Elvira: Mistress of the Dark is an adventure game / RPG developed by Horror Soft and released by Accolade in March 1990 for the Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64 and MS-DOS. It is named after the movie that released in 1988. A sequel was released in 1992, which already gives us a hint that this game must have done alright commercially.
And sure enough, the reception for this game was very good. On Wikipedia you won't find a score below 4 stars or 81% and it received the Computer Gaming World RPG of the Year Award for 1991. Not sure why it won a year later, but know that the competition wasn't light at the time.
In Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, we play, well, ourselves, called upon by Elvira to prevent her great-great grandmother Emelda's return from the dead. The game plays in a castle and has multiple elements. It is part point & click adventure with its typical verb-interface (open, unlock, look in), part action game with real time combat and part horror game as it uses a lot of gore and has some scary surprises in store overall.
If you don't know Elvira, as a non-American I didn't before today (though her style does look familiar), she is a character portrayed by Cassandra Peterson and was most popular in the 80s. She is most known for her gothic, cleavage-showing wardrobe and her edgy humor.
I checked out the movie before playing and thought it was a funny movie, though a lot of gore and horror is present in it, so I wasn't sure what to expect with this game. Sure enough, it's a lot of tense, creepy horror interspersed with Elvira's edgy humor.
In the game, you control your character by clicking forward, turn right, turn left or turn around. Whenever an enemy approaches, you start in attack mode and have to click LUNGE / HACK to strike. Depending on a variety of stats and some RNG, your strike hits or is blocked. If you hit, often you get a second attempt (again, depending on your stats vs the enemies) but if you are blocked, you go over to Defense Mode and have to BLOCK / PARRY.
But let's dive deeper into that whilst we go through each category in more detail.
STORYTELLING
You start the game by moving two steps forward before being arrested. In a humorous little scene, your character is in his dark prison cell as light shines in and the characters jaw DROPS. In comes Elvira, and she quips that you were sent to save *her*, but instead she is saving you. She brings her to her room in this castle, in which she is a prisoner. Her great great grandmother Emelda is about to awaken from the dead, so you have to help prevent that from happening.
Elvira then is found in a kitchen where she can mix spells for you, she can also climb into a little hole if you find her some light for that and there are a variety of other things that she does / expects you to do, but most of the time, she is not gonna be on screen. She is pretty much her witty self from the movies and TV shows and it works well.
Then there is the guy who arrested you, who seemed to be on drugs or something, and later an old woman who takes over the kitchen, meaning you have to "scare her off", otherwise Elvira will not mix any more spells for you.
Depending on how you stand on her edgy humor and a horror story like this one, this might work or it might not. It's not particularly advanced story telling and most of the game is spent in combat or exploration, with some environmental storytelling as well to be fair. There isn't that much here overall, but it's solid.
GAMEPLAY
Combat took a while to get used to, especially defense. Your enemy reaches back for a swing for a second before striking to your left or your right. From what I figured out, BLOCK or PARRY is assigned to one side during a specific fight, so when he attacks left, you BLOCK for example. However, I believe stats matter here too and sometimes, I would click it too early or too late and the swing would hit me anyway. Considering that you have 99 LIFE to start, you can lose it all rather quickly, especially because the tougher enemies can be found very early on. But the game has a real time combat system that was uncommon for the times and even if it isn't great, it's still unique.
This means that the entire game is filled with trial and error moments that you will die to dozens, if not hundreds of times. Make sure to save often.
The rest of the game is puzzle solving and exploration. For example, outside in the garden area, a man stands with a bird on his arm. When you get too close, the bird jumps into air and flies at you. Within this time, you have to figure out how to defeat it. Turns out, there is a very specific way to beat it, and if you don't have the item, a bolt, go and find it. The game doesn't indicate that you need it though, but this is one of the easier "puzzles" to solve. Problem is, your aim is terrible, so you can't hit it. What do you do now? The manual has a tip regarding that if you're stumped, but even though the answer is very "game-y", it kinda makes sense.
Many puzzles are like that. Often they do make sense and you'll get them eventually. The problem is, figuring out where item A is to use it with item B to get the wanted result can take a long time and will involve a lot of dying. Considering your life points are rather low, even saving a lot will still mean losing a lot of time to find this random item. Games back in the day did this a lot I notice to add an additional "challenge" for people looking to complete games, so you probably will either have to use a guide or look for hours and get lucky. Not the most fun.
To complete puzzles and for combat purposes, you have an inventory and can drag and drop items in and out of it. The manual says that you have a lot of space and shouldn't be shy when picking things up, however there are a lot of necessary items to collect and going over the invisible quota happened quicker than I would have liked. If you are over encumbered for too long, you become too tired and the game ends, so it's actually important to pay attention. Luckily you can simply drop items anywhere and then pick them up later. But there's a lot of inventory management without a lot of "reliable" management to be done.
Plus, there is a kitchen where Elvira mixes you spells, but once you visit and exit for the first time, the kitchen is blocked by an old lady and you need to find an item later to get her out. Until then, no spells. That means you shouldn't go there for a while, but if you don't, you gotta keep the ingredients in your inventory, which means you have to manage dropping them somewhere and getting back to them later. There is some strategy involved here, but to me it wasn't the most fun.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
There is a little line by Elvira when she first talks to you, but it's not even linked to what she is actually saying, so it's not much more than a noise and not worth discussing.
The sound design is solid. From the sound of swords clashing to the sound of enemies shouting when being hit (though the sound is the same for both man and monster), not to mention the sound when you beat a sharp wooden stick into the chest of a vampire with a hammer, the sound design works well in line with the game's atmosphere.
The real highlight of this game though is its soundtrack (for the Amiga version). There are three or four tracks that you hear based on the location you are in and all set the mood perfectly. The track in the garden especially I could definitely listen to outside of the game. The music is creepy, unsettling truly does the most work to make this game feel like a horror game. I can recommend a listen.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
Oh man, what can I say here? I think it's safe to say that this game is one of the bigger gore-fests of its time. The first character you meet that imprisons you for example has no pupils. Or the first time you are in combat, you realize that whenever the enemy's health depletes, cuts in his chest become visible. But that's the harmless stuff.
Because whenever you die, your character's demise is shown in very graphic ways. When the bird manages to kill you, it takes your eyeballs and you see your character in that particularly gruesome image. When a vampire bites you, you have bite marks in your head. When the old lady gets her hands on you, your head ends up swimming in a cooking pot. There are many more unique ways you die and even the most basic death is hard to look at, not to mention that your character is bloodied in every scene.
ATMOSPHERE
The grotesque design mixed with the tense music and the appearance of a bunch of in-theme characters make this one of the more atmospheric games of 1990.
CONTENT
If you know what to do, this game takes a bit over an hour. If you don't, you'll probably be busy closer to 10 if you use guides sparingly. 10 hours will be filled with a lot of reloading and guessing on which way to go in which order, in addition to inventory management, so a shorter length or a bit less complexity in the level design would have done this game good I think.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
As I mentioned, the design is too complex at times and a lot of it has to do with the dungeon (here: castle) being small overall, but filled with enemies that are too strong at pretty much every second door, meaning you will go into the wrong direction or enter the wrong room on a very regular basis.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
The amount of gore present here is certainly noticeable and I'm gonna say it's unlikely that there were many other games like this back in the day where you had so many different ways of seeing your character's death. If you enjoy horror games, this definitely pushed the scene in the right direction, but if you're in it for the RPG mechanics, it'll probably not be as welcomed.
REPLAYABILITY
Once you have finished the game, there is some replayability in approaching puzzles slightly differently or of course trying to beat your previous time (or limiting the amount of reloads), but generally the game is fairly linear in how to solve things.
PLAYABILITY
The game is perfectly playable.
OVERALL
The focus on puzzles in addition to the RPG mechanics present in this game make for awkward gameplay mix. If you're a fan of one genre but not so much of the other, this will probably be off-putting to both fronts. If you enjoy both genres however and don't mind experiencing how a mix between the two would work, and especially if you don't mind but rather welcome the horror elements in this game - which set a great atmosphere - you'll likely enjoy the game for what it's worth, however the complexity and the reliance on save states may be frustrating to you.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
- Leah Wesolowski for Computer Gaming World Issue 82 (May 91): "these images are simply not acceptable for two-year-olds" (in reference to the gory scenes) | No shit, Leah.
