Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain. I liked it, despite some nitpicks. It plays like a Zelda game but with a gothic horror mood, which is perfectly fine with me. Kain is assassinated at the start (I managed to take down three of the guys before they got me) and then resurrected as a vampire, so you have to fight your way across the land to get revenge. There are also these mystical pillars set up in the middle of a forest that somehow represent the health of the land but they've been corrupted and you have to fix them. I wasn't crazy about that part of the lore but it's not a big deal. I did like how the game was laid out. There are 9 pillars, so you'd think it would be a straight "go to one dungeon for each pillar" set-up but the game instead has a linear structure and it's more about meeting the characters involved in the story (and then killing them). It has a pretty good plot by video game standards, with one development understandably leading into the next, until by the end you feel like Kain has gone through a novel's worth of adventures and arrived at a clear resolution. There's a good and bad ending, and for once I think either ending is justifiable (although the bad ending became canon for the sequels).

Compared to the 2D Zelda games, Blood Omen is much more ponderous. Link zips around nimbly but Kain just sort of moseys along slowly. A lot of encounters involve you meeting a bad guy, moving in close enough to provoke a swing only to back off and then hit him before he can wind up again. You also gain various sub-weapons and magic throughout the game, most of which I didn't use except the thing that looks like the Glaive from Krull (good for killing at a distance). Once you get the shield/repel spell, combat becomes very easy because you can cast that on yourself and it lasts long enough for you to clear out a good section of an area without worrying about taking any damage. You can also shape-change - bats for quick travel, wolf for hopping over obstacles, mist for walking over dangerous surfaces, and human for disguising yourself in towns. You also get weapon and armor upgrades you find as you go along.

The coolest thing in the game is the blood-drinking. It would have been bothersome if you had to walk up and chomp down on everyone's neck to refill your health meter, so the game allows you to raise your arm and the victim's blood leaps out of their body and into your mouth, like in Prince of Darkness when people start puking at each other from across the room but in reverse. A nice touch is that some creatures have green blood which will poison you if you drink from them (be careful if you're wearing the armor that automatically sucks blood for you).

The graphics are okay. The sprites appear to be pre-rendered on top of nicely detailed pixel art backgrounds. You can zoom in but I don't see why you would because the graphics don't get prettier and your view distance gets really cramped. Your status bar takes up a big chunk of the right side of the screen, which I suspect is why the "camera" tends to reorient itself every time you turn in a direction, to make up for the smaller playing field. I got used to it but it was off putting when I first started playing. The game is major showcase of colored lighting, though. Almost every location shows off with the lighting effects and it adds to the atmosphere a lot. At its best it's like you're playing a Mario Bava movie. There are some CGI cut-scenes that play in certain parts which are...certainly representative of their time.

The voice acting is pretty good but they really should have given Kain more voice samples. Hearing him yell "VAE VICTUS!" or chuckling evilly every other second gets old really fast.

Load times are pretty bad on the Playstation version. I could be wrong, but I do think the console version's gameplay actually moves slightly faster than the PC version but my memory could be fooling me.

The game gave me a final rating of "GIMP", I guess because I didn't kill enough people and/or find enough secrets (17/100).