The Horror of Rylvania

This game was the earliest big horror hit after the Lurking Horror. It was made by Adventions, who were the most influential group between the end of Infocom and the rise of Inform.

Rylvania is one of their better games, with The Legend Lives!, because it eschews the horrible puns and bad humor of earlier games (except for one item which is an ad for Unnkulia 0). However, it is still all over the map with tone.

It has some of the feel of Bram Smoker's original Dracula, with a trip through Europe, wolves, a fearful village, an abandoned castle, the torment of a loved one.

Like all Adventions games, it is a bit unfair or tedious at times, but overall not bad for fans of old school games.

It has some gratuitous violence at some points which made the PCs characterization hard to figure out.

This is the way it should always be done. The atmosphere is never ruined by silly inside jokes or pseudo intellectual political statements. The atmosphere is just perfect. Once you get to the castle it feels a lot like Shadowgate but with more interaction with NPCs (Spoiler - click to show)when the doctor is chasing you your pulse really rises. It has a time limit (Spoiler - click to show)once you become a vampire you may die of hunger. Some items in the castle are completely useless so you are not likely to finish the game on the first or second run without some experimentation. You have to write lots of notes and that's part of the greatness of this game. It never gets boring thanks to the awesome story and the flawless atmosphere. There are only a couple of references to Looney Tunes, Tin Tin and other stuff that never break the atmosphere.
Play it. And do not use a walkthrough. Part of the enjoyment is to figure stuff out by yourself writing notes. You don't want to finish it in 45 minutes (totally possible with a walkthrough, since the game is not terribly long).