Dungeons & Dragons: Ravenloft Series

I'll start by saying that this score would have been pretty different if I tried the game for the first time nowadays, it'd probably feel clunky. However I first got the game in 1996 as a kid, and I loved every second of it. The DND rules aren't as complete as Baldur's Gate, but they're fine. You'll still be navigating perilous dungeons and killing monsters and getting cool loot with true DND flavour. I "completed" the game again during the confinement that happened here like in March/April. Spiritually completed, since I got to the ending, but the ending video bugged out. I still got some fun with the dungeons. The only problem was when completing the "seals", I thought I must have missed one quarter but it was there in the last dungeon. Pretty common happening with old games. Otherwise the game is defined by its heavy Egyptian feel, Har'Akir is an Egytpian-themed domain from Ravenloft. The game's roots can be traced to an AD&D pen-and-paper adventure called "Touch of death", that told the same story, but here it's spiced up I think. I prefer the videogame to the module. All in all I wish that companies brought pen-and-paper adventures to videogames as well as this today. Of course the reality is well different.

Ravenloft I & II were among my favorites when they came out in the 90s, despite their graphics being outdated at release already (only 90 degrees angles, no curves, flat world with no ramps etc. and pixels! Holy moly do closeups look horrible!). The problem with the "smooth scrolling" 3D games is they aged worse than their "step-by-step" cousins (Dungeon Master 2) and this is especially true about Ravenloft. Atmosphere and Sound effects are great however, I love the fantasy horror touch, which saves these titles from mediocrity, part 2 also has the Ancient-Egypt setting going for it. The voice acting is pretty bad though. Gameplay-wise these titles are just average. I preferred the first one despite terrible graphics and a clumsy combat simply because of the Transylvanian Dark Fantasy setting, the high difficulty and the focus of everybody's favorite enemy type, the undead. Both games are combat heavy and feature low puzzle density (which are mostly just finding keys/buttons/teleporters) with some dialogue but overall is pretty linear.

I remember having played that back in the day and being drawn in hard. So I thought I'd relive the experience. OK, I expected an old game with 16-bit aesthetics and so on but honestly, it got me bored quite quickly. Don't know why but I don't recall the game as such a chore. Maybe I'm too old and impatient. Maybe it's that I'm too used to modern games where exploring the world is a reward in itself because the world is rich, which obviously couldn't be done back 30 years ago so you're stuck with the stock walls and the flat world. Maybe. Also, experience of running the game in DosBox is a letdown - the game is unresponsive, the controls are clunky and the overall feeling is a big mess. So yes, it's a big step-up from, say, EotB games but I'd rather play me some Ultima Underworld.

Strahd's Possession has game-breaking bugs. Amazing game but unless you are lucky or extremely savvy at fixing broken old game files, you will regret purchasing this collection. Have fun with the D://cine13.anm file not found bug in the caverns. Reinstalling won't help. Loading old saves and restarting the game won't help either (at least for me). I usually don't have too many issues with running older games but this game I had bad history with. Back in the old days, I had similar issues with this game that prevented me from finishing it. Now, 20 years later, I am still in the same boat. I was hoping this gog version would be different... Didn't play Stone Prophet. This is a brief review for Strahd's Possession only.

Enemies have rdiculous attack rates and constantly spasticlly dart around out of view with zero movement frames, step movment barely works and picking up things or interacting with the world is difficult sense each click can move the character wiht an innocous click. This game is simply a hassle to play. However, the graphics though old, are quite nice for the time, characters are generally well animated and npcs are very well voiced. But gameplay is what matters, and sadly this game is just broken.