The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing Interview

Neocore Games’ Júlia Inzsöl took some time out of her busy day to address several questions about The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing for a new post-mortem interview on SpawnFirst. Looking forward to the action RPG sequel, that’s for sure:

The game mixes a dark world filled with monsters with witty humor. How did you come about making this decision to mesh the two?

As we intended to stick to the dark, gothic-noir style in the game, we had to decide if we wanted to make a true horror story, or rather fill the universe with humorous antics, and create a game that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Actually, the witty humor mostly comes from the conversations between Van Helsing and Lady Katarina, and for me it’s an essential aspect of their relationship. Also, the dark humor made it a perfect playground for us to include all sorts of pop-cultural references from other games, movies, books and turn them into hidden content and funny easter eggs that we all love so much.

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This game seems to blend RPG elements with hack and slash, and the outcome is a great mix. How were you able to combine both elements successfully?

The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing is an Action RPG, and as such it mixes RPG and Hack and Slash elements. A great mix, as you said. The truth is that RPG is our all time favorite genre in games, so we always try to use as much role-playing elements as we possibly can. For example, in this game not only does Van Helsing have a skill tree, but so does his ghostly companion, Katarina. She can also get ability points etc., unlike NPC’s and (followers) in other similar games. As much as we love the RPG genre, you can be sure that even if we create a game in a totally different genre in the future, it will definitely have some RPG elements blended in.