The Haunted Hoard: Dracula: The Undead (Lynx)

Dracula: The Undead is a rather unique Atari Lynx title for how it chooses to execute its adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Rather than an action game, this game aims to be a bit of a point and click adventure, the player not fighting the most famous vampire of all time but instead going through the early events of the novel as Jonathan Harker. It’s an ambitious direction to be sure, one that could very well make for an interesting “interactive novel” experience, but that isn’t quite how Dracula: The Undead manifests. Not only does this Atari Lynx title fail to design its point and click play well around the events of Dracula, but it only adapts the first 4 chapters of a 27 chapter story and not in a way that makes that feel like a fulfilling and full tale on its own.

Curiously, the game begins with Bram Stoker himself greeting you. While he was dead for almost 80 years at the time of the game’s creation, this representation of Stoker acknowledges the unusual marvel of a video game now telling the story he wrote nearly a century ago. Stoker will appear at times later down the line, usually when extended exposition or narration is required, but you do find yourself playing as Jonathan Harker as he has arrived at Dracula’s castle on business. Quite quickly, the cordial visit instead becomes a matter of finding a safe escape, Jonathan noticing the abnormal hints to the vampire’s true nature more and more as he freely wanders about the castle. Dracula: The Undead is truly just about that quest to get Jonathan out of the castle, although there is a very weak promise of a truer ending to be found. Periodically, when something strange happens, you need to quickly whip out your journal and take a note of it, the game’s best ending involving you recording each detail that provides evidence of Dracula’s vampiric nature. What this ultimately amounts to is a single moment at the end where you are told in few sentences what happens at the finale of the book, an unsatisfying rush to a straightforward finale with little context or satisfaction. Rumors online and bits of evidence hint that the game was heavily truncated from original plans and a Atari Jaguar CD version was planned that maybe could have expanded the tale instead, but this version of Dracula: The Undead is purely a journey about making that vital escape from Dracula’s estate.

To find your way to safety in Dracula: The Undead requires a fair bit of puzzle solving, or at least a fair bit of inventory use. Jonathan Harker is free to walk around whatever rooms he has access to, and when you wish to interact with an object, you pop open a pair of menus. The left reel contains a range of verbs that are universally available, actions like Examine, Get, Use, Open, and Climb all fairly important and used frequently, although Turn really only feels necessary in one situation so it’s some unfortunate menu clutter. The right menu will contain any relevant objects near where you’re standing, although its detection can be a bit fiddly at times. That right menu also contains the items in your inventory, meaning you can use your verbs any time on them and the left menu can even shift to be an item so you can use items together like adding oil to a lamp and then igniting it with a match.

It can take a bit to get used to the system as well as your own movement, particularly because the screen does not show much of anything well save for the rare scene featuring a more detailed close-up of a character. Usually, your very pixelated version of Jonathan walks around a dim sepia-toned room searching for interaction points, some of which may be invisible in the foreground such as unseen window, and at other times you may need to approach something like a desk from the right angle for you to be able to interact with it or whatever is on it. There is no immediate pressure to be found in Dracula: The Undead so you can futz with menus and bumble about rooms looking for important things without concern, although unfortunately a good deal of your important tasks will just involve finding the right item in one place and doing a usually straightforward task with it elsewhere. When it isn’t straightforward though, it can feel like either logic is being a touch strained or you simply didn’t get the information you’d need to link two things together, but those cases at least make you do some problem solving compared to moments like blindly walking around the catacombs in the hopes you not only find something interest, but don’t miss something important since you can’t be sure of what might be valuable until you’ve scoured an area.

Perhaps the more appropriate puzzles are unfortunately the ones that do include some actual punishments for messing them up though. There are ways to die in Dracula: The Undead, and all of the situations involve something you actually need to have prepared for in advance to survive or else they will lead to your immediate doom. The game is usually able to hint at or at least explain a death well enough for you to avoid it after it’s claimed you once and there are very few of these early ends in general, but sadly, Dracula: The Undead lacks any way to save or continue from where you left off. A death is a full game reset, the game not overly long as mentioned but there are some unfortunate moments that are dragged out and huge wastes of time.

Jonathan is repeatedly asked to climb the wall outside his window during the adventure, shimmying his way over to other windows to enter rooms for vital progress. The wall climbing must be done in a similar way each time, the walls having invisible barriers so you’re just guessing which ways to go until you get it right. You can’t speed it up, you need to often climb back the way you came, and there are multiple points of required climbing before you even factor in the disheartening truth that a potential death could force you to do these mindless climbing sections all over again. This gameplay portion in particular saps a lot of a person’s desire to even see this small adventure through to the end, this action tedious, lacking in any interesting element even when done the first time, and a barrier with no danger since you can’t fall and no real value since it’s just a longer way to move about. Had it been done once perhaps it would at least feel like an interesting story beat, but instead Dracula: The Undead leans on it quite often, possibly to pad an already pathetic run time if you had just been allowed to puzzle out the way to escape without such obnoxious obstructions.

THE VERDICT: Dracula: The Undead is a game about escaping a vampire’s castle with no palpable peril, almost no puzzles that go beyond just finding the right items in rooms that don’t always show important details well, and a terrible wall you’ll have to climb across repeatedly despite it being a slow, boring, and unchanging task. Cutting the adapted story so short it ends up unsatisfying already put this adventure game on unsteady ground, but not having any interesting ideas to compensate for its truncated tale leads to you remembering obnoxious exploration more than any shreds of the horror or story that the game rarely provides.

And so, I give Dracula: The Undead for Atari Lynx…

An ATROCIOUS rating. The wall alone guaranteed this game was not simply a poorly done adventure game. There are moments of aimlessly wandering around below the castle that don’t inspire much love, there is the ease with which a vital item or object could be missed because of the visuals not being able to depict castle rooms well, and there is the ultimately basic story of a man realizing he met a vampire and mostly just needing to write down everything he sees the exact moment after or he’ll forget it. A puzzle or two can feel like it asks for a bit more from you than just doing the obvious, although killing you sometimes if you didn’t think of an action can throw you back and add more disheartening trips across the castle walls. A single wall climb still wouldn’t have been much with it relying on you just sussing out where invisible walls are through trial and error, but it would match the tone of castle exploration being dangerous even if it doesn’t back that up with teeth very often. However, making you climb across the walls repeatedly robs that moment of its punch while adding nothing interesting to the process. It’s a hollow activity placed in a game to pad it out, but there’s nothing there to salvage the experience even if you push through the constant wall crawls.

Being a somewhat faithful adaptation to what little parts of the novel it included, Dracula: The Undead really ends up offering fairly little compared to other adaptations. Unless you want to see some fairly straightforward sepia tone pixel art of Dracula, Jonathan, and Dracula’s brides, you’re not going to find elements that stand out in a good way. Jonathan Harker may be the best wall climber he’s ever been in this specific version of the tale and Bram Stoker starting things off by opining on modern technology is a unique angle despite it not going much further than that first mention, so with its weak inventory puzzles, excruciating navigation, and lack of imagination beyond getting point and click systems to work decently enough on the Lynx, Dracula: The Undead ends up a game of the past best left undisturbed.