In Brief

According to the (semi-apologetic) explanation in the main menu, The Visitor is a game that was designed to fail. Conceived as part of a 'bad visual novels' contest, it uses borrowed footage from several classic horror movies to tell an alternate story: the tale of a frustrated, socially awkward Dracula and his reluctant fascination with a fangirl. Aside from the writing, none of The Visitor's assets are original, but somehow this is what gives it its charm. The recasting of iconic moments from iconic films in a new light takes skill, and the atmospheric piano-and-organ soundtrack does a wonderful job of supporting the grainy black-and-white visuals. This may not be the kind of game that everyone would enjoy, but if you're willing to forgo flashy battle systems and complex mechanics for an interesting (and exceptionally dark, when it's not giving you mood-whiplash) spin on the 1931 version of Dracula, you may enjoy giving The Visitor a try.

In Depth

I'll level with you. I'm chomping at the bit to discuss the writing in The Visitor, and so I'm going to be brief with the soundtrack and visuals. They both feel very appropriate, complement each other well, and flow with ease. I never felt like I was being jerked back and forth between scenes in The Visitor, and I never felt like the music was intruding on my enjoyment of a scene. Unfortunately, there is a bit of 'voice acting' (a sound clip ripped from the classic movie) that shows up to mar a scene with its suddenness, but the overall audio/visual impression I got from The Visitor was immersive and wonderful. Now, let's talk writing.

Ookami has an obvious knack for the mechanics of telling a story. She builds characters clearly, and she sets up situations that force them to interact. Most of the writing in The Visitor is dialog, and it flows appropriately. There are little narrative interruptions every so often that feel out of place--mostly because they're tiny islands of third-person past omniscient in a sea of first-person present limited--but they're not technically wrong, just a little weird to read in this format.

Where The Visitor falters is actually in the early characterizations of its cast. The roles that they play are all excellent, and appropriate for the plot. There's the exasperated, straight-laced vampire still coming to grips with his undead nature (who turns into a dominating sociopath.) There's his well-meaning-if-eccentric family of salty old uncles, delinquent cousins, and one lunatic with a pipe organ conspiring to drive the vampire crazy (who are also horrifying killers, by the way.) There's the titular Visitor--a young woman who finds herself fascinated with him--and there's also her family and friends, the complication in their romance (who end up being objectively the most sympathetic characters in the story.) Unfortunately, while the execution of each of these roles is generally consistent, they are hugely different from the wacky Transylvanian fun-times that the game page seems to suggest. For a story that starts off looking like something by Terry Pratchett, by the end of the second chapter it more closely resembles Vampire: the Masquerade.

The vampire--Count Bela Blasko--is a perfect example of this sudden shift in tone. He starts out likeable enough. His living situation is obviously not ideal, but he puts up with it well, and he's nice enough to the young lady that drops by his house. He shows her his garden, talks about his family, and very indirectly hints to the reader that he might be lonely. Obviously charmed, the lady (Helen) invites him to a party at her place, not knowing that when he arrives he's going to spontaneously turn into an arrogant prick. Once there, Bela wastes no time in being rude to Helen's family. Inexplicably, they take it in stride. Their tolerance is helped along by the timely arrival of Helen's friend David Manners and his actually insane boyfriend Dwight Frye, who do their best to be bigger jerks than Bela, and nearly succeed. The fact that Dwight is possibly only insane because Bela is an amoral vampire who sometimes breaks people's minds is an interesting bit of darkness, but only serves to further confuse the tone of the story. What could have been comedy turns into weirdness when both Dwight and David make passes at Bela, are both shot down, and then Bela punches Dwight out (with the full compliance of Helen's family) for begging for sex. The end result of the scene is that the hero of the piece comes off looking like the villain, the villains end up looking like strawmen, and the love interest appears to be interested in the vampire only because it's her job to be.

This illustrates the second major problem with the writing in The Visitor. Characters occasionally seem to forget who they are in service of the (allegedly central) romance plot. This isn't so much a problem in genres like erotica, where the core content is the action and the characters' personalities and motivations are just a way of adding spice to that action, but The Visitor is PG-13 at best. It spends an awful lot of time skirting the subject of sex (condoms are discussed, as is performance enhancement medication,) but never commits to going all the way. Nonetheless, its characters--in their various ways--all rally behind pushing the romance between Helen and Bela to its logical conclusion with such enthusiasm during the early chapters that it sometimes feels like the only thing any of them care about is whether Bela finally gets any, and the core romance of the story is less satisfying for all of the narrative pushing.

The quality of writing does improve as the story continues, and after a sharp dip during chapter two, it rallies and makes a valiant recovery for chapter three. Bela suddenly has time to talk with his family, and backstories develop. Bits of vampire lore are dismissed or expanded on, giving the setting its own surprisingly robust mythos. Side-plots are revealed and incorporated into the central storyline, and everything becomes a little more engaging. However, the price of this is just how dark the plot becomes. By the time chapter three was done, I didn't feel like I was clicking through light-hearted entertainment anymore. I felt legitimately sorry for the antagonists, and was hoping that Bela would somehow catch a stake by the end.

He doesn't. At least, not in the ending I got. There are a few branch points in the narrative, all of which revolve around indulging in or abstaining from Bela's vampirey hunger--for the most part. There is also an excellent section of chapter three in which the challenge is actually how to deal with several intruders in Bela's castle before embarking on a date, but it appears not to influence the main plot. In the case of my ending (a supposedly happy one where Helen turns out to be a Bram Stoker memorabilia collector and agrees to marry a man she's only just started dating,) it felt rushed and anti-climactic, throwing out pages of solid world-building for a sappy happily ever after. There was no real feeling of a final confrontation to give it any punch, and so the lasting impression that The Visitor left me with was of a story that--while well-written--didn't really know where it was going, and ultimately suffered for it.

Writing Nitpicks

"The regular coach not going to fall apart. I just had the damned thing maintenanced." Missing an 'is'

"Oops my bad." Missing a comma

"If we reach an empass of any kind," impasse

"making it that much more difficult for some idiot Stoker fan to put a steak through my heart while I'm out" stake

"Might I remind you that re-growing an organ--especially the heart--hurts like loving hell?" 'loving' sounds really odd in this context, and makes Bela sound like an SA goon.

"Crap! I supposed to call her, wasn't I?" Missing a 'was'