Summary
Solid Dracula Adventure game that is mislabeled as an RPG
The Good
The graphics are good for their time. Anyone who has played any DOS or SNES era games will enjoy the visuals.
The story is the typical hero ends up in Transylvania and has to kill Dracula. It's cliche but it's written well enough to motivate you to keep going.
The puzzles are solid and make sense in context of the game. There aren't many silly contrived puzzles you see in many Adventure game.
The big positive for me was the open ended nature of the game. You can skip around in what order you want to travel or solve quests/puzzles. Too often, adventures games are written well but force you along a linear path.
The Bad
Combat is overly simplified. You literally just walk up to a monster and click attack over and over until one of you is dead. Most of the time you end up just running away monsters so you don't have to keep going back to town to heal. That being said, fighting and/or running away from enemies probably takes up 10-20% of the game.
Inventory management becomes more and more of a chore. The interface itself is a nice. But you can only hold maybe 15 items in your backpack. But within your backpack you can have a bag that holds 12 items in it. So halfway through the game you end up having a bunch of a bags of items inside your bag. It's hard to explain, but anyone who has played
Ultima 7 will know what I'm talking about.
The music is pretty bad even for MIDI. There are certain locations like the starting town where this really grating music loops over and over.
The Bottom Line
Veil of Darkness is a solid Adventure/RPG hybrid game that plays very much like the
Quest for Glory series. The game is mostly about interacting with NPCs and solving puzzles with your inventory.
