Transylvania is Polarware's graphical text adventure series. The first entrant into the series features a more primitive (by contemporary Infocom standards) verb-object parsing language, but has graphical depictions, similar to early Online (Sierra's predecessor) graphical text games. Polarware went on to develop the Comprehend and Comprehend Plus parsing engines, which would power the later entrants. "Comprehend Graphical Novels" feature full sentence parsing, and are capable of complex command structures, on par with Infocom's.
The Comprehend engine dramatically simplified programming the games for multiple platforms, and Polarware would go on to re-release Transylvania in a "Comprehend Edition" for the Atari ST and Amiga platforms contemporaneously with The Crimson Crown.
Transylvania III: Vanquish the Night features the most fully-fledged version of the engine, a full musical score, and digitized voices on some versions (the Amiga version is the most advanced). While text-based adventure games fell off during the 90s, Polarware's graphical text adventures would inform the design of later SCUMM and point-and-click adventures.
Log in to comment