Having stylishly blended H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythology with Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock Holmes - The Awakened, Frogwares is once again venturing into a disturbing and fantastic universe, the world of the Prince of Darkness, a world full of Gothic adventure, romance, mystery and terror.

Dracula: Origin reveals the origins of the Dracula curse. Once the ardent defender of Christendom, Dracula loses his faith in God when he is abandoned by his one true love after she marries. Dracula then makes a pact with the Prince of Darkness, and becomes a vampire.

As time goes by, Dracula discovers the existence of a manuscript that allegedly details a rite which brings damned souls back from the beyond. On the body of one of his last victims, Dracula finds the photograph of a pretty young woman, Mina, who looks so disconcertingly like his beloved one; he determines that her body would be the perfect host for the damned soul of the woman he worshipped.

In Dracula: Origin, the player takes the role of the famous Professor Van Helsing whose life’s aim is the destruction of Dracula. Van Helsing must stop the vampire from finding the manuscript. A rich adventure that takes him from London to Egypt, Austria and through Carpathian Europe right into the terrifying home of the Dark Prince.

Mysteries, enigmas, love, thrills and vampires…. Dracula: Origin offers an adventure that advances the genre in leaps and bounds with superb graphics and a solid story line. Made up of a subtle graphic mix of detailed 2D scenery and full 3D characters with a powerful sound track, the game brings to life the imaginary world of the original literary work by Bram Stoker. This new adventure game makes full use of the traditional vampire stories (horror, love, blood, crucifixes, stakes, garlic...) and the genre’s terrifying, Gothic, romantic and fantastic atmosphere.

Dracula: Origin reveals the origins of the Dracula curse - that of a man tortured by the lost of a woman he held more precious than anything and offended because she would rather kill herself than give in to him. Slowly, the thirst for vengeance has done its work, turning the ardent defender of Christianity into a hardened servant of the Demon. Dracula begins celebrating terrifying satanic masses involving terrible atrocities. He was still alive, still human, until the day he drank his rival’s blood and then made a pact, sealed for all eternity, which made him the first vampire. He became the great monster of legend, bent solely on the destruction of humanity and with an unquenchable thirst for blood and warm, bloody flesh in his fangs… But the woman he loved has killed herself and has thus been condemned to eternal damnation; Dracula feels he was the guilty party as he was unable to save her.Thus condemned to wander the world endlessly and without aim, forced to suffer alone in his pain, he can only feel better when feasting upon the blood of the living.

Dracula: Origin retranscribes Bram Stoker’s world faithfully. The player evolves by a traditional Point & Click gameplay. Plunged into a troubling, Gothic atmosphere, the player will find all the typical themes of an adventure game through superb graphics with a skilful mix of 2D environments and 3D characters. The player will have both his mind and his nerve tested by the traps and mysteries that he will have to face. Stake, crucifix, garlic clove, mirror… these are some of the 150 vampire-themed objects in the game that you need to use alone or in combination to succeed in your mission. You will meet Bram Stoker’s epic heroes: Van Helsing the disciplined scientist, Dracula, the insatiable vampire, Mina, the idealized reincarnation of Dracula’s dearest one... You will meet more than fourty other disturbing or angelic characters with whom you need to interact with intelligence in order to gather precious clues.Those adventurers who may struggle to solve mysteries will be pleased to hear that Dracula: Origin offers an exclusive Help System. It allows players to be helped progressively out of their fixes by providing clues that slowly give more and more away.

Travel through a rich variety of decors and locations as you hunt; a hunt full of leaps and bounds that will take you throughout Europe, to London and to Transylvania via Vienna and with a breathtaking stop in Egypt. Plunge into a Gothic adventure, where everyone’s every move is driven by the horror of blood and the longing for Eternal Love. Supported by a sound track quite terrifying, the player is forever propelled towards more suspense and horror preparing to take part in the struggle between two conceptions of the world: chaos and order, fantasy and reality.

The inquiry leads you from London to an Egyptian necropolis, from a Viennese palace to a cursed monastery, to finish in the famous lair of Dracula.

Tentatively scheduled for release in 2008.