Dealing with backlog: Two short horror games

Necronomicon: The Dawning of Darkness is a horror/mystery game that I bought back in 2013 or 2014. It's a port from an old Playstation game and it shows. The controls are kind of clunky, the animations and voice acting leaves a lot to be desired and the story makes no sense. I bought it because I was looking for Lovecraft inspired games at the time. There's no tutorial and no direction in what to do, but when I figured it out the game was pretty easy.

I knew from beforehand that the game was far from bug-free, because the mixed reviews on the store page said so and the forums contained lots of tips and tricks on how to get past bugs. I got almost all the way to the end (the guide I looked up made it seem that way anyway) when I got to a bug I couldn't find a solution for. Seemed like nobody else had gotten that particular bug. I was at the library looking up books to find out what the antagonist was up to. One particular book refused to be picked up, and without having that book I couldn't get any further.

Vlad the Impaler is a visual novel-esque point-and-click adventure. You're thrown right into the game with no tutorial whatsoever and no indication as to what importance the stats have and what will influence them and what they influence. That's easy enough to learn, but I never managed to complete the game. Because no matter what course of action I took beforehand, saving the Sultan's life was impossible and I was always killed by his guards. I figured it was because my stats were too low, but at the time it seemed as if I had taken every possible combination of actions beforehand and I still didn't have high enough stats to pass that check. My mind keeps turning up alternatives now though, so i may actually pick it up again at a later time and try to complete it later on.

The story seemed odd and to not go together and all in pieces when I did my first run, but after a while when you discover the different routes the pieces all start to fit together. It's just odd that you'd have to play it multiple times to figure out how the whole thing fits together.

I did love the style of the game though.