Dracula: Origin is the latest game from developer Frogwares, best known for its line of Sherlock Holmes adventure games. This latest adventure will immediately bring you back to the time when companies like Sierra and LucasArts were ruling the roost in the adventure game genre—complete with first rate story, creepy atmosphere, and sharp visuals, but it doesn’t last too long.

This game is loosely based upon Bram Stoker’s book Dracula. You play as Professor Abraham Van Helsing and your goals are to kill Dracula and rescue Jonathan Harker and his fiancée Mina from his clutches.

Along the way you will also come upon another of the book’s characters, Dr. John Seward. As the game opens, Dracula has already captured Harker and extracted information from him about Mina. Dracula notices in a picture of Mina that she looks a lot like his long dead true love and he makes a beeline for London in order to find her and complete some dark ritual to put his love’s soul in Mina’s body.

Setting up shop in London and needing to feed, Dracula ‘drains’ some hapless citizens and Van Helsing becomes aware of it via the local paper. Already a vampire hunter by trade, he plans on taking care of Dracula for good. He starts his search by reading about the murders, taking note of the location of the crimes and eyewitness accounts of the suspect’s escape route. Using the map in the opening room he is able to pinpoint where Dracula is located and goes to investigate

The gameplay itself harkens back to the old point-and-click adventure games of yesteryear. Van Helsing goes through various static scenes with some environmental animation added in places. Using the mouse, the icon can change into two feet for walking, a hand for using objects or an eye for looking at the surroundings. As added assistance you can press the spacebar and see all the available icon spots on the screen. This is cheating by all accounts, but there are places in the game where it gets very tedious combing the screen for hotspots.