I've had a browse of the manual (not promising, sounds like the UI will be terrible!) and the introductory graphic novel (awful - badly written, confusing layout and art, full of typos).
Ha ha ha, started the game and immediately having issues - the first screen says "Insert CD 1" and it just stays stuck on that! So, the only solution for this is either mount a virtual optical drive or download an updated exe file from GOG (even if you got the game on Steam). Trying the latter now. What an incredibly promising start!
Didn't work, and it seems like a very fiddly issue to fix. I might try installing on my older PC which has an actual optical drive, which apparently can often fix the issue even if you don't have a CD to put in there. A lot of effort for what is almost certainly going to be a dreadful game that I give up on in half an hour, but never mind!
Good news: it worked! And there was some glitchiness in the game but I fixed that by turning Incremental Rendering off and on!
Bad news: it's fucking terrible already.
It's ugly as sin, for one thing. The control scheme has point and click verbs on the mouse, but also arrow keys for the free-roaming camera which controls like you're in a level editor and means that the game looks even worse than it should at all times. You absolutely have to read the graphic novel to have any idea what's going on because the game starts with you getting off a train with bruises on your face and going to a hotel and that's it (the comic tells you that you're hunting some vampires who have been feeding off a family for generations, the vamps took the family's newborn baby and Gabriel chased them onto a train but they got the drop on him - none of this is in the game, and if you haven't played the previous games then you'll need to read the manual too!), but even so it's an incredibly dull and bewildering start to the game with you in a bland hotel room and no idea of your objectives.
The one good thing so far has been the opening titles which were admirably bonkers - a mix of classic late-90s Clive Barkery horror imagery, a gentle piano tune laid over them which gives the whole thing an anime feel, Space Odyssey (starchild imagery) and Blade Runner (a unicorn dream). Brilliantly, none of this means anything or helps set up the game whatsoever.
Welp, after spending ten minutes or so wandering aimlessly I was about to resort to a walkthough when the game froze and wouldn't let me close it or go to another window so I had to restart my PC. So I think I'm done with this game! Just embarrassingly bad, even ignoring the tech issues.
Skimmed through a playthrough vid, it seems the game is 90% walking around fields and then the last 10% goes absolutely bonkers. It turns out the family are the descendants of Christ, you're the descendant of the soldier who crucified him and your dagger is magic because Jesus kissed it, Jesus had a team of bodyguards whose descendants help you, but a rogue faction used Christ's blood to become vampires. And the guy in the hotel lobby turns out to be another immortal who drank Jesus's blood, but he's a good guy because he decided never to use his powers. Wow.
It is an absolute disgrace how many good reviews this game got, and certain adventure sites should be ashamed.
Rating: Embarrassingly awful.
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