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About the Story1899: On the way to your well-earned summer vacation, the Orient Express gets stuck in a snow drift – and there is a murderer on board. Time to get out of your coffin and investigate!Game Details
Language: English (en)
First Publication Date: October 31, 2011 Current Version: 2 License: Freeware Development System: Inform 7 Forgiveness Rating: Polite IFID: 9851B076-C3D9-4B7B-916C-6C602C5B59B9 TUID: 3fmgwtnx2x6zbsje |
Awards
1st Place - Ectocomp 2011
News
Release 2 December 19, 2011
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Member Reviews
| Average Rating: ![]() Number of Reviews: 3 Write a review |
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:

Written for ECTOCOMP, Bloodless is a short game which takes inspiration from - what else? - Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. You play a vampire on board a delayed train. Someone's had the life sucked out of them, but it definitely wasn't you. Time to investigate!
Bloodless may not be hugely surprising, but is a solid, short game, with light-hearted, bare-bones narration along with relative straightforward puzzles, of a variety familiar to IF.
Bloodless, being set on a train, has a spatial layout similar to the long, featureless corridors so beloved to this genre, but grouping rooms into carriages chunks them into more memorable sections. Bloodless is a pretty entertaining, bite-sized riff on the vampire genre.
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3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:

by Sam Kabo Ashwell (Seattle)
Related reviews: vampire, dracula, horror, genre, train, setting, Victorian, oldschool, minicomp, speedif, ectocomp
1899: a train is trapped by snow, and a murder has been committed; but you are Count Dracula, and identifying the murderer is only one part of the more pressing objective of getting some blood. Related reviews: vampire, dracula, horror, genre, train, setting, Victorian, oldschool, minicomp, speedif, ectocomp
Written in 3 hours for Ectocomp, in which it placed 1st of 8, this is essentially a speedIF. That considered, it's an impressive piece of work, if not a hugely distinctive one. It's designed along unadventurous but very solid lines; gather some inventory, assess the situation, solve a straightforward puzzle. The map is well-organised, the puzzles are easy to pick up without being obvious, and you are deftly turned away from red herrings. The terse efficiency failed me at (Spoiler - click to show)lighting the stove, where failure responses don't really signal the correct action; otherwise, for a game written this quickly it's remarkably robust.
Genuinely horrific effects take time to build and a lot of fine-tuning, and few Ectocomp games really attempt to create them; Bloodless is no exception, and mostly feels like a neutral-affect oldschool piece. It does, however, manage to develop a strong, atmospheric setting in a few minimalist strokes; I got a good impression of the creaky, dimly-lit, narrow environment of the train carriages.
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2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:

This game is similar to both Murder on the Orient Express and Dracula.
You awake from your coffin on a train to discover that a passenger has had their blood drained--and not by you.
This game has many of the usual speed-IF problems (undercluing and underimplementation), but it is in the top 10% of all speed-IF, and quite enjoyable.
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Recommended Lists
Bloodless on the Orient Express appears in the following Recommended Lists:Ectocomp Games (All English Winners/Entries) by thecanvasrose
A list I created for myself so I can play all of these games. Sorted by rank and year. English entries. I'll add descriptions and my own ratings (out of 5 stars) to the entries in this list as I go through them.
This is version 5 of this page, edited by RavenWorks on 15 October 2018 at 11:42am. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item