Van Helsing is a title that’s quite happy appropriating the successful parts of other aRPGs and mixing them up with a few ideas of its own.
Those ideas tend to lean in the direction of providing interesting distractions between the click-click-clicking, such as mid-map quests with varying outcomes. The aforementioned Professor Frog was happy to purchase old bone artifacts from me for historical purposes, but it was also possible to feed them to an ancient idol for some additional experience points. In another location, the decision to lead a confused ghost to the site of his hanging provoked an angry response (fair enough, really.)
These sub-quests boil down to simple dialogue tree choices or re-visiting certain areas of the map with newfound items, but NeoCore’s light, banter-tinged writing style, the developer’s flair for otherworldly encounters and the sometimes amusing over-pronunciation of words by voice actors for whom English may well be a second language keeps the diversions entertaining.
