Operation Backlog Completion 2025

Celebrating All Things Spooky: The Textorcist

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  7 Responses »
Oct 252023
 

Today, we’re actually going to discuss a game that I’ll probably never finish but still want to give a shout-out in this year’s spooky celebration.

The Textorcist: The Story of Ray Bibbia is a bullet hell typing game in which you play as an exorcist standing against the forces of darkness.

Your demonic foes attack with tons of projectiles that you must dodge, and your means of fighting back is to perform exorcisms – by typing out the words as they appear.

(…It just occurred to me while writing this post that the forces of hell use bullet hell attacks; that has to be intentional.)

This is a bizarre blend of genres in which you’ll frantically dodge projectiles until you get a brief window between attacks, at which point you’ll type as fast as many words as you can before you need to dodge again. Of course, you can also try typing with one hand while you dodge.

If you get hit, you drop your Bible and need to retrieve it to continue typing. If you take too long to get it back, however, you’ll need to start your current prayer over from the beginning. And if you get hit when you aren’t holding the Bible, you lose one of your precious hearts.

The Textorcist is a little creepy, pretty funny, and such a unique idea that I can’t help but love it… but it’s also brutally hard.

I’ve never been much of a bullet hell player, and dodging all those attacks while finding time to type in between pushed the limits of what I can do. Fights also take a while, as they’re all lengthy boss fights and sometimes have dialogue partway through. Lose all your hearts, and you start the fight over. The game also only saves after each battle, so if you take a break from a fight and quit the game, you’ll need to watch the preceding scenes again.

(Technically you can skip dialogue, but it seems like it won’t skip anything with animations, so you need to rewatch some parts and skip multiple times if you’re repeating a scene.)

The Textorcist is a unique game that I wish I could finish, and maybe someday I’ll return to it, but right now the frustration of attempting these boss fights over and over and over caused me to reluctantly set it aside. However, if you love typing and bullet hell games, it’s well worth a look.

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Dracula: Love Kills

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  6 Responses »  Tagged with: ,
Oct 232023
 

Two years ago, we talked about the adventure game Dracula: Origin, which I got in a bundle of adventure games years ago.

Now it’s time to discuss the sequel, Dracula: Love Kills.

Dracula isn’t the antagonist this time around. Instead, he’s the one you’re playing as!

After the events of Dracula: Origin, Dracula wakes up to find that the world is in danger from the Queen of Vampires, and so he sets out on a journey to find the artifacts he needs to gain the power needed to defeat her… even if that means working together with his enemy.

Unlike the first game, which was a standard point-and-click adventure game, Dracula: Love Kills retains only some of those elements and instead is mostly a hidden object game.

You’ll inspect each environment, play hidden object sections that give you a cluttered array of objects to search for the listed items, and solve puzzles to progress. The gameplay is fine, although it gets a bit repetitive. What makes things a bit more interesting is that you also unlock new vampire powers as you go, which you must use to find certain items as long as you have enough blood.

It’s really just a matter of having a different way to interact with certain key spots, but it was still nice to get new powers.

At certain points, you also have a choice of whether or not to bite someone, although there are plenty of blood vials scattered around if you choose not to. It’s mainly there for story purposes, as there are two different endings depending on your actions.

The story is pretty basic, and I found Igor more annoying than funny, but I enjoyed the premise of Dracula and Van Helsing joining forces against a greater threat. Overall, Dracula: Love Kills was a decently enjoyable vampire game with a good theme for Halloween.

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Without Escape

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  6 Responses »  Tagged with:
Oct 202023
 

Without Escape is a short point-and-click adventure game in which you wake up during the night after hearing a noise and decide to investigate.

Although you don’t find the source of the noise, you soon learn that something strange is going on.

This is a point-and-click adventure game with static backgrounds. You’ll visit each screen and click things to interact with them. Sometimes you’ll find items, which you’ll then use automatically when you click the right spot.

Some of the puzzles are logical, while others operate on game logic or surreal dream logic, so it sometimes devolves into revisiting locations and clicking everything until you find the right thing. Fortunately, it’s a fairly small setting, so that isn’t as tedious as it would be in a larger game.

(One puzzle also requires you to know a specific chemical symbol, and I didn’t see anything in the game that would provide that knowledge.)

The story… is an excuse to find keys and open doors and enjoy a creepy atmosphere. It’s clear the developers love Silent Hill, as there’s a lot of references to it, but the story is less coherent and just left me scratching my head at the end. There are multiple endings, of which I got the two main ones – the remaining endings appear to involve things like getting a game over in a specific situation and reaching a certain point in the game within a time limit.

Without Escape is a decent game, some mildly spooky fun that takes under an hour to complete. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it’s the sort of game where I’d be interested in seeing what the developers come up with next if they expand and polish the ideas found here.

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