Dracula The Undead (Lynx) Playthrough
262A playthrough of Atari’s 1991 graphic adventure game for the Atari Lynx, Dracula the Undead.
The Atari Lynx was best known for its killer arcade ports, but if you look hard enough, there are a few original gems to be found lurking in its library. Dracula the Undead is one such gem.
The game is a point-and-click style adventure, and as far as I can tell, it's the first proper example of the genre to grace a handheld system. (The Sword of Hope for the Game Boy came out around the same time and is similar in a few ways, but it's primarily an RPG.) Dracula is also notable for how it's not at all geared toward kids. It's not vulgar, but it doesn't make any effort to shy away from its subject matter, either.
Dracula the Undead begins with a fireside chat with Mr. Bram Stoker. He explains that we will be playing as Jonathan Harker, a lawyer from London who has just arrived at the count's castle located in the heart of the Transylvanian Alps. Dracula has some business to attend to for the day and has invited us to explore the castle while he's out, and it's not long before we find ourselves in a less-than-ideal situation.
The gameplay is pretty good overall given the game's age and platform, and the interface works well once you get used to it. The puzzles aren't complicated, but they make sense within the context of the game world and the solutions are (mostly) logical which makes for a refreshing change from the norm. It's just too bad that it's so short. Its brevity is probably a blessing considering the lack of a save feature, but the game supposedly started out as a four megabit game that had to be whittled down to ship on a two megabit cartridge. If it still exists, I'd love to see that cut content some day.
What initially drew me to Dracula the Undead was its presentation. I remember drooling over screenshots in magazines. The sepia tones give it the look of a turn-of-the-century photograph, and it makes use of the Lynx's power in some subtle but effective ways. The scaling of Jonathan's sprite as he moves away from the camera creates a convincing illusion of depth, and the way the latern's light plays across different surfaces is an impressive bit of pixel artistry to behold.
The sound is a good match for the graphics in that it, too, is uncharacteristically great for the Lynx. The music is moody, understated, and a whole lot less bloopy than you might expect, and the quality of the sampled effects is about on par with what you'd have heard from a 16-bit console game in 1991.
All in all, Dracula the Undead is an impressive achievement. It succeeded at doing horror on a handheld system in the early 90s, and it did so in a way that's still effective all these years later. I wish there was more to it, but what's there is great for the short while that it lasts, not to mention memorable.
I included the bad ending at 33:19 to show what happens if you forget to log an important event in your notebook.
*Recorded with a Retroarch shader to mimic the look of the original hardware.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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