Nosferatu: The wrath of Malachi on my PC

I'm a big fan of Survival horror games, I mean, who isn't?! they are just awesome! Games like Alone in the dark, Darkseed, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, F.E.A.R, Doom -Fits here in my opinion- and more and more and more; Games with awesome action ridden horror secuences, horrible things lurking around to eat the flesh out of your bones, great ambients that chill your bones, and the amazing feeling of not knowing what the fuck to do, you know what I mean, simply awesome! Now, I want to talk about this one game: Nosferatu: The wrath of Malachi.

Nosferatu is a survival horror first person shooter videogame for the PC, developed by Idol FX and released in 2003 by iGames; after a little research, I haven't found any other games by Idol FX, I just keep finding this one and some other called "Drake", but I don't know what that one is about or anything so I can't say anything more there, but perhaps someone might inform me. It's loosely based on Bram (NOT BRAN) Stoker's "Dracula", or perhaps a little more on F.W. Murnau's "Nosferatu" -By a little I mean just the title and the vampire's character, because the game has little to do with any-

The game begins with you as James Patterson as you arrive late to an old creepy castle on top of a cliff, where your sister Rebbeca is going to get married with the son of some rich Transilvanian Count... by night... I mean, could it be more obvious that something is not fucking right?! anyway, James arrives late and as he gets there, he finds out that something's gone totally wrong when he finds that the luggage of his family is at the entrance and that the main door has been covered with crosses; out of a sudden, he realizes that the Count is a vampire and he must save his family and friends from the dark forces of evil -How did he learn this I have no fucking clue...-

This is your standard FPS, the main idea is to save your family from being vampire's dinner in a two hour time limit, there are three buildings where you can look for them, tho, the game is very lineal in a way, because the access is really limited to the first building, and you can't get into another if you haven't finished the first and so on; also, you have a time limit to find each of your friends or they get eaten -when one of them dies, you get a movie with some odd images and a voice telling you the pain and suffering that person dealt with due to your incapability of rescueing that person, people might find it cheesy, for me it's pretty cool- You have your standard combat weapons, a sword -swords tend to look shitty on FPS games in my opinion- a revolver, a flintlock gun -the best one, slow tho-, a cross, wooden stakes, holy water, machine gun etc. The whole game has a movie like style which makes it really beautiful to see, you have old tape like lines going across the screen all the time and a grainy appearance, making it look like an old scary movie.

This game adapted something that sounds real cool but fucks things up in the end: The castle is completely random, the rooms and everything aren't the same everytime you start a new game. At first I thought "hey, that sounds good" and thought that it might add up a lot for replay value; and it does, don't get me wrong, but sometimes, the rooms are so random that you don't know where you are or where to go; I have not such a problem with that, but what I hate, is that the random thing, sometimes puts people too far away or in places that are hard to reach and they end up dying just because it was too fucking far!! and when you find a person, you must return to the entrance because that's the safe spot and they give you stuff like garlic or guns, so you don't have too much time to waste running on rooms that look almost the same of to far away places!! Another thing I hate is that the monsters respawn, and when you go back to rescue a person, you find yourself in a room that you had already cleaned, but packed with monsters! and I'm not sure, but the monsters attack your friends and they die!! Something really funny, is that characters jump to avoid things, and they can jump like three or four times their own size and land all stiff.

The graphics are not so great but not that bad either, the characters seem a little square and choppy, but that's ok; there are little combat animations, perhaps to give the feeling of enemies being real fast, but it makes them seem really shitty and the path recognition is really bad, so they find themselves getting stuck on things in the room -you get used to this and don't notice it farther ahead-; still, they are not to be taken lightly because two or three monsters can get you by the balls in no time. You have a stamina -or perhaps a fear- bar, that goes up as you fight monsters; when it's really up, James has a hard time walking, his breathing goes all rough and shoots with a shaky hand. The whole lay out of the castle -tho repetitive- is really pretty and massively gothic, and, having times when action is completely paused and you are not fighting any monster, you can check the surroundings and appreciatte the pretty images.

What is really great and what makes the atmosphere of the game is the music, old fashioned movie like strings ambient music going all over the game makes it more creepy, the upbeats when a monster appears are bone chilling that you find yourself jumping out of your seat or looking all over the place to find that nothing is following you -some people find this bad, I find it good, you end up walking on your toes-. Also, some things that pump up the creepines are the dark voices you hear at times, the scary laughs, the odd sounds and things like that, specially when you use the cross, it is accompanied by some odd multiple voiced prayer that is just fucking creepy.

The ending of the game is pretty, but is a little downbeat, and Nosferatu and later Malachi aren't that of the hard bosses you'd expect; The normal vampires you find creeping out of coffins are more of a fight than the last bosses -and who is Malachi? the prophet from the Bible? did he turn against God? or that creepy kid from Children of the corn?-

To wrap things up, Nosferatu is a rookie, low-budgeted game with some flaws, still, the game is good enough to bypass all those flaws and give out a great gaming experience and a good couple of scares (people, stop fucking focusing on the bad things of games! there are games with glitches for example, Call of Cthulhu: Dark corners of the earth, but they are fucking awesome games! and shouldn't be qualified as bad just because of some thing.) In my actual experience, I had a great time playing Nosferatu and enjoyed every single bit of it; a very recomendable game if you like creepy stuff and old scary movies. Not the best horror game out there, but a great horror game.