The levels present a simple Dracula origin story from childhood to immortality, revealed as a series of paintings in a gothic dungeon-like tower. Several of these images make more sense as Dracula's Instragram account than Dracula's portrait gallery -- is Dracula supposed to have posed for a portrait painter while feeding on someone? -- but there are some nice touches, such as earlier paintings appearing in the background of later paintings.
The sliding puzzle difficulty is extremely easy for all 8 puzzles: 2x3 tiles, 2x3, 3x3, 3x3, 3x3, 3x4, 3x4, and 4x4 tiles. Compared to for example Slide Stories, which offer different replayable difficulty levels on the same image from 3x3 up to 9x9 (81 tiles!). That said, Dracula Frames is organized like a story, unlike the Slide Stories series which call themselves stories but tend to be a series of related images (cute couples, cats) that have a theme but can be played in any order.
The art style beyond the puzzle images is very inconsistent. The paintings are well done fantasy images in high resolution, while the tower is done in a retro-fabulous row-res pixel style. This contrast would work just fine except for a problem: also scattered throughout the tower are individual objects each drawn in a variety of different pixelated resolutions -- flowers in one resolution, vials and mirrors in another resolution, the paintings in a third and backgrounds in a fourth, et cetera. This is unfortunate because the paintings and the backgrounds each work fine on their own, but the final result is awkward, like a meme or clip-art mashup.
The different pixel styles also don't give any hint about what is clickable or dragable and what isn't, even though there are several hidden and not-hidden objects outside in the background to be repeatedly-clicked or in one case dragged in order to unlock a final level.
The final level is a hidden bonus game: a kind of sliding puzzle arcade game prototype, in which you must deliver one tile past the obstacles and past a randomly spawning monster to the goal. It is extremely simple but there are a number of interesting ideas here; it would be interesting to see this turned into a full game. That said, the prototype doesn't quite work. The monster spawns with a 9-tile attack area, and in practice if the player is unlucky enough to have the monster spawn on top of them then they won't be able to shuffle their tile out of the attack zone in time, and will instantly lose. Still, this bonus level isn't too hard with a bit of persistence or luck, it just isn't winnable with pure skill.
I'd love to see more sliding puzzle mode stories like Dracula Frames, particularly with more consistent art style and with the wider range of difficulty levels that are common in other sliding tile games.
