor, syntax bugs that make at least one puzzle almost unsolvable, guess the verb problems that severely hamper another, etc., etc., etc. What makes these problems even worse is that the game was very funny. Sure, its sense of humor may not appeal to everyone, but it certainly worked for me, outside of couple of misses.

Overall, I can't say my time playing this game was wasted, but I also can't recommend it in good faith. All I can say is wait for a version where the author fixes all the bugs.

This game has a vote for it on the 'worst IF ever' poll, but I don't think it's there. It's just problematic. I evaluate games on the following five categories:

Polish: Not here. The game's bugs are numerous.

Descriptiveness: Well, it succeeds pretty well here, to be honest.

Interactivity: Problematic. It's very hard to guess what actions you are supposed to do.

Emotional impact: Dampened by the obnoxious jerk professor and the overly objectified Eva.

First up, there is obviously some sort of story behind a google account name eggheadcheesybird. I always enjoy odd usernames, well done. In some ways however, that was the funniest part of this evening.

The professor was characterised very well and was quite unlikeable as was no doubt intended. I particularly enjoyed the diary, it put everything into perspective. I didn’t find a way to kill the professor unfortunately, I was hoping i’d be able to throw the flesh eating bookworms at him (also mildly amusing), but it would let me. Or stake him.

There were a few bugs. The biggest one was that the professor kept talking and moving and doing things when he was in a different room than the character, and you could lift the pillow and search things whilst the professor was sitting on it.

There was a walkthrough built in that was nearly less than useless. I needed it to get to the (Spoiler - click to show)underground chamber, given that (Spoiler - click to show)the statues didnt seem to be mentioned in descriptions anywhere, but even knowing what I had to do in there (Spoiler - click to show)(get a rubbing of the coffin lid) it still led to a painful guess the verb puzzle in which my character beat himself to death several times with (Spoiler - click to show)charcoal and paper.

(Spoiler - click to show)The ressurection pages combined with the coffin message suggest you can resserect the female vampire and yet dripping blood in the urn fails to work and I was completely unable to find any of the interesting endings. On the whole, an interesting try marred by poor execution and overambitiousness. It may have been better to ignore the open ended idea and at least implement -one- full path that was interesting.

I didn’t feel much urge to replay it, open ended or not.
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Review initially posted on Silicon Dreams during the 2008 IF Comp
(https://frater.wordpress.com/2008/10/21/if-competition-2008-review-4-draculas-underground-crypt/)