Sanguinophile I am not but I can honestly say that I love vampires. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, John Carpenter’s Vampires, The Hunger, Cronos, Dracula 2000; I love these films with vampires in all their forms. There is something horrifying yet intimate and sensual about the world of the Transylvanian bloodsucker that has me yearning for every new vampire film and the idiosyncrasies of the vampires in them. The song, Love You to Death, by Type O Negative, is one of the most poignant depictions of the two-sided nature of the vampire, lover and killer, driven by melancholy and depravity. Perhaps, we see the two sides of human nature in the vampire tale?

You can imagine my delight when I discovered this little known title and was given a copy to review. Here was my chance to live inside the skin and warped world of a vampire without the obvious moral and legal ramifications. We’ve seen vampires through the eyes of Jonathan Harker, but there are two sides to every story.

Erevos (Greek title: Erebos) is a short point and click, inventory based adventure game from Greek three man team, Nyx. The Nyx team comprises Christos Mantzieris, director and designer, Filippos Panteloglou, programmer, and Feliche Mantzieris, musical creator. All three men act in the game amongst others. The accompanying literature with the game cites www.erevos.mainpage.net as the game’s homepage but it has since moved to www.genadios.edu.gr/erevos.htm. Erevos is the first ever Greek multimedia game and features full motion video that is subtitled in English. There is no recorded speech in the game. At first I found this somewhat off putting but if you can ascribe this silence to perhaps being some kind of ESP-like communication it may be easier to come to grips with.

Erevos runs at 1024x768 resolution, changing automatically when run. However, a minor quibble is that the game does not return you to your previous resolution setting. I overcame this with the use of a free application called Reschange. I found this game buggy solely in the startup screens. The game did not work properly when I had Media Player 9 installed: the Genadios and Nyx logos as well as the introductory movies played repeatedly. Once I reinstalled Media Player 6.4 the game ran almost perfectly. I still found I had to hit Esc after clicking on the Erevos screen at the end of the logos or it returned to play the logos one more time. Genadios’ support, in a series of emails had not heard of this error and unfortunately could not offer a solution. One into the game proper, the game ran without a hitch. There is an installation patch for “older” computers running Windows 98 but this did not help the problem.

One other warning: because you are a vampire, you can only go out after sunset. The designers have implemented a flag that checks the clock on your computer to ensure it is between 8:00pm and 7:00am (note there is a mistake in the readme file which says 8:00am-7:00pm)!! I found this an immensely annoying “feature” of this game as I was playing it mainly during the day because the game doesn’t actually warn you until you go through the rigmarole of starting the game up and loading or starting a game. Most of the time, you can change AM to PM on your clock to get around this. But why is sunset always at 8:00pm? It certainly isn’t here…

What little story exists is accessed through reading the background information about the two possible characters you may take the role of. Before you get excited and the concept “replayability” flits in your head, be aware that only one of the game's nine chapters is more than minutely different with a different character. You can choose to be Eric Koplpot a lunatic recently escaped from a psychiatric clinic, whose vampiric origin is unknown even to him. Alternatively, you can play as Giannos Romar, a foreigner who exiled himself to a Japanese village, only to become a vampire and be run out of his adopted home. Their different histories have no bearing on the tale. During the game, the active changes from time to time with little rhyme or reason to some of the other vampire protagonists. Erevos, meaning “deep darkness”, refers to a super secret underground organization of vampire hunters that dates from the Inquisition, 1454. The epilog is seemingly tacked on and had no bearing on the story at all. If someone can understand its relevance, please let me know.

The game consists of nine chapters comprising one day (night) in the life of the vampire. The graphics are rendered simply and are esthetically pleasing and suitably scary. Cutscenes are grainy reflecting reality TV like filming techniques and harkening to The Blair Witch Project. Watch the introductory sequence and try to tell me it doesn’t scare you… Some of the period photographs are sensational for bringing the mood of the time they portray. The game is highly linear and in many cases you cannot even turn around to look behind you. Controls are of two types, which seem to be used haphazardly. There are general movement cursors in the form of arrows as well as left right arrows on the screen that rotate you around an area of interest. Be aware that this is a very grisly game full of blood and sucking noises while feeding but at no time would I say it was excessive. In fact, most scenes of violence are handled in complete darkness with sound effects only to allude to what is occurring.

Sound is sensational in Erevos. In fact, a disk of music accompanies the game featuring full length original compositions and even songs. The music is eerie and really sets the mood. Scary sound effects designed to scare work flawlessly in with the music and there were some genuinely scary moments. An extraordinary touch for an independent adventure was the inclusion of character and place specific themes in music rather than the same tune repeated over and over. The heavy metal songs are of rough quality but appropriate for their use considering they are supposed to be recordings from a nightclub.

The puzzles are pretty easy, involving use of inventory items almost solely. How the designers made up for this was to place constraints on your adventure: each day is timed (though this was never a problem) because of impending sunrise, you must maintain your blood supply which drops over time, and worst of all there is no in-game save. The first six levels and the ninth are no problem. They can be finished easily and the no save feature is not a problem. Chapters seven and eight are more complex and better for it but you may find yourself reaching for a walkthrough to avoid having to repeat the level. Games are saved automatically at the end of each completed level. Death at any time sends you to the desktop instead of a more convenient menu to restart the level. Perhaps unintentionally some of the puzzles suffer from needing a prescient ability to know what is in store. There are times where out of two alternatives, one results in certain death without warning. In other words, in order to solve the puzzle, it requires that you have discovered the wrong way to take the right way! There may be alternative solutions to puzzles (but I didn’t discover any) as there are many redundant inventory items. One warning for those people who leap for walkthroughs at first sign of difficulty: some puzzles that require a solution cannot be solved until the solution information has been discovered.

Vampires are far weaker in this game than is traditional. One blow from a vampire hunter is enough to end your adventure. For some reason, vampires in this game need to use lamps in dark rooms. I thought they were nocturnal, possessed of amazing powers?

Obviously, having been produced in Greece, it suffers the usual English-as-a-second-language issues we see in any translated work. Dialog is stilted, there are spelling, grammatical, and punctuation errors but none of these ought to hamper your enjoyment. I was amused that the books in the game were in Greek but signs and puzzle clues were in English!

Obviously I like vampires and adventure games. It suffers from a significant problem in the form of inability to save the game. Other problems I noted are minor and I could have overlooked them comfortably. This amalgam of adventure and gothic horror though may not be to your taste. At the conclusion of this game I have a bad taste in my mouth because of the grisly ideas and dialog in the total absence of the romanticism of the vampire legend. Undoubtedly, those with lower expectations may relate to even enjoy being a cold blooded killer. I came away from the game wishing for more humanity. Perhaps this is not a good expectation when playing a vampire…

Final Grade: C+

System Requirements:

• Pentium 133 MMX
• 32 MB RAM (64 MB recommended)
• 8x CD ROM (24x recommended)
• VGA card
• Monitor capable of 1024x768 display resolution
• 644 MB hard drive space