Reviews for Bloodlust: Santa Monica (Definitive Edition)

[FutureCopLGF]

Wow, pretty neat game! Always interesting to see how creative demakes get in representing the original material, and to see Vampire Bloodlines recreated as a point-n-click adventure is neato: reminds me a lot of SNES Shadowrun which I loved back in the day!

For the most part, the game is cool in a lot of ways: a very rich world with loads of interactions and flavor text, tons of quests and character choices, solid presentation and intuitive design, and so on and so forth. It feels really professionally done! Having said that, though, there were a lot of pain points that stood out to me that got in the way of the fun:

*The biggest problem with the game is the dialogue/text system: it commits the cardinal sin of making it so that when you click when text is filling out, it skips to the next line altogether instead of just fast-forwarding the current line to be completely filled out, then requiring another click to go to the next line. Because of the way its setup here and how text-heavy the game is, its so tedious to have to wait for the text to fill out.

*While I like that the game is incredibly rich with interactions, it can be a bit much: there's so many unimportant people to talk to who say unimportant junk, and get us involved in unimportant quests. I know people enjoy sidequests, but I'd like if they at least stay somewhat aligned with our main goals and vampire culture in general: why the hell is my character offering to help out people with so much meaningless garbage? Don't they have more important things to worry about?

*Some of the puzzles are pretty dumb. For example, there's a dog supposedly blocking the way to the suites, but really he's off to the side: can't we just walk right past him? Even if he was in the way, why in the world can't we distract him with the steak or a frisbee?

*I tried playing as a Nosferatu, but was really disappointed. In the original Bloodlines, playing as Nosferatu makes you approach the game in a completely new and fresh way, having to sneak around through sewers and such. In here, all that happens is everyone gets spooked when you first see them, but are easily convinced by a silly excuse. It's really tiresome to do so everytime and a complete waste of an interesting setting.

*Quest log progression is a little weird in that it shows you information you shouldn't be aware of yet. For example, I haven't even read the note yet, but it's already showing me my next steps of meeting with Mercerius at the suites. Likewise, I went over to the beach during my exploration and suddenly got a new quest telling me that Mercerius wants astrolite from the beach: I haven't even met him yet so why would I know that???

*I really wish that the game told me right at the start that I couldn't save when playing the browser version! I just wasted like 30 minutes, only to realize that I wasn't going to be able to save!

The game definitely has a lot of potential, but some of these errors are pretty major. If they get ironed out, I think this could be excellent!

emontero responds:

Thanks a lot for your feedback! I'll try to address all of the issues in the following update.

[Selvira]

Okay, the idea is great. I loved the original game, so a point-and-click pixel version sounds right up my alley. But the game is clearly underdeveloped. I somehow clicked on an invisible Tess who called me out for ruining her art exhibition IMMEDIATELY after getting the quest to do so. I also had the option to ask her sister to call off the feud, even though I'm pretty sure I never got that quest to begin with. Quests also don't seem to DO anything other than progress things and give you items that you might need elsewhere. However, what items are needed for what isn't always entirely clear. And I was giving books to Jack when I could've been reading them myself. :/ Why make that a quest??? But I was having fun until the game glitched. Probably need to add some kind of mechanism to keep the story quests streamlined so you don't trigger something before intended. A save system would also be nice. Best of luck in your development!

emontero responds:

Thanks a lot for your feedback! I'll try to fix all the bugs in the following update. Thanks for playing!

[Alanok42]

Aaaaand, it's glitched. The game has a lot of potential. And the artwork is astounding.

emontero responds:

Thanks! Hopefully the following update will be less buggy. Thanks for playing!

[2ndhandembarrassment]

I've tried to play this game five times, and each time I've had to stop playing because of bugs. Just now, I tried to play as Stuart, and the game glitched before I could even leave the room. There's also a recurring glitch in Tess/Juliette's office where the tab reveals characters who aren't supposed to be in that particular scene. I interacted with the invisible characters (thinking this was part of the game) and accidentally messed with the storyline.
I'm giving three stars for now. I have managed to make it farther with other characters and there's clearly so much work and cool story telling here, it just needs debugging. I look forward to raising the score once everything is updated!
EDIT: I've finished the game! There are still a few bugs here and there although none of them got in the way of finishing the game. Examples: I chose the character who could seduce, but there was no option to seduce Kevin; the epilogue didn't reflect the choice I made in the Tess v Juliette story; I was able to kick through the locked fence despite not having a kick or lockpick skill. But overall GREAT job!

emontero responds:

Thanks a lot for your feedback! I'll make sure to fix all the bugs in the following update. Thanks a lot for playing!

[TharosTheDragon]

I love point-and-click adventures but the dialogue problems unfortunately make this unplayable for me. It's amazing that devs still keep getting this wrong after all these years. Everyone wants to have a typing effect but no one wants to do it right. If I press a button while the text is still animating, that means it's going too slowly and I want to read it faster, so it literally doesn't make any sense to just make it disappear and move on to the next bit so I can't read it at all. No one would ever want that to happen. It would almost be better to just make it unskippable (though not actually).

Anyway, yeah I ranted but I can see you put love into this so I'll still give you a high score

emontero responds:

Thanks a lot for your feedback! You're totally right, the typing effect is really annoying when it skips the text. I'll try to fix it in the following update.