The Haunted Hoard: Dracula 2: The Last Sanctuary (PC)

The first game in the Dracula series, Dracula: Resurrection, sought to continue the tale told in the original novel. However, they made the baffling decision to never have the player even encounter Dracula in the game, the confrontation delayed until a potential sequel. While the game did give you the small victory of saving the hero’s wife Mina Harker from Dracula’s minions, the sequel decides to completely undo that progress with her getting captured again. Thankfully, Jonathan Harker will finally get to meet his old vampiric foe as they actually come into direct conflict this time around in Dracula 2: The Last Sanctuary.

 

Sometimes known just as Dracula: The Last Sanctuary, its plot features Jonathan returning to England after facing Dracula’s minions in Transylvania. However, the world’s most famous vampire is operating in the area, seeking to reclaim Mina to help him reassert his power as a mighty vampire lord. Jonathan Harker will have to venture across England and Transylvania both to stop him, meeting characters both new and familiar along the way. Dr. Seward assists the hero in trying to uncover what can stop Dracula, a former thrall of Dracula’s named Hopkins provides additional insight, and the count himself is finally in the same room as Jonathan at times, doing all he can to stymie Jonathan’s efforts to stop him. There are new minions to the dark lord as well, large bat men proving to be instant kills if not dealt with appropriately and near invincible vampire servants requiring the right tools to put down when encountered, the story of the antagonist fleshed out more as you grow closer and closer to taking him down. From the tale of his unfortunate brother Radu to the mysterious location of the vampire’s last sanctuary, the plot moves forward pretty well and motivates the point and click gameplay nicely with its abundance of details, but the scenes where characters speak are often a bit ridiculous. The character models don’t seem to ever come to a complete stop, the animators perhaps nervous that leaving them still for a second might make them look cheap, so instead we are left with overexaggerated gestures and characters who look jumpy and anxious since they have to keep leaning around and gesticulating to show they’re alive. While this works for characters like the eccentric Hopkins who is meant to have a neurosis, Dracula and Jonathan end up more like campy actors then the two serious pillars of a serious plot.

The point and click gameplay of the first Dracula game has been brought over essentially untouched, bringing with it its positives and negatives and the still lingering question of why they didn’t combine Resurrection and The Last Sanctuary into one game with a more robust story. To make progress in Dracula 2: The Last Sanctuary, the player must use items in the available environment to get passed Dracula’s minions, open secret passageways, or uncover vital details that reveal your next course of action. There are actually quite a lot of interesting and creative puzzles scattered throughout the adventure, some interesting in concept like trying to take down a robotic Dracula prop and others that require careful thinking like navigating a deadly checkerboard or learning the secret of an expansive graveyard. Items come in plenty of varieties, but some consistently useful ones include a gun that isn’t so much used for combat as it is timed puzzle solving as you need to shoot enemies properly as a timer bar depletes and a pair of vampire glasses that show you things you otherwise couldn’t see, although these glasses can sometimes prove finicky in use since you need to use them on specific objects rather than just wearing them to see whatever might be hidden from view. Trying to kill bat monsters with mirrors and sunlight or figuring out how to brew an anti-vampire potion are certainly strong ideas, and the game will give you things like a book filled with clues early on that are only reincorporated much later for an interesting twist on its usual bequeathing of a bunch of items only relevant to the current area, but there are puzzles that require odd leaps in logic as well, sometimes the player not even giving much instruction on what to do next or where to go. Even the good puzzles can encounter this issue as the exact actions needed are made oddly cumbersome or their execution obtuse, but this mostly comes down to a flaw in the point-and-click design.

The game is viewed in first-person outside of cutscenes, but it is implemented in an awkward way. You do not walk around freely, instead needing to click areas to move between them so your static standing position can change. You can look around the area you’re facing, but some areas require you to be standing in the right position to interact with objects, meaning you might be standing near a window, but to look at it requires first clicking on it to approach the rigidly defined area where you can interact with it. In some cases this can screech things to halt as you have to search all around for wherever your mouse cursor will register as the way to move forward, and this extends to any clickable item in general. There is a change to the cursor into different shapes when you have found an interactive object to help a bit, but the regions where this triggers on screen are much too small for their own good. Dracula 2: The Last Sanctuary is littered with annoying pixel hunts, the player sometimes seeing objects they need but are unable to grab unless they’re standing right or found the one spot where the cursor allows it. Many areas in the game can be incredibly dark as well, with key items hidden in the darkness just to make searching for the miniscule area of interest that much more agonizing, and all of this gets exacerbated when you are in a particularly large area with many places to potentially search.

 

When there are plenty of places to go between in Dracula 2: The Resurrection, the design can break down. Having multiple screens where a seemingly innocuous portion of a still image is meant to be clicked on to continue weighs down what should be areas focused more on encouraging creative puzzle solving rather than brute forcing things with what items are on hand. Dracula 2: The Last Sanctuary wants you to think before solving some puzzles, but others ask you to search a large area for the spots you can dig, activate your glasses on a random patch of air, or look the exact direction required to walk into a new area. The momentum of the better puzzles can screech to a halt when suddenly you don’t have the object that barely sticks out in the area around you, and with some objects requiring multiple types of manipulation before giving up their goodies, you might have to do multiple pixel hunts in a row to uncover that hidden object. Other things like scooping up snow from only one specific pile on a snow-covered roof really strain what feels acceptable, but you have the freedom to scour around to slowly but eventually find it… except for during the timed sections of course. One particularly bothersome area involves swimming around underwater where, of course, you can only swim around by finding the right small area to click despite having plenty of room to look around, and since a Game Over requires loading a save file, frequent saving is a must to avoid some of the time-sensitive problems you’ll encounter. The timer isn’t always harsh and feels like a tolerable addition to some puzzles, especially the late game gauntlet that is mostly free of the game’s usual bugbears, but there are far too many hours spent with the niggling annoyances to let the impressive or interesting puzzles carry the experience.

THE VERDICT: Dracula 2: The Last Sanctuary feels like a second half to the original game both in its plot and in its flaws. While we get a proper confrontation with the dark lord this time around, getting there involves puzzles that could have been interesting challenges hurt by the pixel hunts, issues with overly dark visuals, unclear objectives, and the rare unfortunate timer. Some imaginative, cleaner inventory puzzles do exist as do ones that require creativity and logic to overcome, but too many times the player will struggle against barriers where they are meant to behave in one incredibly specific way that is difficult to ascertain. While we do get to battle Dracula himself this time around, it’s a journey with too many unfortunate barriers and screen scouring to make getting there worth the effort.

 

And so, I give Dracula 2: The Last Sanctuary for PC…

A BAD rating. Much like with Dracula: Resurrection I must first caution prospective players to get the original release or GOG.com’s version as the Steam copy many would be tempted to buy seems to be a buggy and broken mess on top of already being a game that naturally tests your patience with its odd design choices. Admittedly, Dracula 2: The Last Sanctuary was pushing against the barrier of 3D gaming on PC at the time of its release, so things like the overly animated characters are somewhat easy to accept, and the odd movement between areas is certain born from an attempt to make detailed backdrops without having to render them for proper navigation. However, navigation didn’t have to be mapped to only small segments of the screen you can click, and the detection for your cursor’s placement is a constant problem to solving even the best puzzles in the game. It’s quite easy to mouse over objects of import and not trigger the cursor to change into one of the symbols that tells you it’s interactive, the mind inclined to write it off only to find out later it’s what is necessary, you just didn’t float over the small exact spot of importance. When you aren’t given clear directions on a current goal this gets especially bothersome, the player essentially having to test every inch of any possible area of interest to uncover what the path forward might be.

 

There are still moments where Dracula 2: The Last Sanctuary does its problem solving properly and the little niggling points briefly fade into the background, but not enough to rescue it from being an overall slow and sometimes frustrating experience. Finally getting to face Dracula after a previous game delayed the meeting for so long is rewarding in some ways, but outside of aspects like development time and financial incentives, it still feels like the first two Dracula games should just be one large title with their weaker moment trimmed out. It’s disappointing both games were harmed so much by their point and click interface’s issues, and while taking down the legendary vampire should certainly be difficult, this game unfortunately makes that true with obtuse and awkward controls and ideas more than by placing down more legitimate challenges.