Elvira: Mistress of the dark (1990) review for MS-DOS, Commodore 64 and Atari ST

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Elvira: Mistress of the dark
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Horrorsoft as the companyname suggest only made games, mostly RPG's, that had a horror theme to them. The first game I every played from this company is this one called Elvira mistress of the dark. You have been called upon by Elvira who has been kidnapped and who is now being held captive inside her own castle. Upon arriving in the castle you are quickly captured without much of a chance to do anything and Elvira has to come to your rescue. The game's not over yet though as she has lost her powers and now you have to find items and potions to help get her magic back so she get back her castle.

After you get out of jail Elvira instructs you to find her potions and you set off to find them somewhere inside the castle. You get some basic equipment like a sword and you're gonna need it because the castle is filled with guard who will try to stop you. Actually you don't have to fight them most of the time but usually they are guarding an entrance so you'll have to fight them eventually. Fights are seen from a third person view and you have only two options namely trust and parry, you have to actually time both of them and not go all crazy pressing buttons.

The interface uses a fairly standard layout with the main view taking up most of the screen and to the sides you can find things like actions (examine, take, etc.) and movement. On the bottom of the screen your inventory is shown and text whenever you meet people who want to talk instead of fighting. Unfortunately you can't move using the cursor keys which would have been a bit easier than only using the buttons on the screen.

Elvira was only the second game to come from horrorsoft, their first being a game called personal nightmare in which Elvira also made an appearance. The control scheme has some flaws but they get the job done and you'll learn to live with it. The graphics are pretty good but consists mostly of stills as there is not alot of animation. Overall the game is fairly enjoyable and unlike some of the later games the graphic violence is mostly limited to death scenes.

Overal rating: 7/10

Erde Kaiser

Elvira: Mistress of the dark was released for four different systems here are some notes:

Atari ST	Released in 1991. Game has been tested but not completed with SainT v1.10. Game runs under steem but there are some graphical problems, under Saint it works okay though. This also has a trainer for infinite health.
C64	Released in 1991. Game has been tested but not completed with CCS64 v2.0 win. Not bad for the C64 and altough it's missing music the rest of the game is all here. There are six disk files in total but the originals are double sided which means if the game asks for disk 2 side B you insert disk image nr. 4. This also has trainer.
DOS	Released in 1990. Game has been tested but not completed on a DOS and win2k PC. This works without problems on windows machines.
Others	This version is not available. Amiga released in 1990.

Date added

Apr-10-2005 15:31

Name

Elvira: Mistress of the dark

Developer

Horrorsoft

Publisher

Accolade

First released

1990

Genre

RPG

Download

Atari ST, filesize: 3186 Kb

Commodore 64, filesize: 481 Kb

MS-DOS, filesize: 2156 Kb

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