A series of point and click/role playing computer games based loosely around the Cassandra Peterson character
Elvira. In 1990,
Horror Soft Games released the first installment,
Elvira: Mistress of the Dark. The game was surprisingly well received by critics and adventure/horror fans, and in 1992 the follow-up,
Elvira II: The Jaws of Cerburus was released to even better reviews than the original. In addition to being surprisingly good, the games were also known for being
ridiculously challenging and
ridiculously frightening, while maintaining a dark, tongue-in-cheek sense of humor. Not surprisingly, the majority of laughs came from Elvira's
comments.
An almost identical IP from the same company,
Wax Works, was released in 1992.
Tropes within the game include:
- Absolute Cleavage: Take a wild guess.
- Big Badass Wolf: that can eat your neck
- Eye Scream: You can die with your eyes torn out by a hawk, you can get them fried, you can get one of them burned by acid...
- The Chew Toy: If you are a gore fan, the protagonist, as you can let him die in a lot of gruesome ways.
- Fan Disservice: At one point in the haunted house, you can join a lovely young woman in bed. Is it sexy? At the beginning, yes. At the end? HELL NO. There's a reason one YouTube comment referred to the woman as "Lamprey head"...see for yourself.
◊ - Giant Spider: There's a gigantic black widow in Elvira II.
- Have a Nice Death: The games seemed to take a sadistic pleasure in showing the player gruesome death screens depending on how and where they were killed.
- The Many Deaths of You: Boy howdy.
- Nintendo Hard
- Schrödinger's Gun: In the second game there are three places where Elvira may be hidden; no matter in what order you reach them, the first two Elviras will be fake and transform into monsters.
- The Problem with Licensed Games: Averted, as both games were very well reviewed and won numerous awards, some even being "Adventure Game of the Year".
- Trial-and-Error Gameplay
- Unwinnable by Design/Unwinnable by Mistake: Even if you do avoid the many, many pitfalls, you might still lose something vital in a fireball trap.
- Your Head Asplode: The witch you encounter early on in The Jaws of Cerberus goes down like this. Complete with her one eyeball flying toward the screen!
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