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Number of Ratings: 13
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1-13 of 13 - Edo, March 21, 2021
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
A short riff on vampires, September 21, 2017Written 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.
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
Agatha Christie meets Dracula, September 15, 2017This 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.
- Khalisar (Italy), March 18, 2015
- E.K., May 11, 2013
- A. Margo (Southern California), October 8, 2012
- stadtgorilla (Munich, Germany), April 17, 2012
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
Dracula: Guerilla Chef, March 9, 2012by 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.
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.
- Marco Innocenti (Florence, Italy), December 6, 2011
- EJ, November 28, 2011
- Jim Turner (Ireland), November 13, 2011
- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), November 6, 2011
- ifwizz (Berlin, Germany), November 6, 2011
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