| 5 star: | | (0) | | 4 star: | | (5) | | 3 star: | | (6) | | 2 star: | | (3) | | 1 star: | | (0) |
| Average Rating: 
Number of Ratings: 14
Write a review |
1-14 of 14 Impressive Speed-IF, sending up Agatha Christie and vampires, September 4, 2023There's a lot packed into BOE--although it took 3 hours to code (since it is SpeedIF,) the author obviously did a lot of planning in his head to give a very complete experience.
The story is this: you are a vampire, and you need blood. You've already been without it for a bit, and X ME describes you as taller than you should be, but hunched over. Worse, the current train is snowbound, and there's been a murder!
The whodunit is of little to no concern for you. You have your own survival at stake, and the body may give you a lifeline, because the humans traveling all manage to be protected, enough, against you. Nuns wear crucifixes, and so forth.
And there are a few bad endings as you go through the train. There is another vampire you must outwit, and you can also unleash a horrible monster or carelessly expose yourself as a vampire. None of these are the recommended fourth "winning" entry where, it must be said, you show yourself as totally amoral, where you manage to do something awful in plain sight. (Not that the game's explicit about this.)
The highlight of BOE to me is a cooking puzzle that is funny once you see one of the ingredients. Perhaps you can guess it. There are only three ingredients, but as a vampire, you have logistical problems. There are also amusing encounters with other train riders and terse descriptions, especially of anti-vampire items. There is a pet that you will find useful. And in the final scene, you may walk away making quite a good impression.
The author has always been one to go his own way and challenge the status quo. Mister P and his Paul Allen Panks tribute game, The Idol, are examples. BOE deals with more conventional tropes that make us laugh, but it mucks them about cleverly. I enjoyed EctoComp 2011 but would've been surprised if this hadn't won, and years later I'm still impressed with the design and touches of humor.
- Edo, March 21, 2021
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
A short riff on vampires, September 21, 2017Written for ECTOCOMP, Bloodless is a short game which takes inspiration from - what else? - Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. You play a vampire on board a delayed train. Someone's had the life sucked out of them, but it definitely wasn't you. Time to investigate!
Bloodless may not be hugely surprising, but is a solid, short game, with light-hearted, bare-bones narration along with relative straightforward puzzles, of a variety familiar to IF.
Bloodless, being set on a train, has a spatial layout similar to the long, featureless corridors so beloved to this genre, but grouping rooms into carriages chunks them into more memorable sections. Bloodless is a pretty entertaining, bite-sized riff on the vampire genre.
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
Agatha Christie meets Dracula, September 15, 2017This game is similar to both Murder on the Orient Express and Dracula.
You awake from your coffin on a train to discover that a passenger has had their blood drained--and not by you.
This game has many of the usual speed-IF problems (undercluing and underimplementation), but it is in the top 10% of all speed-IF, and quite enjoyable.
- Khalisar (Italy), March 18, 2015
- E.K., May 11, 2013
- A. Margo (Southern California), October 8, 2012
- stadtgorilla (Munich, Germany), April 17, 2012
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
Dracula: Guerilla Chef, March 9, 2012by Sam Kabo Ashwell (Seattle)Related reviews: vampire, dracula, horror, genre, train, setting, Victorian, oldschool, minicomp, speedif, ectocomp 1899: a train is trapped by snow, and a murder has been committed; but you are Count Dracula, and identifying the murderer is only one part of the more pressing objective of getting some blood.
Written in 3 hours for Ectocomp, in which it placed 1st of 8, this is essentially a speedIF. That considered, it's an impressive piece of work, if not a hugely distinctive one. It's designed along unadventurous but very solid lines; gather some inventory, assess the situation, solve a straightforward puzzle. The map is well-organised, the puzzles are easy to pick up without being obvious, and you are deftly turned away from red herrings. The terse efficiency failed me at (Spoiler - click to show)lighting the stove, where failure responses don't really signal the correct action; otherwise, for a game written this quickly it's remarkably robust.
Genuinely horrific effects take time to build and a lot of fine-tuning, and few Ectocomp games really attempt to create them; Bloodless is no exception, and mostly feels like a neutral-affect oldschool piece. It does, however, manage to develop a strong, atmospheric setting in a few minimalist strokes; I got a good impression of the creaky, dimly-lit, narrow environment of the train carriages.
- Marco Innocenti (Florence, Italy), December 6, 2011
- EJ, November 28, 2011
- Jim Turner (Ireland), November 13, 2011
- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), November 6, 2011
- ifwizz (Berlin, Germany), November 6, 2011
1-14 of 14 | Return to game's main page