OK, I admit, I stifled a groan when I saw Vampires: Todd & Jessica's Story. Not another vampire story... really, the whole thing has been played out to death, and I am not sure I can stomach another tragic love story of human and vampire...
But, I'm trying to be better about judging a game by its cover so to say... so I decided to go out on a limb and give it a try.
I immediately burst into a fit of uncontrollable laughter in the opening scene... and not in a good way. Girl... that boy is blue. How you don't know that something is up with him, I haven't the faintest idea.
Our story begins with dear vampire, Todd, proposing to his human love, Jessica, in a romantic setting. Everything is going great until, suddenly, a dark, red-eyed man comes in and snatches Todd away.
For a moment, I thought OK, this might get good... I'm going to be Jessica and save my vampire boyfriend from this mess. That's a nice change of pace... but no... alas, we actually have to play as Todd, the wimpiest vampire of all time. Sigh...
We soon learn that Zach, our vampire roommate, is the one who has saved us from marriage because apparently vampires and humans are forbidden to be wed. But that doesn't stop Todd, laws be damned, he's going to find his love and marry her! Love conquers all and so on and so forth... you get the idea, right?
So far, I'm not caring for the story... it's kind of boring and not really anything I'm willing to spend a few hours on, but I persist and continue on.
The graphics... dark. Very dark. And really hard to see items that you need to pick up along the way. And, if you're not directly on an item, the cursor won't change to a hand, so it was really difficult to find objects that I needed outside of hidden object scenes.
Frankly, the scenes weren't anything exciting to look out. They seemed flat, two dimensional, lackluster, and kind of dated, like I was playing a really old game, but without that nice, fuzzy nostalgic feeling.
And the transitions between scenes... what was up with that? It was slow, and clunky, a gave you that bobbing motion of movement... when was the last time you saw that in a game? It drove me crazy since there was a ton of back and forth, and every time you moved to a new location you would get that... bob, bob, bob... super annoying.
Oh, and the world... it's huge. And you don't get a map right away, so there's a lot of wandering aimlessly in the beginning, and it's easy to get turned around.
Also, the directions seemed a bit off. I didn't understand how I could have come from the basement, and then have the house in front of me, but then five screens away, I'm back in the room above the basement... I know I don't have a great sense of direction, but still... something wasn't right.
That's OK though, because I'll just use the hint button, and it will tell me where to go... oh wait. That doesn't work. The hint button just made things flash across the screen really quickly, and I have no idea what it was referring to. Or, it would tell me there wasn't anything to do in this area, so I would have to go room by room until it flashed those marks again, and yet, still, I didn't know what I needed to do.
Now, I'm getting cranky.
Why are these flashes sweeping over two items in my inventory?? Where do I have to use them? Oh wait... I can use them on each other?? Really? You didn't think to mention that in the tutorial?? Talk about confusing... I was so stressed out by the end of playing Vampires: Todd & Jessica's Story, I needed to go straight for the bottle of wine in my fridge.
How about those hidden object scenes? Surely those are done right? Well, for one... they repeated. And I hate that. If you're going to make me sort through endless piles of junk, don't make me look in the same place twice.
Also, there wasn't a lot of attention to detail in the scenes. For example, there was a wine glass on the list of items to find. I was clearly looking at five wine glasses in front of me... but none of them was THE wine glass I had to find. This happened to me a few times, where I would see the object, but it wasn't the right object for the list.
Now, you're just wasting my time.
There were also random sparkles in some scenes for no reason. Just there to be pretty, I guess? Maybe it's alluding to the fact that vampires are supposed to sparkle? Whatever it was, it annoyed me. I'm so used to having sparkles indicate something that I'm supposed to look at, that I kept getting distracted.
At this point, you're probably wondering if Vampires: Todd & Jessica's Story has any redeeming qualities. Well, the music was nice. It had that old school adventure quality that brought back warm, fuzzy feelings of playing early Final Fantasy games. It had a nice mixture of suspense and tranquility.
And that's about it.
Sadly, Vampires: Todd & Jessica's Story was just another vampire story that should have been staked before it ever made its way to my computer. Seriously people, unless you have the story of the century, with a unique twist or unbelievable gameplay... NO MORE VAMPIRES!