As I mentioned
in my latest article Top 5 Point-and-Click Mystery Games you should play right now, the Vampire Saga series is at the very top of my favorites-list. It
consists of three parts and now I will be talking about the third installment –
Break Out.
Even though
Break Out is the first game of the series that I ever played, out of the three,
I liked it the least, because compared to the other two installments, the story
of this one was pretty weak. It was also the least scary of the three. But don’t
let this discourage you, because even though I liked it the least, I still like
it more than other games out there. I personally feel that this game, along
with the previous installments, offers some great graphics and matching music.
Especially, the spooky cathedral music and creepy dark location in an abandoned
old mining town gives the perfect atmosphere for a really scary game.
I would
recommend that you play this game before the other two. It won’t affect the
storyline, but it will make you appreciate the game more.
The story is
about a Doctor, mourning his recently deceased daughter, Grace, who was invited
to a local hospital in the creepy, seemingly abandoned mining town called Hill
Lock. An unknown and obscure disease has spread out through the town making its
victims have unidentifiable symptoms and the break out is especially from the
mines – the main source of income of the locals. Due to the fleeing of the
superstitious medical staff of the hospital, it is up to the Doctor to research
the disease and find a viable cure.
Here, I will
elaborately describe the plot with as much detail as I can remember and also
add the gameplay and the basic features.
Gameplay
- From the main menu, you can create a unique and individual profile and your progress will be saved for that particular profile only.
- There are two mods to this game: Casual and Expert.
- In Casual mode, the player is free to roam the locations without a time limit; the interactive parts are highlighted and the Hint Bar fills up quicker. The Expert mode limits these features.
- The Hidden Objects Scenes are highlighted in purple glow and they are not randomized.
- On the game screen, the player will find the following things – the menu button, the hint button, the diary button and a special box of blood samples button. The last button is crucial to the game’s plot.
- The player can access the Hint button as many times as he likes in Casual mode, but not before the button refills in between each click.
- The game offers a custom cursor.
- The game offers non-interactive special cut-scenes important to the storyline.
Plot
The Hospital
The game starts
with the Doctor arriving to the town via a train, where the player gets to know
about the death of his daughter, Grace. Upon arriving at the hospital, the
Doctor notices that the place is pretty much empty except for the town Sherriff
waiting to receive him. The Sherriff informs the Doctor about the disease and
also adds that his son, Adam, has been missing and he needed to find his son as
soon as possible. So, he leaves the Doctor at the hospital and tells him that they
received a fresh disfigured corpse that very day which was waiting for the Doctor
in the mortuary to be researched on.
The Doctor
enters the morgue and finds the corpse. Strangely, the corpse has very coarse
greenish skin with fangs and very long sharp nails. He sees it lying in a very
odd position – as if trying to fend off someone – on the hospital bed with a
very strange heart-shaped amulet in its left hand. The Doctor takes its blood
for sampling and finds very strange mutations in it. As soon as he finishes
analyzing the blood, the microscope breaks down, leaving the Doctor startled.
Still confused, he enters the morgue again and finds an amulet piece that
matches exactly with the one the corpse is holding. He joins them together.
As soon as he
does so, the corpse suddenly springs to life and disappears. Terrified, the
Doctor leaves and finds a revolver in the reception area and returns to the
morgue to find out what happened. Suddenly, one of the cold chambers bursts
open and the previously dead corpse is in it waiting to get out. The Doctor
panics and shoots it in vain but finally runs out and flees the scene with the
nurse’s car. He ends up in a road accident and wakes up in front of a diner. Several
times in this location and further more in the game, the Doctor will continuously
see the apparitions of his daughter and another sinister dark shadowy figure.
The Diner
The Doctor finds
himself in front of a diner and garage called Molly’s, where a small path leads
to the main town. But the path is blocked by a ferocious dog. The Doctor lures
the dog away with a piece of a sausage and enters the garage. There, after a
thorough puzzle-solving part, he is confronted by the shadowy apparition. He
manages to escape the demon by dropping a car-engine on the shadow and heads
out to the town.
The Town
In the town, the
Doctor comes across his own home, where he sees Grace playing hopscotch before
disappearing. He also finds a school bus parked in front of a cinema nearby his
house. While he was investigating inside his home, suddenly someone knocks the
backdoor of his house. He sees that the Sherriff’s missing son, Adam, was
outside in his backyard. Adam appears to be very pale with redness around his
mouth. He threatens the Doctor to open the door so that he can come in and
drink his blood.
Confirmed that Adam was in fact no longer a
human, the Doctor rushes up to the second floor but finds Adam outside his
window, twelve feet above the ground. The Doctor runs into his bedroom. But as
the window was open, Adam manages to enter the room. However, the glare from
the television blinds him for a second and the Doctor throws a garlic, which he
has previously found in his fridge, at the vampire Adam. The garlic burns Adam
and he flees.
The Doctor,
then, goes to his backyard to see what happened and sees the apparition of
Grace. After some slight investigation, the Doctor exits his house. But to his
horror, he finds another black shadow climbing up the yellow schoolbus. The
shadow jumps into the school and blood is found to be splattered across the
windows and the bus rushes forward. The Doctor
quickly follows the bus down the street, but finds that the bus is vanished. He
proceeds forward and ends up in the churchyard.
The Church
Grace’s
apparition appears again once the Doctor gets into the churchyard. Apparently,
she has been helping him all along. The Doctor follows Grace’s ghost up to the
graveyard but finds a huge bat clinging to the gate of the graveyard. He
collects some holy water and a branch from the church and uses these to drive
the bat away. Then, entering the graveyard, he digs up his daughter’s grave
because Adam previously hinted that his daughter may have turned into a vampire
as well. But he gets caught by the Sherriff.
When the Doctor
tells the Sherriff about vampirism, the man dismisses the Doctor’s claims and
accuses him of hallucinating and locks him in jail.
The Police
Station
The Doctor,
using his instant cleverness and a little help from Grace, breaks free of his
jail cell and heads out. In the yard, he faces the Sherriff, who was standing
in front of the water tank. While the Doctor and the Sherriff were talking,
suddenly Adam pops out of the water tank. The Sherriff, glad to find his son,
goes up the tank to retrieve him, not listening to the Doctor’s warnings. Adam
attacks the Sherriff and pulls him inside the tank. Panicked, the Doctor
immediately flees the place. He returns to the graveyard and finds a path that
leads to the train station.
The Train
Station
The Doctor
discovers a trapdoor leading to the mines but in order to access that, he must
move the train. He decides to investigate the mines because that is where
everything started. As he enters the engine room of the train, he finds a dead
man who had a strange mask with indents on them. Apparently, the man was attacked
by vampires as well. As soon as the Doctor fills up those indents with ancient
coins he found earlier, the corpse vanishes into thin air. The Doctor continues
to move the train backwards. After doing so, he goes through the trapdoor into
the mine.
The Mine
As Doctor goes
into the mine, he comes across a wooden figure submerged in a pool of sticky
yellow fluid with a manometer stuck in its hand. He assumes it’s just a mannequin.
He collects a hammer and breaks a huge hole in the wall to discover a path
leading deeper into the mine. Further venturing through the caves, the Doctor
finds a massive cavern dug through the ground with a ladder leading down.
As the Doctor
went down the ladder, he comes face to face with his daughter, standing in a
ritualistic chamber, who informs him that the demon who turned everyone into a
vampire is sleeping in the coffin. It turns out that the shadowy figure the
Doctor has been encountering is the main demon himself. She also tells him that
she is a vampire herself and in order to save her soul and the town, the Doctor
must destroy the mines and make sure no one ever comes back.
Even though it’s
painful for him to imagine so, the Doctor agrees with his daughter and decides
to use the air-pressure engine to release methane in the mine. In order to do
so, he must retrieve the manometer. The Doctor returns to the mannequin with a
hacksaw and chops down its fingers to get the device. He notices that the
mannequin grimaces, confirming that it’s the solidified body of a vampire. He
quickly returns to the engine and releases air throughout the mines.
After everything
is ready, the Doctor bids finals farewell with his daughter and leaves the
place after giving her a small bomb. Grace, then, goes to the ritualistic
chamber and starts a fire, which in combination with the methane, creates a
huge explosion, seemingly destroying all the vampires, including her.
Hope this article gave you an important insight to the game. Let me know what you think.
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