The Haunted Hoard: The Astonishing Adventures of Mr. Weems and the She Vampires (ZX Spectrum)

There is a certain design approach that seems fairly popular on the ZX Spectrum where the player is destined to get Game Over after Game Over as they figure out what to do through failure. There are some games like Revenge of the C5 where this manifests as a pure test of memorization where your losses come from the fact you couldn’t know the right way in advance, but there are also games like Dizzy – The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure where the game almost makes it interesting to explore and uncover what you’re meant to be doing but the rough movement keeps sabotaging your efforts. I wish I would be able to say The Astonishing Adventures of Mr. Weems and the She Vampires figured out how to do this formula properly, but while it comes close by making the learning process approachable, it also includes a few elements that still keep it from hitting on what could make this game style enjoyable.

The Astonishing Adventures of Mr. Weems and the She Vampires is about Mr. Weems, an unassuming former accountant who apparently has just moved on from a stint as a lion tamer to instead become a vampire hunter. At the heart of the Mansion of the She Vampires lies the Great She Vampire herself, the bloodsucker’s minions patrolling its six floors to help guard the five items required to kill her. To be able to take down the Great She Vampire, Mr. Weems will need to find the box with the relevant item on each floor, make it to the sixth floor to utilize them, and then escape by going back up through all the other floors.

No matter how good you end up getting at The Astonishing Adventures of Mr. Weems and the She Vampires, you will always have one consistent danger to worry about: running out of blood. When this action game begins, you start off with a blood count of 1000 that gradually ticks down as long as you’re playing. This is a bit of a timer in some ways and definitely keeps you active to avoid unnecessary waste, and the game has a “Fang Length” setting that determines how fast the blood drains passively if you want to make the game harder. However, Blood Count is also your health, meaning any contact with the monsters in the mansion will drain it as well. Curiously enough, running into pots scattered around this shooter’s single screen rooms will also drain your blood a bit, but this might tie to the fact that every pot can become a bat.

When you enter a screen with monsters on it, one pot will almost always become Frankenstein’s Monster while a few others will turn into bats. Mr. Weems comes equipped with a garlic gun that he can fire fairly quickly, the moment the garlic bullet makes contact with something or disappears off-screen allowing you to fire your next shot. Bats and pots only take a single shot to take out, but Frankenstein’s Monster is a bit more durable. In some rooms it can be smarter to destroy as many pots as possible to prevent more bats from appearing and potentially flying at you from unfortunate angles, but in others it can be smart to find a safe spot and just fire on the creatures as they approach, especially since the next pot that transforms into a new monster will be one that is fairly close to Mr. Weems. Once every monster on-screen is defeated though, you can start shooting the coffins, these preventing monsters from reappearing next time you visit that room. Inevitably you’ll retread ground just trying to find where to go, but a good escape route after killing the Great She Vampire is also important to set up or else you’ll likely not have enough blood to make it to the end if you have to fight through everything all over again.

Exploration actually has a few interesting factors tied to what you’re looking for. To get around the six floors you’ll inevitably need to find keys to open gates, but all keys can be used on any gate, meaning when you spot one out in the open you can determine if it’s worth the risk to grab it. You can find Garlic Bombs as well that destroy almost everything on screen, it being a great way to get out of a pinch or quickly clear a room that might have too many pots to make wiping it out the normal way a good time investment. Mr. Weems does have a limited time garlic pill that will briefly make him stop losing blood and make him invincible, but it is a one-time use so it also needs to be used strategically if you want to make it through the game with blood to spare. Thankfully, there are blood vials to be found around the mansion, and the game isn’t too stingy with them either. You will almost inevitably die on your first few playthroughs as the ticking timer that is your blood count means you won’t be able to reach the end in time, but as you explore you’ll figure out where keys are, which routes you don’t need to take, and you’ll find places to top off your blood so you can press in deeper. A floor doesn’t necessarily become easy once you know where all the helpful goodies are, but you can traverse them much more quickly and head deeper into the mansion more formidable than your last run. Your mental maps and item knowledge will get you to the area you need to explore and since the game’s six floors aren’t too large, it does feel like eventually you can figure out the route you need to go and clearing the game feels achievable so long as you don’t get careless.

At least, that’s what the hope would be, and that’s where The Astonishing Adventures of Mr. Weems and the She Vampires hits those unfortunate snags that undermine its otherwise effective focus on being able to do better after each failure. First and perhaps least offensive is the fact the necessary route to the end of the game requires you to find destructible walls that show no sign they can be broken. If you just explore every available room on a floor without busting down innocuous walls, you will not always find the exit to the next one. Conceivably, you can just start shooting every wall to figure things out though, and shooting is fast enough this is technically not a huge issue, but it is tedious and will lead to your blood draining as you’re basically poking every wall you come across just in case it’s important. Once you know of these walls you can at least hunt them out actively, but where the game’s difficulty and design really starts to suffer involves exactly how certain monsters appear and behave.

There is a third monster type you can encounter while exploring the Mansion of the She Vampires, and they are, appropriately enough, the She Vampires. These smaller servants of the Great She Vampire actually look a bit like cartoon ghosts save for their wiry hair, long fangs, and ample bosoms. Rather than having set spawning rules like the bats and Frankenstein’s Monster though, the She Vampires will appear every now and then when you’re in a room and sometimes they will appear right on top of you. They enter from the side of the level at least so you can sometimes know to move away from the edges to avoid losing an incredible amount of blood to their sudden appearance, but their high strength is matched by a decent defense so multiple shots are required to kill them. A She Vampire can follow you across screens too, but more worrying is the fact that some screens are set up so you literally cannot avoid immediate damage when you enter them. Pots will be right in front of you so Mr. Weems immediately bumps into them and gets hurt, or they’ll turn into monsters and immediately touch you. Even if you come in firing, if the pot becomes Frankenstein’s Monster, then you can’t kill it quickly enough to avoid contact. Mr. Weems’s movement isn’t exactly the most precise either, some spaces only as large as he is and if you’re slightly off in how you line his rather tall body up, he can accidentally touch a pot or worse, leave the screen, meaning all the pots and monsters will respawn once you go back to it if you have yet to clear out the coffins.

As a result of the poor monster spawning and pot placement, there are moments of mandatory damage found throughout The Astonishing Adventures of Mr. Weems and the She Vampires even if you play as carefully as possible. She Vampires being able to spawn on top of you when some rooms won’t even let you proceed forward until you’ve cleared out enough enemies also essentially guarantee at some point you’ll have bad luck and have a good deal of blood drained, and the more you explore the mansion to try and find replacement blood, the more likely it is you’ll trigger another She Vampire. Essentially, even if you memorize the world perfectly, there’s always going to be a few points where you’ll be done in by bad luck, your success tied too closely to these factors that stand against that gradual area mastery that should have been the appeal of the game.

THE VERDICT: The Astonishing Adventures of Mr. Weems and the She Vampires is such a tragedy. Initially it starts as an insurmountable challenge, but as you begin to learn the layout and where vital items are, you can start pushing into deeper areas more quickly and figuring out what you need to do to guarantee your safety. Sadly, that safety isn’t actually guaranteed thanks to rooms where you have to take damage or a She Vampire might spawn on you suddenly and far too heavily punish you before you can even respond. The poorly implemented destructible walls and control issues could have been overlooked, but unfortunately Mr. Weems’s adventures stray away from a nice focus on testing your area knowledge as they throw in cheap tricks to try and wear you down.

And so, I give The Astonishing Adventures of Mr. Weems and the She Vampires for ZX Spectrum…

A BAD rating. If The Astonishing Adventures of Mr. Weems and the She Vampires had played fair, it could have easily earned itself a deserved Good rating. While the slowly draining blood is at first a nuisance, the game is designed smartly so that you can start off your next life and make good use of what you learned before to speed up the process of getting what you need to advance. The six floors are reasonably sized that you can make pretty quick sprints to where you want to be, at least before the game introduces the things that ruin your slowly forming adventure plans. If this shooter wanted to be better, it really just needed proper allowances to prevent taking instant damage when you appear on screen or when a She Vampire shows up. Simply make it so a She Vampire can’t appear on the same space as the character when they first show up and don’t put pots right beside screen transitions and The Astonishing Adventures of Mr. Weems and the She Vampires can start leaning back on its more legitimate difficulty. Clearing out rooms won’t become to easy without these tricks, bats can already move over walls and objects so sometimes they make you have to move into danger to avoid them or get an angle on them. Rooms crowded with pots can already be threatening since the moment a monster is dead the next one might appear closer than you’d like, but it still feels like you have some control over the threat level since you can prioritize targets and then pop open the coffins to make the room safer next time you visit.

The frustrating elements in The Astonishing Adventures of Mr. Weems and the She Vampires feel at odds with a game clearly designed to become quicker and easier to complete as you learn its ins and outs, but that does unfortunately make it a solid fit for this odd genre it finds itself in. Once more, a game that could have made learning through repeat playthroughs entertaining shoots itself in the foot as it includes a few tricks seemingly just to ensure deaths happen more often rather than testing the player’s ability or intelligence. The most astonishing thing about Mr. Weems adventure sadly ends up being how close it came to pulling off its gameplay style only to end up including a few little ideas that have an outsized impact on how the game feels to play.