There are not a lot of disqueting point and click adventure games around anymore, are there? We do get the occasional Hob’s Barrow, but, overall, it feels like that trend died down in the 90s. While your Sanitarium and Phantasmagoria might be gone, Vlad Circus is here to pick up the slack. Boosted with a double shot of survival horror up its arm, is its three-ring horror worth diving into?

Lazy Ollie, a clown at the titled Vlad Circus, was lost jobless and insane after horrible fire years before burned down everything. Now out of the asylum, Ollie has a chance to meet all the former members, with its owner ready to give it one more shot. But not everything is easy, as dark clouds are forming at the horizon and something horrible seems to be going down.

Vlad Circus nails perfectly the grim and dirty atmosphere of the old creaky house, lived in by circus freaks. Like the illegitimate baby of Tod Brown’s classic Freaks together with Alex de la Iglesia’s Balada Triste de Trompeta (or Last Circus, as is known in international markets). Ollie has to try and help his fellow three-ring friends, in order to get the circus back running and, perhaps, find happiness again.

Some puzzles are straightforward, helped by the limited number of locations: find a way to sharpen the knife, find the key to open the door, find a rope to get the engine running and so on. Others are a bit more obtuse, mostly because the clues seem to be either obvious or missing altogether. Doesn’t help that the solutions seems to be as unflexible as ever. Like, you won’t get to open a safe until you find the item with the combination, even though the game – for some reason – fools you by letting you input random numbers.

The survival horror mechanics, on the other hand, are hard to swallow. While filling your lamp with kerosene or recouping health by using your rosary is okay, having to shoot at headless zombies shambling around does not add anything to the experience. The overall movement and shooting system is not really perfect and the whole experience ends up more annyoing than anything.

Vlad Circus is kind enough to let combat take the backseat with the “story mode”, but it still gets in the way. Especially the rats randomly strewn throughout the house and sewers. They will surely end up biting and making you lose a chunk of gameplay. Again, more of a hindrance than anything, like someone taking away your controller while you play.

The overall puzzle design seems to be, again, working fine. There are some hiccups here and there, like how Ollie has a huge list of things to do at once, but the game doesn’t tell you which ones will ONLY unlock at the end and which you should, instead, do now. Other design ideas are perfect, like the limited inventory items: when you drop something Ollie takes note of it so you can easily find it again.

Graphically, Vlad Circus alternates between higly pixelated sprites and backgrounds, think as a more evolved The Last Door, with nicely drawn cutscenes which elevate the experience. The sparse musical bits also work, even though the final classic music piece really seems to be lifted straight from De La Iglesia.

The main crux of Vlad Circus though, and where it squandered its original appeal, is in how the narrative loses steam as the game goes on. Instead of a big story climax, we get a disappointing action sequence, while all the story bits we were following until a minute before basically disappear into the ether. Indeed, we get treated to a classic “nothing really matters” ending. There is barely enough time to get to know the characters that they get taken away from us. The horror bits also seem to be there just for shocking purposes, since they don’t really connect to anything in the end. There is no mystery to solve, so to speak.

Sure, the game is only four/five hours long, but instead of spending time doing the headless chicken to find keys in fountain (yep), Vlad Circus would have benefited from more meat on the narrative side. There is a hefty chunk of dialogue and character development here and there, but, at the end, it’s difficult to imagine what to do with it.

Topics such as Ollie’s mom, his unwanted love and relationship with the bearded woman, the circus owner’s murderous brother, along with biblical and catholic undertones. They all seem to end up on the backburner. It almost gives a feeling that the game got cut off short, with questions and puzzles left unanswered.

It is a shame since the first hour of Vlad Circus seemed headed in the right direction: a disqueting cast of characters plus a good serving of gore, with a side of disgusting imagery and madness. But, alas, it all gets squandered in a generic and hurried ending which does a huge disservice to all the narrative development that came before.

Clearly, if it reaches the right audience, Vlad Circus has a shot at becoming a cult hit. There are not many of its ilk nowadays. If you can stomach the survival horror parts (I’d recommend “story mode” even if you are a fan of the genre) along with forgiving its narrative shortcomings, you may still have a terrifying time. Still, one can’t help but feel sad that Vlad Circus could not aim higher for a status of real classic horror point and click adventure game. Satan knows we need more of them today.

Our Vlad Circus review was made possible with a key provided by Stride PR. Vlad Circus is available on Steam, PS5, PS4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X | S and Xbox one.