Vampire Saga 2: Welcome To Hell Lock

After a motorcycle accident you wake up in an abandoned town in the middle of the night. You've lost your memory and have no idea who you are or how you ended up in that place.

Even worse, the place appears to be haunted by ghosts and creatures that seem to be following you. You start looking for a way out, but instead, you discover that the town of Hill Lock hides a dark secret. That's how this vampire-themed adventure game starts off.

All that surrounds you is an enigma, and to solve it you need to find clues and useful objects. These involve the usual puzzle types: doors, drawers, or cases that won't open until you find the right key or key combination, power generators that won't work until you gather all the needed fuses, elements that need repairing, etc. Your search takes you to several places: an abandoned house, the slums, a junkyard, and, of course, a cemetery. At the same time, your story starts to take shape, and parts of it are revealed through cutscenes.

As you move on, some puzzles are left unsolved and that forces you to revisit locations more than once. For instance, getting some holy water to fight a vampire requires you to get a container first, walk back to that location where you've seen water, and look for a 'sacred' element to turn ordinary water into an anti-vampire weapon. For this constant backtracking the game uses a handy system: every place you explore is stored as a photograph in an album, which can be used as a map to move to any location with a single click. Hidden-object scenes are also present in this game, and although they are not very numerous, they have an interesting twist: when your cursor gets closer to a hidden item, the name of the latter will change its color, and that should help you spot items faster. Hints can be used at HOG scenes and all around the game as well; they will indicate if a location needs further investigation.

With a decent length and a great graphical work, this game offers all the elements one may expect to find. It includes intuitive puzzles and mini games, HOG scenes, lots of places to explore, and a story that is sure to entertain for a while. On the downside, mystery games of the type are dime a dozen in the casual gaming universe, and this title seems to be just another game in the crowd.