In the turbulent year of 1865, the Romanian Army fights the invading forces of the Ottoman Empire. Two Romanian soldiers, Vladimir Tepes and Bogdan Moldoveanu, engage in fierce battle side by side, in a forest surrounded by the enemy. Bogdan witness Vladimir’s inexplicable survival after a gunshot in the back, with the bullet exiting through a large open wound in his chest. After the war, both men receive honors for their service and retire to more peaceful lives. Moldoveanu is awarded a property by the state, where he meets and marries Elisabeta. After giving birth to her daughter Catalina, she falls sick with a mysterious disease, growing ever more pale until finally passing away, forcing Bogdan to raise their little girl on his own. When the day of her 18th anniversary approaches, he becomes weaker and ill, and starts to worry about the future of his offspring. In order to secure her well-being, he engages the protesting young woman to a richer, older nobleman called Lord Roma. Now she must investigate the dark past relationships of her family, and choose between her own life or sacrificing herself to save her father’s.
Vampire Brides: Love Over Death is a hidden object game with elements borrowed from traditional point-and-click adventures. The player assumes the role of Catalina, seeing the world from her perspective while exploring the grounds of her family state. The gameplay switches back and forth between hidden object scenes and adventure portions, where most of the time the objective is to collect a series of items and use them to solve all the puzzles found on the connected locations.
The scenery backgrounds are reused for the hidden object challenges, where the goal is to find and click on all the items listed at the bottom of the screen, on locations cluttered with paraphernalia scattered around the landscape. Some of the items found on these scavenging hunts are stored in the inventory tray at the bottom, from where they can be dragged and dropped on logical places to perform an action or complete a pending task, or combined to create new tools. The hint button is an eye at the bottom-right corner that shows the position of one of the required objects when activated, but takes some time to recharge after use.
Mini-games take place on a separate screen, where pieces or mechanisms of some sort have to be manipulated directly to solve them. They include common staples of the genre, like completing a sliding-tiles puzzle, setting gears on a clockwork mechanism and other familiar challenges, along with more original ones. They can be optionally skipped after a few minutes.
