A Vampyre Story

Overview

Created by Bill Tiller (Curse of Monkey Island), A Vampyre Story follows the tumultuous life of Mona de Laffite. Mona dreams of becoming an opera singer in Paris, but she's current being held hostage in Draxsylvania by Shrowdy von Kieffer. She's also a vampiress, but Shrowdy is too afraid that she'll be upset to tell her.

Gameplay

A Vampyre Story uses a point and click interface, with a context sensitive radial menu. After clicking on an item a small interface will appear allowing the character to choose an action.

The game is also noted for allowing players to explore further using Mona's ability to transform into a bat.

Another feature is the ability to 'remember' objects and still be able to use them in the inventory, even if they are too heavy to carry, useless at the time or merely a concept than an actual item.

Characters

• Mona de Laffite - The young vampiress who dreams of becoming an opera singer.
• Froderick - Mona's only friend in the castle is a bat; he aids Mona throughout her journey.
• Shrowdy von Kieffer - Mona's captor who is too guilty to admit to her that he made her a vampiress.

Trivia

Some ex-LucasArts members were involved in the game, therefore there are several LucasArts adventure game references:

• Pyewacket, a cat, looks a lot like the character Max from the Sam & Max fame.
• Mona comments that a design on one of the stain glass windows looks like a purple tentacle; Froderick responds that he hates purple tentacles and that green ones are much nicer.
• Mona mistakes a dead chicken for a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle.
• Mona introduces herself as "a mighty opera singer!" similar to Guybrush Threepwood declaring himself "a mighty pirate!".
• During an argument in the game insults are hurled, such as: " SCUMMbag", "dairy farmer" and "cow". "Dairy farmer" and "cow" refer to Insult Swordfighting from the Monkey Island series.
• "A113" appears a lot throughout the game. Mona's Academy of the Arts is on Avenue 113 in Paris, the number on the door of the brothel is A113, in the stable there's a numberplate inscribed with A113 - "ParArts, quality since 1870", a map reference is A1-13. These are all references to a classroom number of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).
• One character, Stefan Rex, writes a play about wagons that come to life, run people over and terrorise people in a livery stop. The book was a flop, causing him to lose all his money, his house and his mind. This is a reference to Stephen King (Rex is King in Latin) parodying the film Maximum Overdrive, based on a short story by Stephen King called 'Trucks'. The movie was also a 'flop' and earned lead actor, Emilio Estevez, a Razzie.
• If players use Froderick on the vase of dead roses, Mona asks Froderick if he's ever eaten rose petal sauce; Froderick replies that when he ate some, he went into a raging fever, had to have a shower to cool down and then a Latin rebel carried him off on horseback. This is a reference to the novel, Like Water for Chocolate; where one of the characters eats quail in rose petal sauce, which gives her a fever, she then has a shower to cool down, however the heat from her fever is so intense that it sets fire to the wooden shower stall. Her lover, a rebel, then passes by on his horse, swoops up the naked Rosaura and they make love on horseback.
• The vocal performance of the character Mona de Lafitte is reminiscent of the famous actress Madeline Kahn's voice, specifically in her performance of Elizabeth in the horror/comedy movie Young Frankenstein.

Development

Originally announced in 2004, A Vampyre Story has gone through a rather bumpy development cycle. When the publisher pulled out in April of 2005 the game was in unpaid pre-production for over an year with only one or two people working on the project at a time. Finally, in July of 2006, Autumn Moon announced that they had found a publisher, Crimson Cow. The developers then projected a fall 2007 release date that was later pushed back several times to a November of 2008 release.

PC System Requirements

• Windows XP/Vista
• Pentium 4 1.6GHz/AMD Athlon 1600
• 512MB RAM
• 256MB DirectX 9.0 compatible graphics card
• (Nvidia Geforce FX/ATi Radeon 9500/Intel GMA X300 or higher)
• 2X DVD-ROM drive
• 3GB Hard drive space
• DirectX 9.0 compatible sound card

Soundtrack