Elvira - Introduction

Welcome to friendly castle Killbragant, which may or may not have a moat depending on where you are.

This is not a playthrough of honor. This is a game I have tried to win for over 10 years at this point. I'm going to play through this entire game in a state of frustration, trying to figure out things that have eluded me in this time. At the end, despite this difficulty, I'm going to recommend it, because despite being very hard, it's fun and interesting.

Elvira - Mistress of the Dark is a weird game. Not necessarily in regards to the world and design of it, though that is true too. A sequel/adaptation of a movie that takes an incredibly graphic horror tone to a character intended to be incredibly campy? It's very strange. What's always intrigued me about it is it playing like an early survival horror game, and you being in a constant fight to survive is not something that only applies if you know what you're doing, this is a constant slide downward you need to fight against. Which is why it's taken me so long to get around to trying to win at it.

Probably not.

The game puts me down in front of the entrance to the castle the game takes place in. There's not a lot to do here, except I can examine the sign there to find out I should enter the office. You can avoid the office, but the end result is the same anyway. I meet a pleasant looking gentleman, who proceeds to tell me that I'm doomed, which is probably accurate, and then has you thrown in the dungeon.

Hey, it's not my fault that the English banned my assault musket and butter knife!

I'm freed by Elvira, who then proceeds to berate me for getting captured by a guard who is undoubtedly stronger and more capable of fighting me right now. She then tells me what I have to do, find a chest which contains some stuff I can use to destroy Emelda, which in the manual is explained. Inside is The Scroll of Spiritual Mastery, and I need to find six keys to open it. Otherwise Emelda will come back from the dead and probably do something terrible. Before I'm sent off, I'm given a dagger, a healing spell and an attack spell.

The game proper starts in the courtyard. There's about eight guard towers, a couple of other exterior rooms, a path to the garden area, a door to the dungeon and a door to upstairs. Enemies pop out whenever you reach certain sections, here it's guard towers, exterior rooms. You get the opportunity to attack first, which is basically you using a spell or your crossbow, neither of which I have right now. You can run, by turning around and then, well, running. But if you turn after the guy behind you starts chasing after you, you enter combat anyway. Chasing after you, in this case, is him stabbing you in the back. Which they'll do once and then sort of politely wait for you to do something.

Few games give you such concentrated "I'm going to kill you" energy like Elvira does.

Combat is straight-forward. Click on the left or right side of the screen to defend or attack on that side. You defend based on which side the guy is attacking. Attacking is more luck of the draw, really. I'm not sure there is a method to being able to do it perfectly, you just hit whenever the game decides you hit. I think the skill stat is tied into this, but despite the simplicity of it, the combat system here has some depth to it.

In contrast to a lot of other games, Elvira is gory. Very, very gory. Dying results in you getting to see very graphic results of what happened to you. In most cases, this involves seeing your slashed throat. Since these are modified photos of real people, it feels a lot worse than the more campy gore of what games would have over the next couple of decades. This, oddly, is in sharp contrast to what Elvira tends to promote herself as. More campy, goofy Halloween fun rather than some dude getting mutilated. Even if she tends to show those films anyway.

My goals this early on are all based around the spells. This is one of the most important aspects of the game. At this moment, Elvira is in the kitchen, and once I get her the spellbook, she can whip up more spells for me. There are a few that are necessary, but the ones that will sustain me throughout the game are healing and pain removal spells. See, if I get hit enough times, it doesn't matter that I'm healed up, the pain still causes my stats to plummet. I also need salt, the spell that identifies spell components, and those spell components.

This last bit is quite tricky, because the game's copy protection is the spell system. Which is not unreasonable, except that because of this, walkthrough makers seem to skip over the whole, where can you find the components, part of the game. Also, the official cluebook has something obscuring text, so you can't find the components with the versions online.

You can pick up the plates...because you can.

The first part is easy, go inside the castle. The library is to the left of the entrance. I just need to grab the book. This is oddly, the only action not built into the interface. You get all the usual adventure actions, but picking things up is exclusively click and drag. Elvira is in the kitchen further down the hall, along with a larder stuffed with food, some of which are spell ingredients, which at the moment, the most important is honey.

I also take the opportunity to enter the armory, after fighting off the guard. There are weapons in here, as well as a suit of armor. I just stick to a sword, dropping the dagger I started with, and pick up a crossbow. Now I just need to find some bolts. Unfortunately, I don't remember where they were. So, for now I'm going to enter the garden area.

If you somehow haven't been killed until now, this is the point you'll realize this isn't quite a fun, fantasy adventure.

The garden area is where most of the spell ingredients are. Unfortunately, most are hidden behind a locked door at the moment. So I go all the way to the far side of the area, past the falconry area and the hedge maze, to the garden shed. Where an old man has had a door fall on him, his throat slit, and maggots crawling on his corpse. Which is as charming as it sounds. There's also a sledgehammer and a crucifix in here, which might be useful later. There's other stuff, but it's all food I don't think I can use.

Shouldn't she be looking towards the camera more?

I'm not really sure what I can do next, so I decide that what I'll do next is clear out the upper floor of the castle. First, I need to get a stake from the living room, because there's a vampire just snoozing in one of the upstairs rooms. Not sure what the logic is, because if you go near her, despite being, you know, day, she'll get up and bite you...assuming you don't have the crucifix. Which I'm glad I got, because I forgot I needed the sledgehammer to drive in the stake. It's odd how often vampire media forget that you need a lot of force to drive a stake through someone's chest. Guess this was before people forgot that.

After returning with a sledgehammer and staking the "vampira", I get the dust she turned into. The rest of the place is mostly killing lizard people and then grabbing random crossbow bolts inside the rooms. Yeah, lizard people, as in lizard men wearing robes and swinging various weapons. The exception to the rooms is the central room, which is a bathroom, which only contains Laudanum, a kind of opium, and a locked door for which I have no key. I also get a Bible page for some important reason.

Four bolts turns you from a rank amateur to a master. (the fourth hit the forest)

Now that I have the bolts, I can return to the garden, getting past two respawned guards. Here, there's a target which I can fire a few crossbow bolts at and suddenly I'm an expert marksman. Just use the crossbow and you hit someone with a bolt. In general, this is useful, but there are specific enemies you can only take out using this thing. The first, and nearby, is a weird hawk and falconer combo. Hit the hawk with a bolt and the falconer disappears. You get a feather and a key labeled tertius.

As I return to Elvira to drop off the stuff I don't need, I hear a scream and see that she's left the kitchen because of a lard bucket. That means I can't return there under penalty of death without the salt. Where is the salt? In the basement, where more creatures and spooky things are.

If you make a joke about him, that'll probably be the last joke you ever make.

There's not just salt down here, there are skeletal guards. These differ from regular guards in that you can't tell how wounded they are from how they look. There's also bugs, centipedes, spiders, beetles and earwigs. And of course, spider webs, all of which are useful spell components. You basically just explore every room, clicking on the same hotspots to try to find the same things. At about halfway through the area there's a sort of boss skeletal guard, who wears pink, and takes quite a bit of swordfighting to take down. I've also noticed that the tougher enemies swing their sword faster, which is screwing me over on occasion.

The area he's guarding contains the salt and a few other things. There are tongs on the table, which if you grab, kill you. The spirit of the torturer around here comes back and burns your eyes out. I've always assumed that it's just another one of those things that kills you, but seeing as I have a satchel that seems to be just flavor. Maybe it's one of those puzzles where the game plays against your assumptions? The satchel and the seemingly unobtainable tongs. Surprisingly, it works.

There's an iron ring on the ground which, when you attempt to take it, opens up an old grave, which has skeleton bones and the quartus key. Then it's just a finishing ring around the dungeon until I get out. I was surprised that I managed to pick up what was seemingly all the cobwebs, because they're not in the rooms like the others, they're out in the halls.

You're welcome. I'm so glad I decided to help you.

Now that I have the salt, I return to the kitchen, slowly wait for the right time to toss the salt at the cook, and everything's back to normal. Elvira thanks me, and I unload all the bugs I've been carrying, and now this place is a bizarre mess of bugs, poisons and other assorted odds and ends.

Unfortunately, this has all been the easy part. This is all I really remember solving. There are minor puzzles I've solved everywhere, but what those are escape my mind at the moment. The bigger problem, of course, is that enemies respawn, and as they do they get tougher and faster. I've already taken out three guarding the path to the garden and there's at least two trips there left for me. What that eventually means is something I'm afraid of.

This Session: 1 hour 30 minutes