A Vampyre Story
Adventure gamers have been anxiously waiting for the release of A Vampyre Story. The graphics of the game can be compared to an advanced version of the classic adventure game Curse of Monkey Island. While cartoony graphics will not please everyone, a large portion of the adventure game community seems to long for a classic looking title, to satisfy their nostalgic desires. Like so many games these days, a Vampyre Story has been delayed due to initial problems with its publisher.
The story : You’ll be taking control of Mona, a talented opera singer who gets kicked out of the World of the living by a vampire named Shrowdy Von Kiefer. Doomed to spend the rest of her life/death in Von Kiefer’s dark castle, she decides that the place isn’t for her, and she leaves to pursue a dream of singing at the world famous Paris Opera.
The release date is set for this month for both Europe and the US.
Well, I have a lot more than two words, as you can tell, for the same reason I’m able to offer those: I recently had a chance to visit with The Adventure Company’s PR guru Suzanne MacGillivray and Associate Producer Dan Dawang, who provided me with a lengthy first-hand demonstration of the upcoming comic adventure that’s now in its final phase of crunch-time technical polishing.
If it seems like ages ago that we first heard of Bill Tiller’s debut adventure with then-newly-formed Autumn Moon Entertainment, that’s because it was. It’s been many years since the original announcement of A Vampyre Story, but its dalliance with an ill-fated startup publisher plunged the game deep into development limbo. Fortunately, where one German company dropped the ball, another was there to pick it up, and under Crimson Cow’s oversight, slowly but surely the game has crept forward to this day. And with release now finally in view, I can say with genuine (albeit still cautious) optimism that so far it looks like it’ll be well worth the wait.
Read all about “A Vampyre Story” at ADVENTURE GAMERS.
Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals
Have you tried the Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals demo yet? Good graphics, interesting story, reasonable voice-acting. After finishing the demo I am convinced this will be a game to get if you are into adventure games, and/or like games taking place in an Orwellian type of environment. Paris 2023, democracy has been thrown out of the window, citizens’ lives are controlled by a powerful totalitarian government, and a flying pyramid hovers above the city. You are a struggling artist (your apartment confirms this, it ain’t exactly luxurious) who just joined a resistance group. The game is based on the Nikopol graphic novels, so readers of those novels will recognize the story.
Nikopol is a first-person 3D game, there is no free movement (as in: you click on an entrance and the scene loads). This may be a turn-off to some, however, the graphics make up for it in my opinion. What did annoy me were the illogical puzzles in just this demo. Hopefully the puzzles in the full game are slightly less frustrating. You will know what I am talking about when you play through the demo.
There are days when you wake up in the morning, look out the window, rub your eyes, look again, and you see something so strange that you have no other alternative than to just deliberately ignore it, ban it from your memory, and try to continue to live your normal life as well as you can. Yet if one doesn’t succeed at this, there remains only one thing to do: to get to the bottom of the extraordinary thing in question. In the case of our protagonist, it is a pyramid. A flying pyramid. Above Paris. To be precise, one that emerges suddenly and unexpectedly above the French metropolis in the year 2023.
Preview at Adventure Gamers.
Machinarium
Too little attention is given to the smaller independent games of the world, which is a shame because there are many worth playing. An adventure game by Amanita Design caught my eye recently. The graphic art is unique and impressive, the story reminds me bit of Wall-E. Machinarium is a place filled with metallic material and inhabited only by robots. A small robot has been sentenced (unjustly) to spend the rest of his life on a sprawling scrap yard just behind a major city on Machinarium. He won’t be spending much time there though, his job is to prevent destruction and save a cute robot-girl (his friend). For more details on the game, check out the official website. Make sure you click the interview link as it contains all the information you’ll need, oh and you cannot miss the trailer, it’s right there at the top of the page. Developer Amanita Design hopes to release Machinarium at the end of this year.
