The Horror of Rylvania

Baf's Guide

Creepy, satisfyingly scary. You're on a hiking trip in Central Europe, and your companion gets killed by werewolves--and you're next on the menu. There are lots of gratuitous puzzles, and some of them aren't very interesting--but a few are pretty creative, and the plot is unusually well done for a puzzle-oriented game. Has an interesting twist at the end--it's an early prototype of what's come to be known as the Zarfian ending. Very gory in parts. Originally released as shareware, but when a project to release all the Adventions games on a CD failed, this and all the rest were made available for free.

-- Duncan Stevens

A nice vampire game. Very much based on object puzzles and hunting for potion ingredients, but there's some good interactive storytelling underlying it. Full of clichés, but it delivers them with considerable gusto. I hope I'm not giving away too much here, but it's hard to write a review without mentioning the first of the game's big plot twists: fairly early on, the player character is turned into a vampire. It doesn't really carry the this far enough, though. Your special powers are few and unsatisfying, you only seem to have superhuman strength when the plot calls for it, and you can be killed surprisingly easily for one of the undead. But it does provide the basis for a modal environment, with some locations that you can only visit as a human and others that you can only visit as a vampire. Two mazes, scattered violence, easy to lock yourself out of victory, expects you to dig in places just because you can. The "help" command gives gentle guidance through the early stages of the game.

-- Carl Muckenhoupt