Elvira II: The Jaws of Cerberus

Did You Know?

• The game's protagonist is Elvira's boyfriend.
• The studio was built on haunted grounds, causing props and movie sets to become actual monstrosities.
• The demon Cerberus captured Elvira to use her magical power for his own aims.

Gameplay

The game presents a first-person perspective, with movement controlled by clicking arrows in the bottom-left corner of the screen. Rather than true 3D, the view is simulated through numerous 2D images of rooms and corridors from various angles, which limits freedom; in many rooms, looking to the side is impossible. The game contains four areas: the main studio building and three movie sets. The main building and Studio 2 (the haunted house) emphasize adventure elements such as collecting items and solving puzzles, while Studio 1 (insect-filled caverns) and Studio 3 (a dungeon) resemble classic dungeon crawls. The magic system allows the player to cast spells using items found around the studio, requiring the player to match a recipe's description—such as a glass item or an inflammable liquid—with an appropriate object like a glass bottle or a spray of alcohol.

Reception

In 1992, Dragon magazine's Hartley, Patricia, and Kirk Lesser gave the game 5 out of 5 stars in their column, calling it truly engrossing and exciting. However, Scorpia of Computer Gaming World in 1992 could not finish the game due to unwinnable elements that appeared without warning and a flawed save feature that would force replaying most of the story, deeming it a grave disappointment. In 1993, she called it surprisingly bad and best avoided, describing it as an incredibly tedious hack'n'slash with poorly designed adventure puzzles. The One gave the Amiga version an overall score of 77%, praising the gory graphics as excellent and the UI as reasonably intuitive. The One criticized the exploration, noting annoyance with sideways movement requiring two actions where one would suffice, and also criticized the seven-disk span and excessive disk swapping, stating that loading sometimes took more time than the action. The One concluded that despite plenty of monsters, good combat and magic systems, and a large landscape, the game had small but significant design faults.