Dracula Resurrection is the first game in the Dracula trilogy. It is the direct predecessor to The Last Sanctuary, but completely unrelated to the third title, The Path of the Dragon. I have really enjoyed every one of these games and it is now one of my favorite classical adventure series. However, Dracula Resurrection is the obvious best title in the entire series. And like the other titles in the series, it is of the fully 3D node-based variety.

Dracula Resurrection is chock full of content and actually has a very open world for an adventure game. And while for the most part you have to approach the puzzles in a linear fashion, it never seems forced and you always seem to have many avenues to explore at the same time. In fact, the game is so open that it is separated into just two main areas, Dracula's castle and the surrounding village. With both of areas being so big that I would be surprised if you did not get a little lost at times.

All of these locations are filled with great looking, classically low res, horror-themed visuals. But almost as often as you see these normal in-game visuals, you will be seeing a unimaginable number of cut scenes. For almost everything you do, you will see a new one: Traveling to a new location, there is probably a cut scene. Opening a particularly important chest, another cut scene. Pulled some lever, even more cut scenes. Not that this is a bad thing, the cut scenes are great, with improved visuals and of course a different perspective giving the game the ability to better convey emotion and action. Overall these cinematics are wonderful, but they do contain some corny dialogue and bugs. Not that this dialogue does not fit the plot, which is really uninspired and contains far too much stereotypical overconfidence by Dracula (especially considering how incredibly easy it is to defeat him and his minions at every turn). But of course, the horror genre can be somewhat self-parodying at times.

One of the main things you will be doing, of course, is solving puzzles, and this is by far the best part of the game. There are a wide variety of logic and inventory-based puzzles, all of which are simply fantastic. Most of the puzzles are intuitive (I did not really get stuck at any point in the entire game). They can also be challenging and quite unique at times. Some of these puzzles are also obviously a little broken, but happily not in a way that should impede your progress.

In summary, Dracula Resurrection is a completely fantastic classical point and click adventure, with only a few small insignificant problems weighing against the great polished behemoths that are the good parts. So if you like vampires and point and click games this is a title you have to check out.

Technical note: Newer systems might need to run the game in Windows 98/ME compatibility mode.