I’m sure I wasn’t the only child who spent hours on end completely immersed in one of those ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ books, where you’d have a dice and pages of writing at the ready for every decision you made. Well, Section Games have strived to serve that particular brand of nostalgia with their text-based horror adventure Vlad the Impaler.

Istanbul is in the grip of a terrible evil. At the behest of Vlad himself, you have been sent into the tortured city to get to the bottom of whatever it is that is turning its people into murderers, cultists and abductors.

The game begins with a choice of character: you can play as the ‘explorer’, the ‘warrior’ or the ‘mage’. Anybody who has even been in the same room as an RPG will know what each character entails. For the record, I played as each, and the difference isn’t as significant as the game would have you believe.

Vlad the Impaler is separated into chapters, each starting with an unchanging story segment, meaning that unlike the classic ‘choose-your-own-adventures’, there’s quite a rigid structure ensuring that the same story is told each time, with variation occurring only in the fine details.

This has its benefits. The gruesome story told in Vlad the Impaler is quite strong, crammed with horrific descriptions of mutilated corpses and ludicrously grim depictions of the beautiful eastern city. By ensuring each playthrough sticks to the narrative, the developers ensure that the player can’t miss their finest asset.

However, it’s rigidness also has it’s disadvantages. The game is nowhere near as endlessly re-playable as it thinks it is. After three playthroughs at around forty-five minutes each, I’m sure I’ve seen everything the game has to offer.

It would be misleading to call Vlad the Impaler a game, as it features very little interaction from the player. After reading through the first chapter, choosing a few options along the way, the player is given a selection of locations to visit, each with it’s own selection of independent incidents to enjoy.

Whether it be a clue towards who is at fault for the curse that hangs over the city, or just some atrocities to intervene in, each incident rewards in the form of either information, attribute points or weapons.

Each character has the standard set of stats, including charm, strength and intelligence. However, I can’t say how significantly they affect the game. I can only assume that having better stats opens up more options. On my first playthrough, I did manage to talk the big baddie into killing himself, which was both impressive and anti-climactic.

The concept of turning a ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ novel into a video game might seem a little pointless, when RPGs already seek to offer flexible adventures with the added bonuses of fun gameplay and exciting visuals. However, due to its format, Vlad the Impaler does have more tools at its disposal than the average equivalent novel.

As a horror story, it’s all about setting a tone, and Vlad the Impaler does that quite successfully through it’s choice of music and it’s brooding, black-and-white visuals. It features a selection of still-images that add to the horrific descriptions of each scene.

It’s difficult to judge just how good Vlad the Impaler is. As a video game, it’s practically non-interactive and doesn’t contain moving images, so it’s as basic as they come. As a horror novella, it’s provocative and well-written, but it never really terrifies.

The language used is very raw and leaves nothing to the imagination, but it’s feels more like a Goosebumps novel than sophisticated horror. There’s a particular passage that talks of eye-jelly dribbling from a crazed woman’s swollen socket. It might make you recoil, but will it keep you up at night? Well I suppose that depends on you. Personally, I enjoyed Vlad the Impaler but I slept soundly, and I’ll probably never play it again.

6/10

 

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