CW's The Vampire Diaries series now a 'fang-tastic' Facebook game

Launched today, The Vampire Diaries: Get Sucked In follows the heels of BBC's announcement for Being Human, another popular supernatural drama set to become a Facebook role-playing game.

The CW's The Vampire Diaries (adapted from a novel series by L.J. Smith of the same name) is a show about a female high schooler's romantic entanglements with two vampire brothers and the mysterious events surrounding their town.

Fans of the show can now visit Mystic Falls anytime instead of just Thursday nights, thanks to developer Arkadium and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. Though Arkadium is best known for creating Mahjongg Dimensions and bringing Cooking Mama to Facebook, they've done work for The CW before, producing a Facebook game for the hit teen drama, Gossip Girl.

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Promising to draw upon "key plot lines," the game is currently divided into chapters, with eager fans having already completed chapter one and are now impatiently awaiting chapter two. When you begin, you're dropped into a fog in the middle of a dream, where you meet two of the show's three major characters--Elena and Damon. You get two item-fetching missions that are essentially a tutorial, then wake up to your first day at the Mystic Falls High School. An interactive map allows you to navigate the key parts of campus, your home, and the town, including the Mystic Grill restaurant. And while there's no voice acting, there's plenty of readable dialog and the music absolutely works to enhance the mood. It's all a very immersive experience.

Arkadium has clearly done its research. While I've not seen the series, the developer has created a game that completely indulges and rewards the most loyal fans while crafting enough intrigue to not alienate the random player who wanders in. The ultimate indulgence for fans is the mini-game "Mystic Trivia," which you can only pass if you have arcane knowledge of events in the show, such as, "Who is the warlock Bonnie flirts with, then messes with in Season 2?" or "What is the color of Damon's eyes?" This Facebook rendition of Vampire Diaries is clearly aimed at the lovestruck fan girls out there.

And speaking of fan girls, the game will know if you're male or female and tailor certain missions to you accordingly. In one mission, female players are sent to the cheerleading squad tryouts, while male players are sent to the football team. Though when you begin, no one asks what your gender is nor does the game ask you for a name. You're basically a cipher, and the characters in the game treat you as a student or a peer.

That the developers would allow such ambiguity is certainly worthy of notice. It'll be interesting, if there's more to it further down the road. Aside from trivia, there's a simple hidden object mechanic that takes up the bulk of the gameplay, followed by the "Mystic Pix" mini-game, which has you compare two screenshots of the show side-by-side.

Click here to play The Vampire Diaries: Get Sucked In on Facebook now >

[Hat-tip: BuzzFocus]

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