Veil of Darkness

The Good
Featuring a nice horror theme, Veil of Darkness is a nice attempt at merging rpg and adventure games (to be honest this is more of an adventure game than an rpg), the game places you in an isometric world where you interact with npcs, get some quests and try to save the poor town from the clutches of Kairn, a badass vampire that gets off by keeping an entire valley in 18th century conditions. The game uses a standard adventure game world map from which you warp to each location in the game (locations which are discovered as they are informed to you), in each location there's a collection of npcs that you can talk to and sometimes a dungeon or so filled with non-respawning baddies that you can kick around. The point of the fights is usually to uncover some puzzle elements or location since there is no leveling-up whatsoever. You have your standarized inventory with paperdoll which allows you to quickly equip weapons.... And... well, uh....

The Bad
For starters the story sucks ass. It's so bad it seems like it was pulled off from the early days of videogaming, you are flying around over this valley and since the big bad vampire is bored he decides to shoot you down for no reason. Once there you find out that you are the one that the prophecy says will kill Kairn and save the valley, so... "Fight Megaman!! For Everlasting Peace"! yawn.... of course there's a babe that has the hots for you and that you will have to save, so don't worry! It's all good...

The graphics in the game are crude but effective, what kills me is the poor animation and the effect it has in the game, you need to see this to understand me, but it seems like everytime you press a key everything just jumps a frame!... It's really crappy and slows the gameplay down to a crawl, truly this is one of the slowest games of this type I have played... It's hard to be scared at something that is a mile away in an isometric perspective, but it's harder to do so when it only seems to have 2 frames of animation and moves slightly slower than a snail.

Finally the concept behind the game is promising, but the end results are pretty dissapointing. This is a lame-ass adventure game that integrates some elements of rpg-ing such as status effects, weapons, etc. but doesn't do so effectively. Combat comes down to whacking enemies endlessly and/or escaping and plays so slow that you can go and fix yourself a drink between hits, there's no character development, the dungeon crawling is lame and almost an aftertought, the npcs are all shallow and spout information as if they were signposts instead of characters, and while you can tackle different quests at different times, the game is completely linear.

Oh! And the puzzles aren't good either. They are stupid Fed-Ex quests, Pixel Hunts or lame association exercises that seem taken from Zelda or other early console games. You know what I'm talking about: "Oh! The zombies can only be killed by silver... hmmm so now I know why the smith offered to make me a silver sword!", etc... etc... There are some interesting ones, like burning down a living three so you can resurrect it from it's ashes, but that's as far as things go...

The Bottom Line
Failed attempt at merging two very cool genres under an admitely cool horror theme. It's "classic" image and theme may fool you into thinking how this is an undiscovered gem, but to put it bluntly this is just a very lame game that becomes even lamer when faced with the competition.

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.

The Good
I liked the atmosphere surrounding the different locations (i have to admit this game spooked me a couple of times). The way it draws you in, you don't just stare at the action, you get involved with your character and the NPCs (each of them has a story of their own)

The Bad
The combats seem a little arbitrary for me (even though i had the right weapon it was really hard to kill the enemies) and too difficult at some points

The Bottom Line
This game reminds me of the old Bela Lugosi Dracula film, it has a little bit of everything: mystery, horror (lots of it), blood, action, romance and lots of interesting dialogues.