Those of you who are excited about Elvira, never fear, you'll get to hear all about her continuing adventures in Elvira II: The Jaws of Cerberus (1991).
Meanwhile, the same issue put Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire in the "adventure" category and had it lose to King's Quest V I wonder what would have happened if they'd switched Quest for Glory and Elvira and put them in their appropriate categories. I haven't played any of these games besides Bane, but to call that one alone an inferior RPG to Elvira is just absurd. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Wizardry: Bane of the Cosmic Forge, Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire, and Eye of the Beholder. As I discussed in my first post on the game, Computer Gaming World famously gave it "Role-Playing Game of the Year" in November 1991 after considering J.R.R. I guess Horror Soft knew what its selling points were.Īlas, not everyone felt this way. It's a decent adventure game, the presence of Elvira notwithstanding, but it lacks the combat, economy, and equipment that would have made it a true hybrid. That gives a final rating of 29, which sounds like I didn't like it very much, and I didn't-as an RPG. I thought it was pitched at just the right level of difficulty and lasted just about the right amount of time. It was nonlinear in the order that you can tackle the puzzles. As you know, I'm normally not a fan of a mouse-only interface, but it worked surprisingly well here, even if there were times I wished I could just go forward and turn with the arrow keys. Mostly, I was surprised at how well I took to the interface. I give it a little credit for the music even though I don't really care about game music. The sound in the DOS version was sparse, mostly limited to combat attacks. 5 points for graphics, sound, and interface.2 points for the main quest, which offers only one outcome and no player choices.The small selection of weapons and armor is another blow to its RPG aspirations. There's a lot of stuff to carry, but most of it is for solving puzzles, and I already gave the game credit for that. I give it some credit for the variety of spells and the game dynamic associated with finding their reagents, but I wish the game had done more with the spell system. As I outlined last time, the spell system was intriguing but mostly optional.
Combat is fast-paced but utterly non-tactical. I could only defeat this guy with the Crusader Sword. The enemies were fun to look at but not very different when it came to combat. They were difficult, but difficult for minutes rather than hours, and generally fair. In adventure/RPG hybrids, I tend to use this category to evaluate the quality of the puzzles, which serve as "encounters" in such games.
I guess I cracked a smile at a couple of her lines.
Elvira herself is really the only NPC other characters are encounters to be defeated. There's no character creation, and the only development is with the incremental increases in weapon skill. It mostly fails in this vital RPG category. 1 point for character creation and development.I give it credit for its horror theme and its tightly-constructed castle architecture, and a little for the back story involving Elvira's ancestor. I guess that might have run into some copyright problems, but the point is the game doesn't quite have the campy humor or irreverent sensibility that you'd associate with Elvira, and most of the enemies and puzzles are played straight. When it delves Elvira's mind, it finds decades of awful horror movies and populates the castle with Blacula, The Blob, intelligent rats from Willard, and perhaps a Killer Tomato or two. The castle is haunted, but in such a way that it creates its horrors based on things it finds in the subjects' own minds. If I wanted to make a real Elvira-inspired game, I'd modify the plot a bit. The puzzles and enemies are mostly generic fantasy and horror tropes, and with the exception of Vampira, they don't seem to draw any obvious inspiration from B films. Regardless, while they crafted an interesting and relatively enjoyable game, the developers missed opportunities to truly make it an Elvira game by incorporating more elements from the types of shlock horror films associated with the character.