The Count: Won!

The Count: Won!

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Via Museum of Adventure Game History.

I was indeed close to a win last time, although I did need a hint to pull it off.

First off, while staying awake with the no-doz pills I went to have a face-off with Dracula, but he never came out of bat form.

This led to some tense chasing about the castle, but unfortunately I realized Dracula would not be trappable in bat form. I did find after he left his coffin I could go in …

… and I suspected I could fiddle with the lock somehow, but none of my objects worked.

This is the point I needed a hint. If you recall I mentioned an oven with “sunlight and heat” and I suspected I had to toss Dracula in somehow. I had a visualization problem, because it never crossed my mind I could *enter* the oven. It’s a solar oven that only works during the day, and going in night revealed a nail file.

This bit of annoyance led to the most clever moment in the game. You can make it in Dracula’s coffin on Day 2 and break the lock with the file, and then come back in Day 3 after he has gone to sleep and open the coffin (which is no longer locked).

Using preparation to outsmart Dracula felt like a perfect merge of action and narrative.

I want to take a moment before moving on to praise Scott Adams’s use of absence to tell a story. Secret Mission had the opening briefing describe a manila envelope that was not there, implying something had gone wrong. The Count takes this even further with an omitted first act (what did happen before the first day?) and nights where the protagonist sleeps while other things go on — items are stolen or removed, and the PC is harmed. This leads to a plot where half of it is reconstructed by evidence in a way unique to the medium.

Certainly The Count is the most coherent of any of the games I’ve played so far. Alas I didn’t find it quite as fun as, say, Voodoo Castle, or even Zork. The sparse structure led to too many moments were I felt completely constricted and couldn’t come up with any action at all that was helpful. Additionally, while the timed structure of The Count is very clever in retrospect, in practice I had a lot of annoyances of having to save and restore and restart and save and restore and restart. So while I might recommend a play, and it isn’t even that hard a game comparative to other works at the time, there would be no shame in using a walkthrough to see it to the end.

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August 3, 2016 at 10:45AM