Dracula: The Last Sanctuary (PC)

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The majority of puzzles in Dracula: The Last Sanctuary are locked-door puzzles. Some require you to use inventory items, while others are self-contained and require you to pore over Dracula's cryptic notebooks looking for clues. Many of the latter type are very hard, and most of them will repeat, with different solutions, throughout the game. The repetition of puzzles tends to seem like an artificial means of lengthening the game, but players who are fond of this style of puzzle will undoubtedly find themselves suitably challenged. Occasionally, though, the game cheats. One door puzzle requires you to find and destroy three guardians that prevent you from entering. The catch is that the guardians aren't labeled and blend into the background, and no indication is given that you can interact with them. So not only do you have to sweep the screen with your mouse, but you also must do so blindly, as you are never given any indication of when you are near something important.

There are many frightening adventure games. Sanitarium, Amber: Journeys Beyond, and The Beast Within all balanced challenging puzzle solving with suspenseful storytelling. Dracula: The Last Sanctuary doesn't even manage to maintain a slightly creepy atmosphere. The opening would lead you to believe otherwise, because of its creepy music that sets the stage for a terrifying adventure. Unfortunately, this music is all but absent from the game afterward. The voice acting doesn't help: The confused-sounding actors ham it up like they're auditioning for a part in Mark Borchadt's Coven.

The game's saving grace is its graphics, which are pixilated and muddy during in-game sequences, but beautiful in the cutscenes. Virtually no game to date, apart from Dracula Resurrection, has ever featured such striking characters. They are stylized and detailed and unsettling in a way that the rest of the game should have been.

Dracula: The Last Sanctuary has huge lapses in logic, no atmosphere, and very little in the way of respect for Bram Stoker's original story. It also has great graphics and a tomb full of difficult puzzles. The puzzles will be enough for those who are content with being limited to the challenge of finding a way past locked doors and blocked passageways. But great games transcend their genre's limitations, while good games work within them. Mediocre games, like Dracula: The Last Sanctuary, only serve to remind us of why such things are limitations in the first place.

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