In the world of monster media, there are few characters as compelling as Count Dracula, and one to come Steam the game looks to benefit from it. The game, with the title Dracula: Crimson Apostleaims to approach the Dracula mythos from a different angle, and in doing so it has a chance to tell a truly original story against a proven backdrop.
Minor spoilers for Bram Stoker's Dracula and Dracula's guest Forward.
Published 1897, Bram Stoker's Dracula is a seminal work of gothic horror, responsible for establishing much of contemporary vampire lore. It follows the titular Count Dracula, a Transylvanian nobleman who was turned into a vampire centuries before the story began. Presented as a series of journal entries by psychiatrist Dr. John Seward, DraculaThe gory details are relayed by Seward's patient RM Renfield, whom the former then leaves to the side. However, Seward is not a day-to-day outpatient therapist: he oversees an asylum for the insane, and Renfield is among his most confused, delusional. So it is fascinating that Renfield would actually be chosen as the main character in Dracula: Crimson Apostle. The nascent Steam game will provide one of very few glimpses of the “sane” version of the character.
How does Dracula: Crimson Apostle fit into Stoker's Lore?
Renfield, the bug-eating madman
Although interpretations of Renfield vary by adaptation, the essence of this character is a fanatical obsession with the vampiric Count. He is held in Seward's Asylum against his will and believes his ultimate salvation through Dracula, who will allow the former to transcend his meager human form and achieve immortal life. An important part of Renfield's pathology is a delusion regarding small life forms such as insects, rodents and cats; he catches and eats them, sometimes ritualistically, in the belief that their life force will be transferred to him.
Renfield actually inspired the name of a real psychiatric disorder, coined in 1992: Renfield syndrome describes a patient obsessed with drinking blood.
Rearrange the cases in the correct US release order.
Start
Rearrange the cases in the correct US release order.
Light (5)Medium (7)Hard (10)
Needless to say, Renfield is an unusual protagonist in video games, so it will be interesting to see what strategy Dracula: Crimson Apostle takes when picturing him. The game's trailer seems to suggest that Renfield only encounters Dracula's castle at the beginning of the game, which could mean that he hasn't fully begun his descent into madness. But that one Crimson Apostle The Steam page also makes it clear that Renfield will experience visions in the game, but whether this is due to Dracula's influence or his own burgeoning psychological disturbances remains to be seen.
Countess Dolingen von Gratz, Dracula's unwilling guest
Countess Dolingen von Gratz was originally introduced through the short story Dracula's guestwhich was published posthumously by Bram Stoker's wife Florence. Florence Stoker argued that the content of Dracula's guest was originally designed as part of Dracula correct, but dismantled in the long run. Anyway, Dracula's guest (and much later, Draculwritten by Bram's great-nephew Dacre Stoker) reveals that Dolingen was turned into a vampire by a cruel twist of fate and chance, and later, after being forced to abandon her earthly life, was captured by Dracula as a concubine. But she repeatedly rejected the Count's advances and remained spiteful and defiant towards him to the end.
Given that Countess Dolingen von Gratz is something of an enemy to Dracula, it will be interesting to see how her role in Dracula: Crimson Apostle shakes out. She appears to guide Renfield, who claims to have seen her in his dreams before meeting her in physicality. This sly and potentially duplicitous manifestation of her vampiric influence is sure to bolster compelling narrative beats, especially when juxtaposed against Renfield's tenacity and slavish reverence for Dracula.
Dracula: Crimson Apostle has the Lore for a great experience, but what about the gameplay?
At its core, Dracula: Crimson Apostle is a puzzle game, but a puzzle game in the style of The Talos Principle or Portalin that its story is a major focus. These types of games can be difficult to balance, as they require a greater suspension of disbelief: only in a surreal story can a series of increasingly complex puzzles and riddles be anything but absurd.
On the other hand, it's important to make the puzzles themselves engaging and meaningfully difficult, of course. right now, Dracula: Crimson Apostle seems to follow Silent Hill and Resident Evil school of puzzle design, where those on display are seemingly built around spatial reasoning and pattern recognition within the game world. For example, the player may need to arrange books a certain way on a bookshelf, or fit specific illustrations into the right frames, in order to proceed.
By nature, puzzle games can offer great environmental storytelling, as each can serve as something of a nuanced, interpretive narrative backdrop. In the case of Dracula: Crimson Apostlecan the puzzles serve as an immersive way to understand the psyche of one of literature's most famous madmen, while giving the audience a deeper insight into Dracula knowledge in general.
