As many know, according to Bram Stoker's Dracula, Jonathan Harker was ultimately successful in destroying the evil vampire and rescuing his beloved Mina.

Or so Harker thought.  In 1904, seven years after Harker saw Count Dracula apparently reduced to a pile of ash, the Count has inexplicably returned and once again called Mina away from London, to join him in Transylvania.  Ever the unflappable hero, Harker, sets out immediately to re-recover his wife.

In Dracula Resurrection, you guide Harker through two parts of Transylvania, both presented in full 360-degree view:  First you'll explore a somewhat isolated outpost-type of frozen wonderland, complete with a tavern, a cemetery, and underground mines, and then it's off to Dracula's castle.  The game combines Myst-quality graphics with Chicken Run-quality animation, and a 7th Guest- or Blackstone Chronicles-quality atmosphere.  Transylvania is dark and epic, and as you explore and follow the story line, you'll find yourself occasionally chilly in your chair from either the stunningly drawn settings or the frighteningly realistic grotesques that haunt the game.

Aside from Harker, there are only about ten or eleven other animated characters, but each one was created to be unique, with their own individual mannerisms (including physical gestures and an accent) that they each leave a significant bite mark on the game.  Although interacting with these characters involves little more than clicking on them and listening to their stories or whatever other information they have to offer, they are nonetheless fun to watch.

Dracula Resurrection has a lot of personality.  Some of the characters, such as Dracula's henchmen, can be a bit dopey; but the serious, dramatic characters, such as the tavern owner, the succubae, and Dracula himself help balance out the sillier characters.  Unfortunately, Jonathan Harker falls into the silly-character category, not so much because he seems a bit too Keanu-like, but because he's ridiculously over-animated.  In one cut scene, the designers worked so hard to make Harker appear as if he were wavering about whether to hand over an amulet he'd just discovered to Dorca, the elderly (and creepy) female vampire who helped him work his way through the castle's different puzzles, that Harker ends up looking drunk, contorting his face into different "pensive" expressions, and flailing his arms about.  Because this type of animation can only achieve a sort of accelerated slow motion at best, you won't ever find yourself trompe l'oeiled into thinking you're watching actual video, but the stylistics are often mesmerizing anyway.

As for its puzzles, Dracula Resurrection involves little more than clicking on the environment to locate keys, and then clicking on the environment to use the keys.  There are some parts that involve figuring out patterns or doing things in a certain order, but these are few and far between.  The game's story line is extremely linear and the interaction is extremely minimal.  Although the fully rendered 360-degree first-person view is good enough for me to use the word "awesome," I won't because I was disappointed that I couldn't walk in the game, but had to click in the direction I wanted to move instead.  So much of the time you'll spend playing will be spent moving your mouse sideways to rotate your view, and then left-clicking when the cursor turns into an arrow, indicating you can go in that direction.

I can't say enough how fantastic the art is, but Dracula Resurrection's story is too, too linear, and the world in which you're playing is too maze-like.  It's true that there were some times when the game taxed my brain, but the taxing usually came because I had not clicked on every available open area on the game and therefore hadn't located every available key.  Which is to say everything that's needed in the game is readily and easily available.  Just click around the different screens and you'll eventually find every key you need.  There's only one path to follow, and, because of this, much of it seems more like a click-through movie than an actual game.

Lastly, I should point out that Dracula Resurrection is not as scary as it could be.  Because the only movement in the game comes in the cut scenes (or key-in-lock activation scenes), nothing will ever jump out at you.  The biggest omission in terms of things not jumping out at you ends up being Count Dracula.  You see him chat with his henchmen a bit, and other people talk about him plenty, but Harker never faces him.  Really, though, Harker never faces anybody while under your control.  You only get to watch him go up against a few of the baddies after you've collected the appropriate keys and activated the appropriate switches.  Also, Harker can't die.  So the only way the game will stop your progress is with frustration.  Which popped up plenty, even though the game took me less than five hours to complete.  The worst aspect of the game for me was when it relied too heavily on the darkness to serve as a puzzle.  The only way I made it from the first half of the game to the castle in the second half, was by virtue of dumb luck.  After squinting and squinting while running the cursor over the screen, my cat jumped in my lap and caused my hand sliding over to the side, sending the cursor over to a pitch black part of the screen.  Voilà, I noticed the cursor change to a hand, and there was the item I needed:  a lamp to throw into an incendiary pit and blow up the bats that were preventing my forward movement.

The beautiful, breathtaking artwork is hardly enough to recommend this game.  Because Dracula Resurrection is too short, with little interaction, few options, no Count Dracula worth mentioning, and because the challenges aren't engaging, requiring that players be little more than undead (or brain dead) themselves, I suggest that only die-hard fans of computer artwork/animation bother with it.

Gameplay:  2.  Dracula Resurrection is a lonely game.  The two relatively huge environments are sparsely populated, and much of the game is spent wandering around, taking in the view, and then wandering around some more:  through corridors, around different rooms, and outside, down barren paths.  The interface is point-and-click at its worst; everything in the game is point, click, and watch.  I needed more interaction.  I also needed the puzzles to be more complex.  One puzzle, however, lives up to this challenge:  At some point while in Dracula's bedroom you have to interpret some horoscope symbols and then apply your interpretation to cracking a combination pattern lock that involves pushing the correct horoscope-symbol buttons.  Otherwise, the puzzles tend to offer little by way of thought-challenges, and much by way of patience and persistence challenges.

Graphics:  10.  The 2D art and the animations in the game represent the current highpoint in adventure-game graphics.  What I missed from Myst were actual people, characters, and this game had some, and they were drawn and animated beautifully.  Down to their pupils and fingernails.  Everything had a glossy-dark sheen to it, the lighting was awe-inspiring, and there were times when, after wandering around in the dark for an hour or so, I came across a lighted room, or lit a candle, or threw open a window and Man!, how beautiful it was, how exciting and awakening.  The graphics exceed the game, as you can tell from the rest of my review, but I have to take a break from complaining here to give the game its due in terms of looks alone.  While nothing in the game looked real in the sense that you could mistake it for reality and try to stick your hand through your monitor, everything in Dracula Resurrection was consistently, sharply stylistic, and flawlessly so.

Sound: 5.5.  The sound had some problems.  The developers did a nice job of adding some sound, whether music or effects, to just about every portion of the game and load screens, and some of the voice acting and voice-overs were superb, with people reading longhand letters, during cut scenes, and, of course, when other characters spoke to Harker; but too much of this lonely game was filled with lonely sounds.  Unseen, generic rats chirping around the castle, unidentified belch-sounding moans, a lot of repetition.  The worst, most frustrating aspect of the game's sound came during the cut scenes that combined music and speech.  Too often the music (which couldn't be turned off) would wash out the speech, leaving the speaker inaudible or incomprehensible.  So much for the drama when, for instance, the succubae emerge and start dancing nakedly around you, threatening you with god knows what because you can't understand what they're saying.

Difficulty:  2.5.  Two things affected Dracula Resurrection's difficulty score:  the interface and the level of the challenges.  That there are no plot twists or options, really, to "click" toward weigh heavily against the game, especially because it's so short.  And because so much of the difficulty comes from the fact that the game is poorly lit—that you have to "feel around in the dark" for the keys—I'm also inclined to lower the score.  In the most basic sense, though, no matter how you look at it, the game is too easy and uninspired.  Even the most difficult challenges can be solved more with patience and persistence than with thought.

Concept:  6.5.  It's not that I felt the concept was bad; in fact, I thought it was kind of neat:  take a piece of classic literature and reinvigorate it.  But Dracula Resurrection did little more with Bram Stoker's Dracula than borrow some of the characters and settings.  I would've liked to have seen more of the characters, even if only in flashbacks, and especially more of Count Dracula.

Overall:  4.5.  Dracula Resurrection could have benefited most from being a different type of game.  As a role-playing game, character-development aspects and multiple story lines would've served as nice accompaniments to the unique characters.  As a first-person shooter, more environmental and other-character interaction could have been implemented.  As a sports game, a team approach to nabbing Mina and nipping Dracula in the bud (before the eventual sequel takes place) could have been incorporated.  As it stands, Dracula Resurrection provides little more entertainment than watching a graphically fun but plot-thin four-hour cartoon-animated movie.

Installation:  Easy.  Super-fast installation.  Pop the disc in and everything takes care of itself.  A second disc comes with the game, and you do have to swap discs at about the midway point, but this only presents a problem with saved games in the areas covered on the second disc:  the game can't load from the second disc, so when you restart you have to have the first disc in, select your saved game, and then slip the second one in.