Frankenstein for the Commodore 64 was developed and published by Zeppelin Games in 1992 and in it you play Egor, Professor Frankenstein‘s hunchback assistant, on a humorous and satirical quest to collect dead bodies for his master’s experiments.

This is basically a fairly simple flick-screen platform ‘fetch’ game, and you collect one body at a time and return it to Frankenstein‘s laboratory at the top of his castle. You then repeat the task until Frankenstein is happy with your grave-robbing skills, or until you run out of time (you only have thirty minutes to complete your task).

Egor’s fear level rises if he touches something hostile, like a monster or a gibbet (which is a bit weird, considering what his mission is), and touching the woman in the village (who I assume is Elizabeth from the original story) lowers Egor’s fear level back to zero. If his fear level maxes-out, you lose a life.

This is essentially the same game as Junkyard‘s 1994 MS-DOS game, Frankenstein, but with fewer details and less appealing graphics. Both games are obviously related to each other.

The music is strange, but atmospheric. The rain and lightning effects are quite good and they are timed to make it appear like there’s a storm coming. Collision detection on platforms is a bit dodgy. You seem to fall off them too easily, even if it looks like you should land on one. Egor’s scream when he dies is funny.

Considering that Frankenstein was made at the tail end of the C64‘s lifetime, this is a surprisingly unsophisticated game and it seems more like a ‘cash-in’ than a concerted effort to make a good game. Frankenstein could’ve been great, but is merely okay.

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