The Haunted Hoard: A Vampyre Story (PC)
Mona de Lafitte is an up and coming opera singer in Paris when a chance run-in with a Baron goes terribly wrong. Baron Shrowdy von Kiefer is immediately smitten when he sees her, the pathetic little vampire spiriting her away to his castle all the way in Draxsylvania. Married while she’s mesmerized, Mona ends up trapped in her new life with an immature and controlling husband, but fortune eventually favors her when a pair of vampire hunters kill Shrowdy while he’s outside the castle. Finally seeing a chance to escape, Mona begins her quest to return back to her Parisian home in the point and click adventure A Vampyre Story.
Not that she’d let you call the game as much though. Mona is in deep denial about the fact she’s been turned into a blood sucker, telling herself what she is drinking is wine and that her pointy teeth and ability to turn into a bat is somehow tied to a curse Shrowdy put on her. Mona is definitely naive and a little headstrong, but for the most part she is the sort to first approach a conversation with kindness and attentiveness. When she does dislike someone or a situation though, Mona can have a fun mean streak, something you’ll see any time Shrowdy or his allies come up. She’s not alone in her escape attempt either, Mona long ago having found a companion in a little bat named Froderick who is more worldly and sarcastic. The two enjoy a comedic repartee throughout the adventure, occasionally bickering but it does feel a touch odd when this mostly jovial pair actually get irritated with one another. Froderick is a bit more prone to complaining or making a snarky comment, and over the course of the adventure you will hear a lot from the both of them because there are many objects to interact with and they have dialogue to describe all of them.
Being a point and click adventure, A Vampyre Story splits its attention between concocting inventory puzzles and having a good degree of conversations that are meant to tell the story. There is a lot of humor to be found in this adventure, although a good deal of it leans heavily on puns that aren’t often that imaginative. It can be a bit strange to hear Mona and Froderick crack puns as they look over the equipment in the torture chamber that still has some blood on it, but dark humor that doesn’t go too far also seems to be a component of this game’s sense of humor. A Vampyre Story will have some great silly situations and you’ll hear Mona and Froderick talk so much they’re essentially going to endear themselves to you by overexposure to their corny thoughts and observations, but the overabundance of things to talk about does start to wear down your desire to hear more of their chatter too. This is unfortunate as there are so many interaction spots and it can be quite easy to miss an important item if you don’t go through all your options in an area, and while the space bar also lets you skip conversations, you might miss the singular clue you’d get to an important puzzle later down the line if you do so.
To help Mona on her path to Paris, you need to look around available areas for characters to talk to, items to grab, and ways to use whatever you’ve collected to solve puzzles. The gothic settings are mostly played straight in appearance save the occasional bit of deliberate absurdity like a sports stadium in a small rural hamlet or a talking iron maiden from Minnesota, and sometimes it can be difficult to tell what in the area is important if it isn’t a comedic break from the expected. Holding tab shows you interaction points though, and when you click on something, you’ll be offered four ways to engage with it. Usually these take the form of talking to it, flying towards it as a bat, grabbing it, or examining it, but these can change so the talk icon might turn into eat for example. This does mean, even when it’s something like the abundant grotesques and gargoyles in the castle, you have four little conversations between Mona and Froderick to get too if you think it might have a purpose, and there are some seemingly mundane items with uses that could get overlooked if you try to just trust your gut. In an interesting touch, your inventory (as represented by a coffin you crack open) will contain whatever Mona’s picked up and also the ideas of what she can use. Represented in light blue, Mona might not want to lug around a huge object, but she’ll keep it in mind and when you try to use it in the proper context, she’ll quickly go back and grab it for use. This also applies to the many uses Froderick has, the bat not only usable like an item (and thus having another short chat to get through for most attempts at using him) but you can store the idea of him doing things like lathering himself in oil or carrying an object for later use.
Despite the conversational barriers to figuring out A Vampyre Story’s puzzles, there are a fair few good ones to be found that work even better because of the fact you can store ideas in your inventory. A chair would be something silly to lug around, but when you’re in a situation that clearly require an item, pop open your coffin, and see it there, it’s much easier to imagine uses than if it was something you could only utilize by considering the immediate environment. There are social puzzles as well, needing to convince, trick, or please certain oddballs requiring some thought at times, the best moments usually when the solution is reasonable yet leads to fun absurdity. A Vampyre Story does feel like it could use a more interesting cast, they play their roles well but you’re hardly going to fall in love with a snooty gargoyle, a glory-seeking constable, or the helpful fortune teller, although she at least has some good jokes like singing you a country song as if it was written by a vampire. Mona and Froderick remain the most interesting personalities and best sources of humor, other people just as much material for them to react to as the many clickable objects around the world.
The mix of cartoon characters and earnest atmosphere gives the game a suitably spooky feel, the excellent music in particular keeping some mystique and eeriness present in areas that would have been foreboding if this game wasn’t a farcical romp. This is the part where I would have noted that A Vampyre Story is technically an incomplete tale, the game concluding with Mona still on her adventure and heading towards new dangers. It wouldn’t have been the worst part to be left off on, it’s not like major questions are left up in the air, but I was pleased to find out that A Vampyre Story is getting a sequel to continue the tale that was announced in October of 2024. It is a bit telling that hearing that news immediately made me happy to hear the story of Mona and Froderick will continue on, the pair perhaps the most effective part of the adventure even if they’re cheesy chatterboxes at times. They do help sustain the game when you’re still looking around for the way things connect though, holding the fort until you can get to some of the more creative and involved puzzles that make good use of the setting and vampire concept.
THE VERDICT: A Vampyre Story can wear on as you listen to tons of puns about every little object you can look at, but its lead characters do start to grow on you and in time the puzzles start to ask for some creative thinking so the adventuring is interesting as well. The rest of the cast isn’t particularly memorable even when they’re as unusual as a lady with a strong New Jersey accent in 1890s Europe and it is a bit of a shame it’s not a complete story, but the atmosphere, the way absurdity disrupts that atmosphere in fun ways, and some more involved activities help this story stay afloat.
And so, I give A Vampyre Story for PC…
An OKAY rating. There were points I considered bumping this game up to a Good, but it is worth noting how often you need to poke everything in every way to uncover some of the game’s less inspired interactions and what charm Mona and Froderick have does wear away some if you have to hear them have a paragraph’s worth of dialogue over even the most insignificant things. If they were constantly batting well with their jokes or observations it wouldn’t have been so bad, but it does eventually become wearisome to press tab and see how many spots are available for interactions. This unfortunately throws you off when it comes to puzzle solving, the abundance likely trying to make you more deeply consider what you click on but then the cases where the logic isn’t the clearest make it harder to appreciate that design sentiment. A Vampyre Story does at least steep itself strongly in its horror aesthetic while being a light-hearted romp despite literally using torture devices to solve puzzles, although it mostly avoids truly being macabre so that the game could be played by younger adventure game fans. A Vampyre Story is made by former LucasArts designers who should have had a good sense for not cluttering the game world, but they also concoct some of the better thematic interactions that make for the memorable puzzles and scenarios.
A Vampyre Story ends up in a funny situation where it is packed with a great deal of voiced dialogue because of so many possible interactions but that might be why it ends up cut short after it only reaches Chapter 2. The bickering and wisecracks from the two main characters is definitely what you’ll remember best, but at times you can feel as trapped as they are when you’re listening to the bat and vampiress try to come up with something funny to say about the latest mundane object. It requires some patience to get through this story, but giving it the time to grow on you may leave you walking away charmed if a bit weary.