Hotel Transylvania, Scary Tale Adventures is a 3D adventure game from Drakhar Studios and Outright games and is based on the hugely successful Sony Pictures film franchise Hotel Transylvania featuring characters from the films but with different classic Tales, The game is released on PS4, PS5, Xbox one, Steam and Nintendo Switch.

Outright Games has a great range of family-friendly games and on many of the consoles the choice of younger kids’ games is very limited, however, they provide the range that is ever-increasing in popularity. Hotel Transylvania is one of the more known family films franchises of recent times and is a little different to many of the kid’s films, starring Adam Sandler and a few of his actor regulars, it spawned multiple films etc and is well-known.

However this game takes a different twist, it does feature many of the characters but the voices aren’t quite the original actors, there are pretty close so a kid wouldn’t really notice it, but this is all about some classic fairy tales, renamed scare-tale which is a unique pin on it.

What they say

“Explore classic fairy tale worlds with your favourite characters from the Sony Pictures Animation films in Hotel Transylvania: Scary-Tale Adventures! Take control of Drac and Mavis and play through unique worlds with their own spooky spin, including Little Red Riding Hood, The Emperor’s New Clothes and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.

Faced with fearsome foes and fiendish puzzles, you must brave your way through and utilize your special abilities to dash, glide and jump through these spook-tacular storybook worlds. You’ll even get to meet iconic HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA characters like Johnny, Murray, Wayne and more, who’ll guide you to complete exciting quests and solve devious challenges, along with a coffin-full of collectables for you to discover. With so much at stake, Drac and Mavis are Counting on you to save the day!”

Hotel Transylvania

Essentially your playing as Drac or Mavis, and it’s largely a more single-player game, there are plenty of other characters but they make up the characters within the story. Each scare tale is a different level set in a different area, with different objectives and enemies, though as you would expect there are plenty of light puzzles solving and adventuring to do, with things to collect and complete the tale.

Unlike other adventure games being 3D it allows you the level and then puzzles to be a bit more challenging and graphically better, the graphics, in general, are quite good and very true to the characters that kids will be custom to, along with the tales the areas are very good, I do think the sound is comparison isn’t at the same level, there not poor but the characters sound ok, and for me, everything seems low key, just almost like background ambient sound.

The controls and abilities are pretty good and the ability to turn Drac to bat for example is really good and you use that in certain parts of the game, the game will give you lot of help and guidance with abilities etc.

What the kids say

“Hotel Transylvania Scary Tale adventure is a story game where Drac reads bedtime stories to Dennis and Winnie. You can play as different characters such as Drac or Mavis. Each Scary tale is different with familiar faces or characters in them. What I Like about the game is that you can use unique powers to defeat obstacles”

Some tips:

When stuck, look around for a level or button

If you can’t beat an enemy, find a “weak spot”

Overall

Fans of hotel Translyvania obviously love the game, it’s good enough to keep them and fans new to the franchise engaged, the idea of Scare tales is actually quite good as kids will also have heard of many of the tales. graphically it’s solid and as I said earlier the sound is fine its just not great with both the characters and in-game sound in general.

But the characters and abilities are good and easy to use, its a shame there are only two active characters to play but it’s not a big deal, I prefer these games being multiplayer during the adventures as a parent this helps the younger, less experienced gain confidence in the game from the other stronger kid, but unfortunately, this doesn’t have that. But if the child has played adventure games then they should be fine and it is fairly helpful within guidance and challenging but not challenging enough to put the kid off.