Vlad the Impaler is not a visual novel, a visual short story perhaps? It seems conceivable that if you know what you’re doing in this grisly little tale that you could finish within 10 minutes, provided you did not take the time to actually read it. But that of course would be to miss all the fun, and if you are into stories about vampires, ritualistic killings, and self-mutilation, then there is potentially fun to be had provided you can stomach the experience’s more mechanical shortcomings.
The story follows your arrival in Istanbul at the request of the titular Impaler. Having been asked to look into a great evil that has befallen the ancient city, you choose one of 3 classes; Explorer, Soldier or Mage, each with their own set of D&D style attributes, and set about discovering the source of the malevolence.
The process of exploring the city is broken up into 15 turns. In each turn you select a portion of the city and choose an action to take within it. For instance in one turn you could ask a local fisherman for information at the port, and on the next turn look for the city guard in the main square. Each one of these actions plays out as a self-contained mini story; events take place and you choose what action to take in response. At the end of each turn these events and actions are reflected in changes to your character’s attributes where you can gain or lose points based on whether you got hurt or obtained information and so on.
After each 3rd turn a mandatory story event takes place, representing a shift into the next chapter where new areas on the map open up and new actions appear within the areas already unlocked. In some of these major events your choices will matter more as death becomes a possibility, and so you must choose those actions that best suit your current attributes, so if you find yourself high in strength and low in magic, best not to try that spell when cutting off a head or two might be more efficacious.
There’s also a morality system which takes account of what choices you make along a binary good/evil scale, but beyond small changes to the story and how your class looks, there isn't much more to it.
The writing to go along with all this is rather decent for the most part. The script is easy to read, never waffles and although clearly not literary dynamite does a good job at describing the action in a clear and concise manner. It’s a shame then that the overall narrative structure simply doesn't work as well as it needs to.
Because everything is so self-contained, save but for the final chapter, there is a challenge in bringing all the disparate story elements together in a cohesive way that the game simply can’t seem to manage. Ideally you would be connecting the dots between the various events you experience, but for the most part they seem largely random where some events simply seem to have no significance beyond themselves. There are of course some connections, but they are too often the same thing and even repeated playthroughs did not really reveal any great revelation or theme beyond the bleeding obvious. Maybe that was never the intention, but the result is one of disappointment and confusion as you jump from random event to random event without anything to give all that randomness meaning or significance. That the final and more linear part of the story is so much superior to all this, suggests that maybe a far more focused narrative would have been preferable, and that the level of player agency ought to have been limited to something that doesn’t so compromise the storytelling.
Matters are also not helped by how the design hurts the story itself, however competently written it might be. The lack of linearity here doesn’t allow the story to build upon itself, nor have proper characters or relationships developed properly. You merely pick at the fragments of a larger whole that isn't compelling enough on its own. There are some scenes where the emotions involved are well evoked, but there just isn't much thematic substance to be found, there is no insightful political or ethical subtext to latch onto in lieu of those missing characters. It becomes ever more frustrating as you realise just how much better things could have been if the story had been allowed a much more straightforward trajectory.
This is all at least compensated for somewhat by the game’s striking art style and superb music. The atmosphere and tone is very rich and immersive where the presentation, although not overly fancy, has that cohesion the narrative so sorely lacks. While this does not mitigate the game’s flaws greatly, it nevertheless makes the experience more bearable and gives your brain a pleasant distraction from the potential thoughts of bewilderment and frustration.
It also doesn't benefit the game much to have such glaring bugs that hitherto have not been fixed. I'm no developer, but one would perhaps suggest that if you were to base an experience on the reading of sentences then those sentences would likely benefit from not having the word “and” omitted from them for no apparent reason. Having already been the subject of numerous patches already, Vlad the Impaler still suffers from this most peculiar of issues and it’s hard to take such experiences seriously when you find yourself having to deal with such glaring and fundamental issues. Add to that crashes and black screens upon launch and patience begins to wear thin.
All that being said Vlad the Impaler certainly held my interest; its basic subject matter, brevity and tone all seemed to work a curious sort of magic at times, one where I found myself able to slightly forgive its missteps and scattergun narrative design. The level of such sympathies will vary according to taste however, and the whole thing doesn't so much impale you as poke gently at your belly button.