Dracula: The Resurrection (PS1) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
234A playthrough of Dreamcatcher Interactive's 2001 horror adventure game for the Sony PlayStation, Dracula: The Resurrection.
Dracula: The Resurrection was written to be a follow-up to the story of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula - an unauthorized sequel, if you will.
After recapping the end of the novel, the game informs us that seven years have passed when Mina suddenly feels compelled to flee to Castle Dracula - the real-deal akumajou - in Transylvania.
Jonathon finds Mina's letter a few hours after her departure and follows suit in a panic, eventually arriving in a backwoods inn in outside Varna in the middle of the night. From there, he questions locals and goes about solving all-sorts of inventory-based puzzles as he searches for access to the castle.
The game was a conversion of a PC game released in 1999 that met with surprisingly solid sales despite its mixed critical reception. The graphics were universally praised for the quality of its character models and its environment graphics that could smoothly pan in all directions, but the gameplay had a more mixed reception. Some loved the simplicity of the puzzles and generally low-difficulty level, while others though it was a mess of pixel-hunting and trial-and-error. Despite any complaints, though, it did well enough to be followed-up with two sequels.
The PlayStation port is a firm step down graphically from the PC version, but it otherwise is a good facsimile of the original game. The FMV quality is beyond reproach, but the level of detail and color depth in the gameplay graphics have taken a big hit, so you'll see plenty of the dithering artifacts and smeary surfaces that the PS1 was famous for. It also ran in a high-resolution mode, so while the edges of objects are sharp and well defined, there is some judder to the picture thanks to interlacing artifacts. Just a note about the recording here: I used blargg's NTSC filter here to clean up a lot of the artifacting, and it looks very close to how it appeared on a CRT screen. Without doing something to compensate for the difference in formats, the graphics are a jittery, headache inducing mess on a modern display. While you can still occasionally see evidence of vertical banding and shimmering, it's far more watchable than the raw output was.
The gamepad controls works well (and the game does support the Playstation mouse!), the load times are kept short, and the sound quality is generally good throughout... though some of those voice actors can get a bit hammy. The puzzles are generally easy, but unless you cut your teeth on graphic adventures, it'll probably still stump you on a number of occasions. Let me put it this way: this isn't Myst.
Dracula: The Resurrection never impressed me with its mediocre gameplay, but it was always good at creating atmosphere. The graphics are beautiful, the FMVs are extremely well produced, and there's something just awesome about exploring the Transylvanian countryside and Dracula's castle in fancy rotato-vision. It won't impress today the way it did twenty years ago, but the art direction still holds up admirably.
For whatever missteps it might have taken, Dracula is a lavishly-produced adventure that's perfect for genre noobs or people that want a good Halloween-themed adventure that doesn't require much brainpower.
It is a classic? No way. Is it worth experiencing once? Absolutely.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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