In Honor Of Dan Beating Drake of the 99 Dragons, I Played Everything From Idol FX (Part II: Nosferatu And A Hugo Clone)

Author's Note: This part of a multi-part series on the site where I, ZombiePie, play and review every single game made by Idol FX AB, best known for making Drake of the 99 Dragons. If you missed the previous episode, you can find it over here:

• In Honor Of Dan Beating Drake of the 99 Dragons, I Played Everything From Idol FX (Part I: Gast, An Admirable Start)

Part 2: Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi (2003)

At least we have a game worthy of being discussed in length today.

What is it?

The last time we met, we discussed Idol FX's debut title, Gast, and some background context to the studio's sudden rise and fall. While imperfect at a cellular level, Gast is speckled with quaint and decent ideas, allowing it to get a pass in my book, considering it came from a small team of greenhorns. Though thoroughly a kids' game in its DNA, Gast is far from an immediate indictment on Idol FX's right to exist as a developer. In transitioning to their subsequent work, Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi, we have me repeating the same conclusion. The game buckles from the weight of its ideas, and almost immediately at that, and within minutes of playing it, it becomes apparent that the game needed more time in the oven. If you recall my last blog, you might remember that in 2003, Idol FX managed to put out not one, not two, but THREE games (i.e., Nosferatu, Loophole, and Drake of the 99 Dragons). So, consider this when I review many of Nosferatu's shortcomings. The most generous estimate I found indicated the game got about nine months of development, and the most pessimistic source suggested just six months. Regardless of where the truth might lie, Nosferatu stands as Idol FX's most ambitious game project, and yet, the studio did not deviate from its expedited production cycle. You finally get to a game worthy of being a labor of love, and you treat it no differently than Drake of the 99 Dragons or a tie-in to a Swedish television show. You can't make this stuff up.

A warning that strikes fear into anyone who decides to play Nosferatu.

But what is Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi? Well, at its heart, it's a first-person action roguelike. It occurs in a mansion complex wherein a vampire lord and his disciples have kidnapped your sister, extended family, and their friends and confidants. Your family members are spread across three major building complexes in this mansion (i.e., a west hall, east hall, and cathedral), but there's a catch, and it stems from the game's roguelike kicker. While the building these characters reside in is set in stone, the exact placement of most of them is randomized. On top of that, those buildings' interiors, including the location of weapons and consumables, are entirely procedurally generated. Not everything is procedurally generated. The arenas where you tackle boss fights are fixed, and a handful of specific NPC placements are nailed in place as well in every playthrough. But, make no mistake, Nosferatu is kind of like Daggerfall, and just like Daggerfall, its sky high ambition is its unmaking.

Furthermore, the game has a fixed timer. You have ninety real-world minutes to save as many people as possible, and if you fail to confront the final boss before that timer expires, you automatically lose the game. Additionally, the game's final boss becomes stronger whenever a savable NPC dies, or you decide to skip saving them entirely whenever you opt to trigger the final boss. There is a slight Lavos or Chrono Trigger-like nature to the final boss, in that after you collect the story-require items, which only takes about thirty minutes in a normal playthrough, you can tackle them whenever you want. The first Dead Rising game is the most straightforward comparison I can make. Think about how that game has environments that feel like interstitial connective tissue between major boss confrontations and how it utilizes a fixed time interval before your playthrough is over. Also, like the first Dead Rising, you'll quickly grow tired of trying to drag NPCs back to the lone safe spot in the game and scream in frustration when they do jack to prevent themselves from being murdered. However, unlike the first Dead Rising, upon a failed attempt at beating the game, your only option with Nosferatu is to start from scratch and roll the dice on a new set of procedurally generated building interiors. You carry nothing between playthroughs.

This portal will simply infinitely spawn enemies until you destroy it.

There's a tension to Nosferatu that ends up being its best attribute. The game starts you with a simple melee weapon and, after that, throws you to the wolves. Because there are no guarantees in the game, you scrounge for every possible resource you can find, and searching every nook and cranny becomes a necessity. Likewise, the game ends up becoming a modern-ish roguelike on par with Spelunky or Rogue Legacy. Until you save the NPC that hands over a pistol or the one that has a rifle, you can't plan for any given playthrough to take advantage of specific arms or armaments. Instead, you desperately strip your enemies of any salvage they are carrying in hopes of making your playthrough more viable. Because your first handful of playthroughs are bound to be losses, each subsequent playthrough orients more around understanding the game's patterns and possible permutations and memorizing its few guarantees, especially its boss battles. The best course of action I'd advise is to do a few playthroughs that help you memorize the savable NPCs in the first hall, get incredibly comfortable with that building, and then move on to the building opposite to it; the same way you develop the skills to clear the first environment in Spelunky before transitioning to the next one, which sports a different gimmick you need to wrap your mind around. However, even in best-case scenarios, you might need to throw in the towel in terms of finding undiscovered family members or else risk your ability to meet the game's deadline; that tension is a proverbial sword of Damocles and ends being what sets Nosferatu apart from most modern roguelikes. Some enemies have different weapon-based weaknesses, which further necessitates you investing in exploration. By hook or crook, Idol FX made a game that predates the modern roguelike renaissance by a whole decade but has almost all the hallmarks of the biggest names that have led that movement.

The safe area where you house NPCs. Just like the one in Dead Rising 1 and 2, it is a chore getting people here.

There's just one tiny problem. The game doesn't work. Don't get me wrong, there's a kernel of a good idea guiding Nosferatu towards a positive terminus. Unfortunately, the game we have presently, and is still available on Steam, did not reach that target. The first issue comes with everything being randomized, including the procedurally generated placement of your family members. There were times when I found three family members all close to one another and was able to transition to a boss rather quickly. Other times, I couldn't find two or three people, even after checking what felt like every building twice. Some family members have a timer that triggers the minute you enter a new environment. Suppose you do not rescue them in fifteen to twenty minutes. In that case, they die without you ever seeing them even once, which completely sucks. Weapons, ammunition, and health packs also being randomized is mind-boggling, given this game is, at its heart, a first-person action game that plays a lot like a cross between Hexen and Quake. In my very first playthrough, my first FIVE chests had nothing but ammunition for guns that wouldn't be unlocked or discovered for another twenty minutes, and it wasn't until the sixth one I finally encountered a health pack, but by then, my playthrough was borked. I mentioned that some enemies have weapon affinities, and unsurprisingly, that's a real problem. There are ghosts that can only be defeated with holy items and zombies that require guns. While the good news is the game gives you enough starting equipment in its first environment to deal with everything, there is a non-zero chance you are stuck sporting tier-one leveled equipment to deal with specific enemy types until the end of the game. And yet, you might still be awash with the ammunition for the upgraded guns and better weapon types you still don't have!

The enemies also respawn after you remove yourself from the game's monster closets long enough, and MAN, does that really suck. And when I say "monster closet," I mean it with this game. Staircases often have pointed roofs with conveniently placed perches so enemy vampires can leap down to attack you. The nice thing is that the game plays an audio cue or stinger whenever a single enemy becomes locked in on you. Unfortunately, this helpful quality-of-life design tidbit oftentimes breaks wherein it triggers if you cross an enemy on the other side of a gate they can't open or when you get close enough to a door to another room but before you open it. Worse, the power balance for the weapons and your tools is all over the place. Early in the game, you get a mission to find a doctor to save an injured priest, and if you save both, you gain the ability to restore your health completely ad infinitum and the use of holy water as an attack. That holy water one-shots everything in the game, and you get it at the start. However, I wasn't able to unlock the most basic pistol in my lone successful playthrough until late in the game because its quest holder was locked in the second half of a building. And the boss battles, which the game often highlights with cutscenes and story-based narrations, are jank as all Hell. Your first battle is at the top of a clock tower, and after you deal enough damage to the boss, they burst into a cloud of bats, and the game states that you must stake them in their coffin. The problem is that the game does little to no signposting on where this coffin is, and the real route you need to take uses a poorly marked collapsed roof that would never pass certification in any mainstream studio.

What's the worst jank?

Zombies should not be able to use guns.

Oh my God, there's so much jank in this game. One of the funniest moments I encountered was when I opened the door to a room and discovered it had two family members, but they were surrounded by vampiric ghosts, and they both immediately died. There was nothing I could do, and at the drop of a hat, the power of the final boss essentially doubled in a matter of seconds. That is a fairly common occurrence in Nosferatu, by the way. Also, if you do recall the first few Dead Rising games, you may remember how much of a pain it was dealing with the AI companions and their habit of dying in the stupidest ways. That problem is 1,000% worse in Nosferatu. Not only do they get stuck in the geometry, and there's often nothing you can do to fix that, but they also need you to bark at them the same command to follow you or stay put multiple times because either their AI routine resets whenever you enter a new room, or they reset to their default state when you walk too far away from them. And when they do take damage, most of them can only take three to four hits before they die, and when those companions do get hit, all they do is stand there and yelp for help. They don't move, and only a few are willing to pick up arms to defend themselves. And again, there's only one place to house them safely, and it is back at the mansion's entrance. So, with some of the later characters that are saved at the tops or ends of buildings, you're dealing with a trek back to the game's safe zone to the tune of seven to ten minutes, with you constantly needing to stop to fight off random hordes of enemies from time to time. It is incredibly annoying, to say the least.

It's hard to tell, but I am using a cross to kill a ghost and it is the only weapon I have that can kill this ghost.

There's also a complete misunderstanding by Idol FX of how health and HP should work in a roguelike. For whatever reason, because Nosferatu is a first-person shooter and combat game, health is dealt the same way it works in Doom, Wolfenstein, and Quake. You have health packs, but you can't bank them in your inventory for later use; you instead use them immediately upon touching or running into them. Also, your health tops out at 100, and if you use a health pack to go over that amount, your health trickles slowly but surely down to 100, barring you don't take any damage before it resets. With the number of health kits being randomly generated, that is a downright untenable design choice, with you often opening up chests, finding a health pack, and walking away from it out of fear you may need it later. Finally, there are death spirals, which may or may not be intentional on the part of the developers. Some buildings have secondary or tertiary parts that can house other family members you need to rescue. Still, they only unlock if you save a family member in a different building. As a result, when you do fail to rescue someone, and that's an inevitability, it can unintentionally screw you over later in the game without you knowing it. And because the placement and location of buildings are procedurally generated, the location of keys that open required doors runs a pretty wide gamut. Sometimes, the two are opposite of each other, and other times, using a key to a door is an exhausting five to seven-minute trek.

Is it bad?

Leading two NPCs to the safe house. A tiresome and annoying process to say the least.

No. It's rough around the edges, but I'd struggle to call Nosferatu a "bad" game. In 2014, James Stephanie Sterling did a video review for Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi, calling the game's technical and design flaws too much of a barrier to entry for most people. They aren't wrong, but I will stop at saying the game's bones are rotten. I genuinely think this game could work if it had gotten a bit more time to bake, and its odd mix of first-person combat, with melee and gun-based options, with roguelike and run-based design choices, was a respectable experiment. In fact, since Nosferatu, there have been games like Ziggurat, Tower of Guns, Deep Rock Galactic, Void Bastards, Mullet MadJack, and many more that have all but proven you can marry first-person combat with roguelike gameplay. Nosferatu is a technical nightmare with plenty of room for improvement, but I would call it an "admirable failure." No one else was making a game that blended the concepts and ideas that it did with a horror theme and setting. Unlike some things we will get into, it's not creatively bankrupt, and there was no template for Idol FX to refer to regarding what they attempted. So, with that in mind and the fact that the game had less than fifty people working on it and less than ten months of development time, I cannot find it in me to get too upset at it.

I love this game for the same reason I love most eurojank titles. You can see what its development team was aiming for, and while they missed their target spectacularly, you can't help but applaud the effort. Nosferatu is also curious to go back to because knowing where Idol FX was headed with its following three projects, you can't help but wonder if there was an alternate destiny for the studio. That future was one where they continued to hone in on the ideas of Nosferatu or even Gast in favor of trying to make easy money on contracts for third parties. Again, Idol FX somehow landed on the roguelike template and heart of what makes Spelunky fun and endlessly replayable FIVE YEARS EARLIER! Relying on procedural generation to create different permutations of environments with specific markers set in stone? Yup, Nosferatu had that in 2003! The procedural dungeons shifting in dynamics and thus forcing you to pick up on patterns and gameplay concepts that best address your present circumstances? The levels in Spelunky might be what you think of, especially when the levels visibly change temperatures, but Nosferatu also had that earlier. And instead of keeping that fire lit and cashing in on the roguelike renaissance, Idol FX made Drake of the 99 Dragons instead. Incredible. Astonishing. Amazing. Truly awe-inspiring.

Loophole: Skrattmagi och glädjetjuvar / Loophole (2003)

Oh... mistakes were made.

What is it?

This entry will be briefer than usual because Loophole's circumstances and context are more interesting than the game itself. Also, it is one of the few games by Idol FX that has never been released in English. To clarify, I don't even have a primer level of Swedish language fluency or comprehension. Nonetheless, Loophole having zero distribution outside of developer Idol FX's home country of Sweden is completely understandable, considering the game is based on an interactive television show that only aired in Sweden. The show involved Swedish children calling and using a phone line to compete in video-based competitions and interacting with storybook moments featuring various digital avatars performing actions in a video game-inspired world. Loophole was, in many ways, a rip-off of the much more popular Hugo franchise, which started as a Danish kid's interactive show and later spawned dozens of games. In the case of Loophole, the game was developed by Idol FX and distributed by the Swedish television and media network TV4 Media. I know "Hugo the TV Troll" eventually got HUGE in parts of Europe, and the video games that featured Hugo persisted well into the early 2000s. Unless someone can suggest otherwise, my research indicates that Loophole had a much shorter shelf-life, and that may be part of why so few people seem to know this game adaptation even exists. That said, there does appear to be a fairly dedicated user on YouTube that seems to have made it their mission to preserve as much of Loophole as possible:

However, the game itself is a complete rip of Gast. Unlike the television show it is based on, it doesn't feature a wide assortment of minigames or challenges in hopes of crowning the player the victor. Instead, it is a simple 3D point-and-click adventure game wherein the main character explores their surroundings, collects a handful of items, and applies or delivers these items to various NPCs that I can only assume are characters in the television show. The story revolves around a big spooky ghost that I presume has conjured a curse on the people of Loophole; again, I don't speak or read Swedish and was using my phone to Google Translate the text on my screen. Like Gast, you move your character by clicking and holding your mouse cursor where you want them to go. The difference is that the game has a bit of Nosferatu DNA because each NPC you must deliver an item to has a timer wherein if you don't bring them happiness, they will turn into a ghost and join forces with the giant looming bad guy. It's a weird choice, considering the timer isn't immediately apparent to the player, and some of the items requested by their respective quest-givers are a good distance away. Lacking Gast's low-stakes nature, wherein you could explore the world and interact with people for however long you wanted, Loophole is genuinely challenging for a kid's game. Also, there's a weird disconnect between the game adapting an interactive television show wherein kids do challenges for prizes and the game adaptation being entirely fetch quest-based.

If I haven't already made it clear enough, this game uses fixed camera angles.

However, there's no denying that the issue might be on my end. Weird aside, for whatever reason, I could only ever get this game working once and never on stream. I found a rip of the game "out there," and after mounting the iso to my D: drive, it was able to boot up without issue once, which allowed me to play for about eighty or ninety minutes, and all attempts to boot it up again failed. I even uninstalled and reinstalled the iso in hopes of cajoling out the evil devil spirit in the file, and that didn't do the trick. If you, yes, you right there, reading this blog, are more experienced in working with EU-only or PAL-exclusive software, feel free to have a go at it and tell me what you did to get it to work. If anything, the game seems fine if incredibly slapdash. It's a palette swap of a prior work, and it is here when Idol FX decided to rip off the seal that ultimately doomed them. Starting with Loophole, seeing no other options on the table, Idol FX would turn to contract-based work with third parties instead of wholly original game ideas. This game, Drake of the 99 Dragons, and even FBI Hostage Rescue came from Idol FX working with a larger partner. Still, again, the problem is that they took on two contracts alongside Nosferatu, and the final products were so bad they tanked their reputation.

What's the worst jank?

Everything in this game looks terrible.

The problem mostly disappeared in Nosferatu, but for whatever reason, the grainy low-fi dialogue from Gast returns with Loophole. There's a crisp audio fry with almost every line of dialogue. With this being a kid's game that was likely only in development for a few months, I can only imagine the same hobbled-together sound booth they used for Gast was done for Loophole, but it does seem like this game used the voice actors from the television show. Again, I'm not an expert on the Swedish language or how things should sound in a well-budgeted Swedish television program, but alongside the bad canned foley work and annoying looping soundtrack, this game felt like it was doing permanent damage to my ears. Also, Loophole uses pre-rendered backgrounds just like Gast, but because the former isn't pulverized with shadows and shading, it does a far worse job of hiding that fact. That's not to say you can't tell Gast uses pre-rendered backgrounds; instead, its shadows do a decent job of making you forget about that fact, and with Loophole, everything is incredibly bright and colorful. It is far more visually awkward to see its fully 3D characters waltz around these poorly sewn-together pre-rendered environments that are entirely told through fixed camera angles. Loophole feels and looks cheap from top to bottom, which isn't too surprising considering it's a TV show tie-in for kids.

Also, here's a warning if you take my offer to see if you can get this to work in a virtual box. On the game's start screen is a link to what appears to be Idol FX's company page. As you may recall in the last blog, Idol FX no longer exists, and I was curious to see if we were dealing with another spacejam.com situation where the company in charge of the URL left it long and derelict but functioning. I regret to inform everyone reading this that this was not the case, and instead, having a website titled "Idol FX" is incredibly appealing to a particular industry. It sure was something clicking a referral link on a game for children and then being asked to select one of six possible cam girls, but I have already said way more than I should have.

Is it bad?

Here's a screenshot of who I can only assume is the antagonist?

It's mean to say, but yes. As I said, I got the game running and working exactly once, and it mostly involved me being wholly befuddled with the story's dialogue, text, and events. And even then, I can, with authority, say you shouldn't play it. It's ugly to look at, and it sounds terrible. To be honest, this silly exercise probably didn't need to last more than ten minutes. But you know more about me than I care to admit; I'm stubborn and play games well beyond what they are owed. The best thing that came from my playing this game was talking to @fisk0 and telling them that despite being an American, I was very familiar with the Advent Calendar Swedish adventure game series. To the five Swedes in this community, if I ever get my shit together and revive my "Quest for the Worst Adventure Game Puzzle" series, I do plan to discuss The Mystery at Greveholm, or Mysteriet på Greveholm.

Everything about how this game looks was pure pain.

Related, but The Mystery at Greveholm series and the Backpacker franchise, the world exploring games, and NOT the historical DOS murder mystery game, are PEAK Euro adventure games. They reek of the weird cottage industry of post-Golden Age Sierra and post-Golden Age LucasArts adventure games that kept the genre alive but with everything having one-sixteenth the budget of any of the works that inspired them. To a degree, Loophole and Gast are reflections of that era before the likes of Ragnar Tørnquist, Benoît Sokal, and Revolution Software fully righted the ship. Weird cheap facsimiles that paid homage to more wondrous works without being especially self-sustaining dominated the adventure game scene for DECADES, and they all came from small European studios. It was such a magical time for the genre, but now I have to ready myself for Drake of the 99 Dragons.

Shit.