Our household don’t just play games together, we also make sure that we watch a great variety of films and shows at home when we’re stuck in. We love watching the Hotel Transylvania series, which has had a whole bunch of different movies! The basic concept is that there is a hotel, made for spooky and scary creatures, and a human came to stay there. This human fell in love with the vampire’s daughter, Mavis, and after the vampire father Drac became okay with it, they all go on wild adventures. In Hotel Transylvania Scary-Tale Adventure, Drac is telling bedtime stories to Mavis’ child and one of the Werewolf’s children.
These stories are pretty interesting, as they are vampire-adapted nods to childhood stories that your child has probably heard before, starting with Aladdin and Little Red Riding Hood. Inside the game, you can choose what story is being told. There is a lot of narration, almost like a mix between a TV show and a game, which has Drac telling you about the characters and about the story. The characters in these stories are vampire characters, so they can do vampire things like fly like bats and fight things!
Hotel Transylvania Scary-Tale Adventures has an open-world feel, as the levels are massive, allowing you to explore to find coins everywhere. It’s a 3D world, with many, many chests, buttons to push, platforms to jump through. There is just a lot going on. We had, at first, assumed the stories themselves would be small, but they are actually quite long, especially with the size of the area that can be explored for extra coins.
At first, our five year old found it really tricky to do a few of the longer, comboed jumps and did ask for the odd bit of help, but her sister, who is 10, had no trouble at all and just went through the game perfectly. So, we do feel it might be better for a slightly older child.
With that said, both children had a lot of fun with the game, and could easily help each other out. It’s a single-player only game, so they could not play together and instead took turns. It’s nice listening to these stories and seeing the characters that you recognize inside the game itself. The only issue we seemed to have with this game is that Mavis sometimes walks in the wrong direction to our Xbox Controller. She just starts moving, in a strange sliding way, against whatever way you are facing and none of us could figure out why. When we didn’t play as her, we did not have this issue, which was fine. Often we just went back to the menu and re-started the area. Similarly, some cut-scenes didn’t trigger, but the camera locked on a talking character, which also required a return to the menu to fix.
Overall, we had a great time with Hotel Transylvania Scary-tale Adventure, and feel like it’s a good game for fans of the movies, or kids interested in fantasy things like vampires and werewolves! It’s an easy platformer for kids to pick up and play, and it’s nice that they’ve tied traditional stories into it. The different stories that you pick from the main menu also made it feel like multiple games to the kids — an added bonus.
Hotel Transylvania Scary-Tale Adventures is available on Steam, Xbox, Nintendo Switch and Playstation.
