Vampires: Guide Them to Safety!
Developer: CBE Software S.R.O.
Publisher: CBE Software S.R.O.
Platform: Mac, Windows (Reviewed)
Release Date: November 12, 2012
Price: $12.99 USD Buy it Here
Overview
Vampires: Guide Them to Safety! is a whacky puzzle game where the player is tasked to guiding vampires to the safety of their coffins before dawn. Players have no direct control over these pesky bloodsuckers and must manipulate the environment to guide their charges to safety.
Story
Vampires: Guide them to Safety! is light on the story. Gamers needing a backstory will need to fill in the blanks with their own imaginations.
Gameplay
Vampires: Guide Them to Safety! is a puzzle game where the vampires need to be led around a maze to the safety of their crypts. Since players cannot directly control the vampires, the player must move the crypt itself. The player are able to move certain highlighted hallways clockwise. Each move counts as one turn. To earn certain rankings, players must complete the level with certain requirements like time and maximum amount of turns used. Along the way, there are various dangers that can bring an untimely end to the lost vampires such as mirrors, vampire hunters and silver bullet firing guns. Players provided with spider webs and garlic repellent to help overcome these obstacles. To make things even more interesting, vampires come in many variations. Some will make specific turns when possible, others will turn randomly. If the puzzle is too difficult, the game provides five surrender flags that allows stuck players to skip over the level and come back to it later.
The difficulty of Vampires: Guide them to Safety! ranges from simple to fiendishly difficult. There were several levels where I had to skip over and come back to it later to conquer. I noticed most of the levels involved more than four vampires that turn randomly running around the crypt at once. Solving puzzles that involve vampires that turn predictably can be solved by studying the maze and having good timing. On the other hand, the random vampires require a fair amount of situational awareness, the ability to think quickly, and excellent timing. I found scoring gold coffins on some of these levels often boiled down to sheer luck and tenacity based on the score requirements.
The level design in Vampires: Guide them to Safety! is excellent. The traps and tools are interesting and fit well in the Dracula the vampire lore the game leans on. This is definitely not your sparkly Twilight vampire game. The controls are excellent. The camera can be moved with the WSAD keys and necessary tools are bound to keys nearby. Unfortunately, the graphic and key binding options in the game must be changed in the start-up menu.
Visuals
Vampires: Guide Them to Safety! uses a fun cartoony art style. I can best describe it as a slightly darker adult Sesame Street design. The vampires remind me of Count von Count. The UI is extremely simple and very usable. On screen buttons are kept to the far sides of the screen and stay out of the way during gameplay. The game ran without any visual problems, slowdowns, or frame drops. Vampires! provided an excellent visual experience.
Audio
Vampires: Guide them to Safety! has excellent audio. The music is catchy, light hearted, and quite varied. It always nice to see a puzzle game that plays more than one track. The sound effects sound good and are not repetitive to the point of annoying.
Overall
Vampires: Guide Them to Safety! is a fun cartoony puzzle game. It is quite lengthy and gaining gold coffins on each puzzle helps increase the length of the game significantly. The audio and visual presentation is very polished. The game manages appropriate for all ages as the violence is cartoony and minimal. At $12.99 USD, the game is priced a little high but is still very reasonable for a game of this length.
Capsule Computers review guidelines can be found here.
