The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing III is an absurd game in the most literal sense of the word. Between explosive assaults on a circus of demonic clowns and trading Monty Python references with a Minotaur, at times it's hard to say what drives this frenetic adventure. You find the same over-the-top action, pop culture quips, and touches of gothic horror here that you do in the previous games in this series. Thematically, however, the series has grown. Underneath bursts of raucous action and tongue-in-cheek winks to the audience, there's an earnest, albeit haphazard attempt at character drama that works because the rest of the game is so ludicrous.

Until now, the Van Helsing series has played out as something of a comedic parody of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein stapled to the kind of quick-firing comedy that made the had. Here, there's little of substance beyond the base game. Even worse is that all that extra content was originally intended to help support a robust set of online modes, but most of those have been cut down. For example, the Neverending story mode, one of the biggest replayability features, is all but gone. When added to the game's decreased level cap (30, down from 60), the exclusion cuts down on the long-term potential of a game that once thrived on post-campaign play.

These unfortunate oversights hint at the biggest problem with Van Helsing III--in exchange for narrative closure, almost everything else has been copied and pasted from its previous iterations. Potions, a quick pick-me-up staple in almost any action RPG, have been cut, but the user interface still has buttons corresponding to where the potion displays were in the last game. Furthermore, some skills explicitly upgrade the functionality of potions that don't exist. Many textures, enemies, and missions are almost identical as well. Adding to that are some pernicious bugs that can cause all manner of issues, from game crashes to quests that cannot be completed. There's nothing game-breaking, but it's still sad to see. This was a series to which I, and many others, had become quite attached. It was a refreshing take on a modern myth and a rote genre.

The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing III is like visiting your hometown after years of absence. Everything's the same, yet off somehow. As you visit all the same places and exchange words with old friends, you're faced with an uncomfortable duality. On one hand, you get the closure of knowing how it all turned out, but on the other, you wonder what could have been, making you simultaneously satisfied and unsettled by the reality that this is the end.