The continuation of the first part is about Halloween video games, which you can stick to and easily survive the long November weekend – especially for those sybarites who have nothing to do and who have the good old luxury of playing computer games from morning to night with full immersion in game worlds. I envy you.
6. Nosferatu – The Wrath Of Malachi
Time to chew gum and kick ass. A two-hour FPS game in which Count Durakula lured a bunch of people to his castle, but decided to sacrifice them all to some ancient evil. But James Patterson turned out to be among the intended victims, who still showed the bloodsucker kuzkin’s mother.
If your idea of a Halloween game is something like Doom or Serious Sam, I wholeheartedly advise you to try Nosferatu. A short, but no less cool shooter that is unlikely to leave you indifferent. It’s extremely difficult to tell something here, because I’ve already told the story, in fact, and the gameplay here is about the same as in any other FPS: keep an eye on the bullets and press the button when the enemy gets into the crosshair. Well, okay, there’s also a streak of stamina… which, however, is the same as cartridges, but for melee weapons.
You might want to ask: if all FPS are the same, then how do you distinguish good from bad? And everything is very simple: a good shooter is the absence of bugs in the code, well-calculated mechanics and memorable aesthetics. All this is present in Nosferatu.
What I remember:
● Aesthetics. In particular, one of our anti-vampire weapons is a huge silver crucifix. For some reason, even in games specifically aimed at fighting the undead, it is extremely rare to find such a banal thing as the holy cross. Surely the developers are afraid of offending the feelings of believers. Or the feelings of vampires. I’m not sure. In any case, there is a cross here, and it is very pleasant to wield it. With a crucifix, you can both directly fight bloodsuckers and consecrate water for an even more powerful Ancient Chalice.
● Well-calculated mechanics. Personally, I’ve always gone through Nosferatu betting on a revolver and a chalice with a cross. However, one day a friend came to me and said: I don’t know anything, there are enough fists. And he really went through most of the game attacking with just his fists. That’s how I learned that fists are almost the only weapon in the game that briefly stuns enemies. I’ll never forget how James Patterson held down two vampires in the hallway at once, tactfully punching them in the face each in turn, like a cross between Van Helsing and Mike Tyson. And he still took out most of this ancient castle with his bare hands. Did it feel more difficult than completing the game with a revolver? I wouldn’t say the revolver has its own drawbacks. And all this tells us that the balance in Nosferatu is extremely competent: with a certain skill, you can destroy enemies in any way you like, but the whole mechanics of the game are designed to provide you with a sufficient number of challenges, no matter which approach you choose.
● The final screensaver is just the epicenter of the coolness. Don’t look for it on the Internet – you really need to see it for yourself.
And yes, when I first went through, it took me a long time to realize that you can’t stick an aspen stake into a vampire right away: you have to hold down and hold the fire button so that our main character can swing properly. Perhaps the only weapon in the game that works somewhat obscurely.
Nosferatu The Wrath of Malach @ Steam
7. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem
It was released exclusively on the Nintendo GameCube, so the game requires an emulator called Dolphin. Well, or GameCube.
Real, pure and undiluted Lovecraft horror. In its own independent universe, with its own gods and indescribable creatures, but conveying feelings of the unimaginable, unpronounceable and ancient is much more fulfilling than most games and films based directly on the works of Lovecraft. Of these dozens of games, perhaps it is Eternal Darkness that is able to catch up with the greatest amount of horror.
The game has a lot of advantages and, perhaps, only two disadvantages. Firstly, to get the true ending, the developers suggest completing the game as many as three times. And it doesn’t work at all, because the passages differ only in the bosses you will fight, and a couple of screensavers. And when, plus or minus, you know all the tricks of the game and what exactly the characters will face, all the horror quickly disappears. I would have mastered two more playthroughs, just to see how well I was able to master all the mechanics and how much better I would do the second time. But three is clearly too much. Therefore, I advise you to download the save in advance, in which the game has already been completed three times before you, so that after the first passage you will be told the full story as it is.
The second disadvantage is that towards the end Eternal Darkness is still noticeably losing ground. The last chapter, which tells the story of a Canadian firefighter, is not memorable at all. Most likely, this happened because initially there was a story of an American soldier fighting in Iraq, but after September 11, 2001, the developers decided to change this story a lot, and the result was some kind of strange dummy. And after the adventures of the brave firefighter, the finale begins, which is just unbearably tedious. We are offered to solve a huge mystery, the parts of which are located in nine, give or take, identical in design and visually completely uninteresting halls, and you run through these gray halls for probably an hour, back and forth, back and forth…
But apart from these two nuances, Eternal Darkness is one continuous pleasure for fans of classic horror.
What I remember:
● The madness system. She’s gorgeous and peerless.Yes, not all the chips are working right now, especially if you’re playing on an emulator, but what works works fine. It is thanks to this system that Eternal Darkness can be safely called one of the best games of all time. The most important thing is that if you’re going to play, don’t look at exactly how this system works and what effects it can produce. You’ll lose the lion’s share of the fun.
● The game, in principle, can be completed in a day, if you remember that a day is not only an evening after work, but 24 hours. And my friend and I went through Eternal Darkness exactly like that: killing one sleepless night on it, which, without a doubt, gave the game a lot of charm. I’ll never forget this experience: one of us starts to fall asleep, the other shakes him by the shoulder with words like “don’t sleep, don’t sleep, eternal darkness is coming!”, some kind of surrealism is happening on the screen, and we, sleepy, already hardly understand where the game is going right and where – the antics of the aforementioned madness system…
● In addition to the story of the American soldier, the story of the crusader was also cut from the game. Moreover, unlike soldier, Crusader was playable in many demo versions, which were provided to players at various exhibitions. The role of the crusader in the game was very significant, because he and his comrades-in-arms did try to stop the main villain – and all this was thrown out, probably against the background of the same September 9th. I still hope that someday someone will find and upload one of those old demos online.
● Maximilian Roivas is a doctor by training who knows how to shoot Macedonian flintlock pistols, and who got the coolest story in the game. And the doctor’s magazine, which is viewed directly with Roivas’ comments, is a real masterpiece. Without a doubt, the best and most memorable role of William Hutkins. Unfortunately, to get into all this, you need to know English, but if you have it, goosebumps are provided. Just listen to this:
8. Molly The Werezompire
Cthulhu Saves Christmas from the creators. For fans of minimalism or really retro games: this is a real text quest. There are no graphics, so the whole process is like reading R.L. Stein’s Horror Movies. Unless the whole thing is played not in the console, but in its own window, with a simple picture as a background for the text.
The biggest problem here is that the story about Molly, as in the case of Cthulhu saving Christmas, has only one language – English. And since literally the entire gameplay is pure text, knowledge of the language is absolutely necessary. But if this is not an obstacle for you, then welcome to the arms of a pleasant comedy, in the company of which you can comfortably spend an hour or two with a glass of hot tea on a cool autumn evening.
What I remember:
● Molly, the vampire werewolf.
● In just an hour of playing, you can easily:
● Become the chosen one among the zombies.
To make a communist revolution in hell.
● Defeat the equivalent of Cthulhu, identical to the natural one.
● And much more!
9. Vampyr
I wanted at least one more or less modern game on the list, with highly polygonal models and other graphics, and I chose Vampire. Although I must say honestly: I can’t recommend it.
The game is based mainly on the story and characters – and … there are a lot of shoals. The plot would have been good if the authors had remained in the field of pseudoscience: the main character Jonathan Reed is not only a vampire, but also a doctor, and therefore he tries to explain his vampirism with biology, anatomy, geometry and other clever things. It all looks cool until some very supernatural entities start appearing on the screen. These entities are described very vaguely, they do not evoke the feeling of something ancient, terrible and indescribable, a la Lovecraft. Instead, they only raise questions along the lines of “what kind of ridiculous crap is this?” and “what do you want from me at all?”. Strangely enough, these are the questions that the main character asks, and as a result, there is definitely a connection between the player and Jonathan Reed.
The funny thing is that at the end of the game, when we finally get to a character who can sort of explain everything to us, Jonathan really doesn’t forget to ask directly: “Man, tell me what it was all about?”, but instead of explaining, the man gives the famous “Fuck you, you fucker freak!” and then dies, so as not to answer any further questions. It seems that the authors themselves did not understand what they had done as a result and how to explain it. Personally, I think it was enough to leave aside the fact that vampires are afraid of crosses, and put all other efforts into deepening and polishing the already mentioned pseudoscientific part of the plot.
The dialogues here are very pleasant, and the voice acting is excellent. But sometimes the conversation of the characters does not feel like a dialogue at all: it feels like these are two monologues that two people read out with feeling, with sense, with alignment… and at the same time, for some reason, they look at each other. The dialog system itself is also often annoying: after all, if you want to open all the hints, then you will have to choose from time to time those answers that you probably don’t want to choose at all. And yes, the fact that such and such an answer opens up certain information about a character sometimes also makes no sense, because everything is clear from the conversation. However, you need to open the hints, because they give you experience for hints, and experience is needed, since the game is modern, and your personal skills don’t make much sense: everything is tied to numbers, and if you are level 10 and you come across an enemy of level 30, you honestly can’t defeat him. no matter how many hours you have played and no matter how skillfully you fence.
The game world is also annoying, because no matter how much information you collect about a person, you will never be able to convince him to do anything. Even though you have the vampiric ability to enchant people, which, in theory, can convince them to do anything. Alas, the only way to influence the game world is to suck a person’s blood. Then his friends and relatives will stir up and start thinking that maybe something needs to be done. It’s strange, of course, that you can’t achieve this in a bloodless way, but come on, because the changes in the characters look really interesting, and it’s really worth having a snack with a couple of gentlemen.
But as soon as you suck at least one scoundrel, the game closes the best ending for you. And yes, the opportunity to kill them in another way, without drinking their priceless bodily juices, is not provided by the game. It would seem that we have a set of firearms, and we can swing a saber. However, the key characters seem to be immune to lead and steel. It comes to the point of absurdity, because there is a natural serial killer in the game, and a girl who has fallen under the control of a random Nosferatu, who literally begs for death, as her master forces her to eat raw rats, just for fun. And even in such cases, we are not given the opportunity to use anything other than our vampire fangs, after which the best ending immediately closes. And no, they won’t let us kill the vampire who controls the rat-eating girl either.
And despite the fact that the game uncompromisingly treats the death of any key character with hostility, no matter how scum he is, Jonathan Reed can drain blood from random npcs by direct suction until he turns blue: no one will say a word. At the same time, no one will tell us what exactly the Priven Guards were guilty of, trying to protect London, covered by the plague from the creatures of darkness. Most of them are clearly volunteers who risk their lives every night purely out of the goodness of their hearts. We can even force some key characters to join the Guard: realizing that their brother, matchmaker, or beloved mother-in-law was killed by a vampire, they will not sit idly by and take revenge. Can they really be called people who deserve to die more than, for example, a serial killer?
However, the game does not consider the Guardian to be private for people, and even if you want to perform a really bloodless passage, you will not succeed. After all, despite the fact that we’re playing as a vampire who hides among humans, the wide-ranging stealth capabilities don’t seem to be needed here, because at key moments the game will lock us in the right room and strictly say: kill everyone! And the room will remain closed until you kill everyone, leaving you with the only question: why the hell did I invest my experience in stealth? Adding a bit of absurdity to this situation is the fact that when Jonathan Reed gets the best ending, he pretentiously declares: “When I became a vampire, I swore not to take a single life, and I kept my oath!” – even if you filled all the cemeteries of England with the bodies of the Priven Guards.
If you save a priest in a battle with one of the bosses, the game will not react to this in any way: the priest will just sit in the background during the cutscene, after which he will disappear into the game world. The final boss was killed with a pair of revolvers so quickly that I had big doubts about whether Jonathan Reed was needed at all: if the Priven Guards had sent a squad of twenty people, the problem would have been solved. And so on and so forth. The game has a lot of disadvantages. Yes, I could just recommend Resident Evil 7 to you, but I still wanted to make a list of relatively unknown games, so… Vampire.
However, it’s even good that there’s at least one game on the list that I’ve been able to really enjoy. Otherwise, God forbid it will seem to you that I’m just praising everything left and right.
What I remember:
● The atmosphere. If there was one thing that made me walk through the Vampire to the end, it was the atmosphere. The developers really managed to convey the feeling of London, battered by the plague and shrouded in hopelessness. It is extremely pleasant to walk slowly along it and say to everyone: sir-sir-sir. And they say, “Sir, sir, sir.”
● The philosopher brothers Agamemnon and Pericles Baker. The owners undoubtedly have the most unusual and multifaceted dialogues in the entire game.
● An interesting system regarding ranged weapons that made me carry a dozen pistols in my pockets. The thing is, I love revolvers and shotguns, and they reload very plausibly and slowly in a Vampire. However, the game allows you not to recharge, but to go into the inventory and grab another weapon instead of the discharged one. Using this feint in battles with particularly tough creatures leads to the need to recharge your entire arsenal for a long time and methodically, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in a Commando. All this is probably lost when using automatic pistols, but I avoided them in every possible way and got a pretty cool experience.
● Almost all the shortcomings that I described above can be fixed using console commands. They can also be used to add crossbows cut from it to the game, although, to be honest, they were still not balanced and turned out to be too lethal. I made a small tutorial explaining exactly how to turn on the console in the game and demonstrating the most useful commands. Yes, it’s in English, but the video seems to be able to understand most of it anyway. In any case, I am ready to answer any questions and help with anything, if at least someone is interested in it.
10. Unusual Findings
Finally, I offer you something that I really love: classic point-and-click. As in all games of this genre, the basis of the basics here is the plot, characters and dialogues, and personally I really liked everything. The action happening on the screen resembles the movie They Live with Roddy Piper, and the game developers honestly indicated this movie in the list of works that they were inspired by. In addition to They Live, Terminator, Aliens, Full Throttle and more are listed as inspirations – Unusual Finds is full of nostalgia for the eighties and the original games of the genre.
We have three characters in the main roles at once, so every player will surely be able to associate themselves with at least one of them. Personally, all three of them more or less responded to me. The main character loves movies and knows a lot of different information about them, including the fact that Universal shot and released two versions of the film Dracula in 1931. And yes, I also liked the Spanish version better, especially due to the big-faced Van Helsing performed by Eduardo Arosamena.
The second of our heroes is crazy about cars and will be happy to tell you all the details about any car that gets in the way. And the third one loves botany and My Little Pony. However, he’s also a computer geek, so phrases like “It’s a Commodore 64C! It has 64 kilobytes of RAM – more than anyone will ever need at all.” they were catching on.
The game has three endings, and there are no bad ones among them: each one is cool in its own way. Personally, I liked Unusual Findings so much that I didn’t calm down until I saw all three. Of course, it doesn’t get as much fun after the first pass, but like any point-and-click, when you run again, Unusual Finds becomes much shorter, since you no longer scroll through every bush and know exactly where to go and what to do.The only thing I really didn’t like was that you can’t save to different slots during the same playthrough. We have to deal with the systematization of saves manually. I’m not sure how much it really needs to be done, but I liked some of the moments so much that I wanted to be able to return to them without going over everything that went before them.
Finally, I can only say one thing: in the spirit of the best quests from the 90s, Unusual Finds contains a couple of very mind-blowing moments. So if you suddenly feel like you’re stuck, don’t hesitate to peek into the walkthrough.
What I remember:
● An extremely apt parody of all the bad things that were in the old video games, called Maze Quest. And especially the soundtrack from it, which, oddly enough, was not included in the OST, and therefore I had to rip the music out of the game files on my own.
● In the game settings, only two languages provide not only text, but also full voice acting: English and … Russian! How unexpected and pleasant… To be honest, I haven’t tried the Russian voice acting, but I sincerely hope it’s good.
● The most memorable moments, however, relate directly to the plot, and therefore I cannot tell you about them without pouring out a portion of spoilers.
● And remember: all adults who love video games are cool.
