Sinking My Teeth into Vampyr

(This article has been turned into a YouTube video, my first of, hopefully many, although I haven’t yet made a second)

The year is 1918. A man crawls out of an unmarked mass grave with the other victims of the Spanish Flu that ravages London while a war tears Europe apart. With the words of a bloodstained monster older than the nation itself in his ears, the man crawls through a world of grey towards the only splash of colour: The red, pumping heart of his beloved sister, come to search through the bodies for him. As she embraces him tightly, he is overcome by hunger and tears into her throat, killing her and welcoming colour back into his world.

This is Vampyr, from Dontnod entertainment. A game of choices and consequences that begins with a choice that you can’t make as a player, but you’ll be suffering the consequences for many nights to come.

So far when I’ve talked about games here, I’ve tried to talk about their politics; often the way that they fall short of living up to their stated goals and ideals. The inconsistency in how Assassin’s Creed as a franchise portrays freedom as the goal of the Assassin brotherhood, but how they often work with real world power structures that were as oppressive as the ones they oppose, for instance. Vampyr certainly does have that problem, and I’ll be getting to it later, but the way that it depicts the downtrodden as needing a champion, and criticizes inequality while still justifying and condoning the hierarchy and wealth that creates that disparity isn’t what makes it an interesting game.
What makes Vampyr interesting is the way that it does something that none of the other vampire games I’ve played have managed to do: It makes you feel like a vampire. It makes you feel like a predator, a monster that makes choices and takes it upon himself to determine who lives and who dies feeding his unnatural hunger. In Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines, feeding is a necessity, and dozens of unnamed individuals mill about; barflies waiting to be seduced, prostitutes who will follow you into an alley for a few dollars, or drunken vagrants just waiting to be pounced on. None of them ever need to be drained dry, and none of them really matter as characters.

Not so in Vampyr, where the dozens of characters who mill around every safe zone all have names and social circles and personalities. Each of them also comes with a helpful little reference card telling you how much experience their lives are worth of you lead them into a dark corner and tear out their throats. You can increase the amount of experience each life is worth by raising their Blood Quality through dialogue choices, where you learn about the Citizens, getting to know them and uncovering their darkest secrets and insecurities through liberal use of vampiric mesmerism to loosen their tongue. You might even do errands for them (which, this being an RPG, often involve going to far ends of London to murder and loot) and learn about their relationships with other characters in their social circle. You’ll also want to keep them healthy. You are a doctor, after all, and dispensing cures for fatigue and the cold is quite a bit of what you’ll be doing to keep the status of every district high. You’ll also want to do it because a meal doesn’t quite taste as good when it has a migraine.

Blood Quality, and the way that it’s raised through a combination of conversation, eavesdropping, diary snooping, gossip, gophering, and kindly administration of medicine is a powerful mechanic, and one that is core to making the player feel like a vampire. It turns the characters into a taunting siren. Every character that you learn Clues about will become a juicier morsel, but at the same time is someone you’ve come to know, and possibly even sympathize with. Even the worst of the characters — some of whom have dark secrets of serial murder and familial abuse, but then again, are you really one to cast stones when it comes to murder? — also have something sympathetic about them, even if its only what they might mean to the rest of the District. After all, if you drink the soul of the man with a temper and a high body count to go with it, what might happen to his poor ailing mother? Will she still be able to care for the orphan if her breadwinner son, the serial murderer, is dead?

In some ways its clear from the outset that mechanically not much will happen to other characters. After all, no one will ever die just because you’ve killed the characters in their social circle that take care of them. Even knowing that, it’s easy to put it aside and ignore it. To get lost in the moment and wonder what will happen to these people if you ruin their lives. Even if they’re just coding and character models, its easy to get swept up in their lives and their stories.

While that old lady may not starve if you rip out her son’s throat in a dark alleyway, the game does still have consequences. This is a Dontnod game after all, the studio famous for Life is Strange, the time travel high school adventure game. Vampyr isn’t an adventure game itself, but it does still heavily focus on consequences. With every death on Doctor Jonathan Reid’s hands, the game reminds you that

With every death, the Status of the District will fall, making characters more likely to be sick (which in turn makes the Status fall further) and raising the prices of goods in the shops. It becomes easy for things to get out of control, and the Status to fall to a point where you’ll have a hard time doling out curatives to keep the colds and headaches away. If the Status falls too far, the District will fall into chaos. Everyone will die, or at least go missing, the whole area will be overrun by enemies, and you’ll lose out on any quests in the area, or, if you’re unscrupulous, any blood bags you haven’t drained.

It isn’t the most elegant of systems, and even on Hard mode I was able to keep any District from falling, even the one where early on in the game my bad decisions lead to the Pillar of the District — the heart and soul, the one who leads everyone and keeps the District from falling to epidemic like the rest of London — but it at least served as a threat that had me stocking up on medicine, which I spent quite a bit of time passing out, even when I had to fight through mobs of enemies to do so.

It would be trivial not to engage in the systems I just described if not for one problem: Vampyr is a rather difficult game. Or at least, I chose the “Hard” difficulty, knowing that I’m not actually good at video games. I can play them well, and I’m not flailing incompetently like someone who has never held a controller before. I don’t have any motor difficulties, though I do get overwhelmed by keeping track of things. I have 70+ hours on Dead Cells and Dark Souls, but in neither game am I the kind of skillful player who can wade into combat and duck, dip, dodge, and dive through the melee. I’m thoroughly average at best.

But I have to admit, I really do enjoy the crap out of hard mode.

The combat in Vampyr is incredibly tedious, and once you have the right stats, you can tear through enemies like tissue paper, and dash around like a lunatic avoiding attacks and taking swings. You can upgrade your slashing melee weapons through the path that will make them steal Blood with every successful attack and suddenly you won’t have to use your weaker offhand weapon to drain enemies, or worse, use the increasingly hard to pull off stun so that you can sink your fangs into the opponent directly like some kind of a dirty peasant.

After you boost your Health and Stamina and Blood reasonably, and increase whichever combat vampire power you chose, most basic enemies won’t give you much trouble. Sure, you’ll still get in a pinch with the priests, who are always found with torch guys, or the ichor skals who belch out poison clouds, but for the most part after about level 15 you’ll breeze through every combat.

And then you’ll hit a boss, or a mini-boss style group of enemies you have to get passed, and the boss will probably kick your ass. That’s where the difficulty actually feels good.

The combat in the game is honestly terrible and boring and I’d often hold off on resting just so that I wouldn’t have to clear out all the enemies I’d killed once more. For some reason Vampyr really wants to ape Dark Souls, and uses a system similar to the bonfires; there are safe places to rest, and spend your experience points, but when you do rest the world will reset with the same enemies in the same locations, with minor variations each chapter, as if you never murdered them. By the end of the game, the biggest killer in London wasn’t the plague, it was me. At a certain point, any time I was running errands I’d give up killing everything in my path and fighting each group of enemies I came across and I’d instead just dash through them, since the enemy AI keeps the aggro range short.

It wasn’t the combat that made the game’s difficulty interesting, it was what the combat forced me to do. As the game keeps reminding you, the blood of citizens is the fastest way to evolve. On Hard mode each individual enemy gives about 5 experience and even the big touch werewolves only give about 8. You can get experience for healing citizens or doing personal errands for each of them, and you’ll get a decent amount of experience for playing the game’s storyline, but the fastest way to evolve is the blood of citizens.

Vampyr’s difficulty means that you’re constantly tempted to sink your fangs into everyone you meet, and you’re stuck evaluating the lives of everyone around you. You can probably get through the first few chapters struggling, but confidently. But by about the third upgrade to your Mesmerism, you’ve probably already started collecting a list of which people you want to eat.

For me, it was the second in command of the Wet Boot Boys. He’s the first one I ate. He murdered a communist because one of the trade unionists killed his friend. His friend was a racist who started a fight with a black man and got killed in the scuffle. The trade unionist who killed the member of the Wet Boot Boys wasn’t even the same one that he shot in retaliation, but that was good enough for him. He was also paranoid about vampires because he once saw one attack someone. I proved that his fears were justified.

There was also the overbearing mother of a teenage boy who attempted suicide. She might have meant well, but she was very clearly smothering her son and the source of his anxiety. So she had to go.
Then there was the serial killer. He had an anger problem, and he was pissed off his mother took in an orphan. He kept killing people who pissed him off, and didn’t feel remorse.

And I couldn’t wait to get my Mesmerism high enough to kill the fake priest who had been going around setting victims of the plague on fire, claiming it was God’s will.

And there was the woman who asked me to end her suffering if I couldn’t rid her of another vampire’s geas.

And the abusive mother.

And the…

I got the bad ending.

Well, one of the two bad endings.

It wasn’t the one where I become a monster, a plague upon the world to match the one I cured London of. But it was still the bad ending. All because I’d eaten far too many people. While I definitely did do that, and I fucked up in the first big choice, and lead to the district of Whitechapel suffering, I do feel like the game pressured me into it. I just wasn’t good enough to take on the final boss, and needed to chomp. But I feel like I chose my victims well.

I think this is actually one of the places that Vampyr failed. The moral choice amounts not to whether or not I took any lives, but only the lives that actually have personalities. After all, I killed thousands of members of the Guard of Priwen, but none of them really mattered. My actions in failing Whitechapel no doubt caused the hundreds of unseen residents to suffer. All that mattered was whether or not I ate the named people, regardless of whether or not eating those people would make the world a better place.

This brings up another problem that the game has. There are a lot of people with problems, even ones that go beyond the extent of the plague of Spanish Flu and the skal epidemic that threatens the safety of London.

Mortimer Goswick is suicidal, and while I can use my vampiric mesmerism to draw the truth out of him, I can’t use it to do anything good for him, other than perhaps kill his overbearing mother, the source of at least some of his existential anguish. It won’t make him happier, but it will at least give him both peace, and money that he’ll use to support the hospital, though I can’t actually tell if that means anything tangible, despite the good an influx of cash would do the hospital.

Carol Price likewise is abused by her mother, a woman that Doctor Reid identifies as having some sort of mental illness that causes her to engineer ‘accidents’ so that her daughter can be doted on and treated by doctors, all while thinking herself to be a clumsy and irresponsible girl who can’t handle the real world. Reid implores her to get treatment for her mental illness (which we’d now call Munchausen’s-by-proxy) before she accidentally kills her daughter. Your vampiric powers can make her follow you to her death, but they can’t make her see her daughter as more than a puppet she can break and mend to get attention.

Other broken characters include the woman with Cotard’s syndrome, convinced she’s a vampire. Will she hurt someone with her delusions of blood drinking? The soldier back from France who lies to everyone that his wounds were from a German shell because he’s too ashamed to admit it was a whorehouse fire, will he come to terms with his shame?; The widower handyman with an injured arm, unable to provide for his children as his doctors squabble over how to treat him; Then there are the two doctors themselves, one of whom is rude and concerned with protocol, while the other is affable and hero worships Reid and wants to emulate his success at blood transfusions through unethical experiments, but will you side with one and stop the other (through murder)?

There are some stories you can change. Killing one of the two doctors will cause the handyman to lose that arm or get better, depending on which of the two you choose to “embrace”. But he’ll still hang around the hospital as a potential source of experience points, doing odd jobs to support his children. If you kill the burned soldier, the woman with Cotard’s will be mistaken for his killer, and captured by the Guard of Priwen, to die if you don’t save her. There are characters with social circles that will fall apart without them, with their companions joining the Guard or becoming high level skals. These are few and far between.

I experienced exactly none of them during my playthrough. If I killed the murderers and abusers but never got these extra story beats, what good are they? Murdering people who, at least by my reasoning, deserve it far less seems to mechanically reward players by giving them minibosses who will grant buckets of XP and means they’ll need to embrace less people, helping them to at least the “only ate a few people” Good ending. It could be argued that it actually is showing off complicated morality, but only on a meta level.

Beyond prying into people’s lives by snooping through their things or asking leading questions, the only two ways to interact with named characters is through mesmerizing them and leading them into a dark alleyway to devour their souls, or using your blood senses to determine any current maladies they’re suffering and, if you’ve brewed the right one up in the rotted plague covered shanties that serve as hideouts, give them a curative that will keep their health up for at least one night. These actions are so integral that they’re given the bumpers and triggers on a controller. Mesmerizing someone and draining their soul might give you a large sum of experience points, but going around and passing out cold remedies made in a dirty bedroom will still net you a small boost, and more than that it will help raise the sanitary status of the district, which supposedly leads to less hostile enemies, or even a complete lack of basic enemies in the area. Not that I can confirm this. Like I said, I ate too many people in my playthrough.

Overall, with a game that features so many morally grey choices, the binary of good and evil feels too limited, and only in some places does the game feel like its giving you the chance to actually heal people’s lives with your vampiric powers, despite the ultimate goal of the game being to do that very thing.

Take for instance the case of the serial killers. One of them is a grumpy many who lives with his mother and takes care of her. He also resents the orphan boy that she looks after, and routinely gets pissed off and murders people. The only way to resolve that storyline is through murder. Kill the serial killer and obviously you’ve put a stop to him. Kill his mother and the orphan boy and he’ll realize you’re to blame and his anger will abate. Everything you can do to change the story involves murder.

The other is a delusional street preacher passing himself off as a priest, shouting fire and brimstone and blaming the Spanish Flu on the wickedness of man. He even blames Doctor Reid and his scientific ways. Press just a little and you’ll learn that fire is more than just a metaphor for him, and that he and a young assistant went out into the city and burned the sick with oil and fire. You can do a mission to go find his assistant, now succumbed to madness and disease as a skal in the cemetery, and you can kill the preacher. That’s about it.

Killing either of these men won’t raise the Status of a District. Giving them medication — which will then allow them to go out into the world, free of fatigue or headache or cold and commit more violence — won’t lower it. Your only interaction is a binary choice of death is bad and medicine is good. The game seems to want a grey morality, but so many of the decisions still feel like they’re an obfuscation of that Bioshock dichotomy of “Save/Harvest”. Again, there are a few handful of people whose lives improve if you kill someone else. Choosing the right doctor means the Handyman can live and provide for his family. Killing Carolyn will allow Carol to live on her own without abuse, but she certainly doesn’t seem happy about it, and never within the scope of the game does she leave. And yet still each of these deaths that marginally improve things will still make the District’s health more tenuous.

Researching about the game to determine just what outcomes there are for every character’s embrace, what strikes me is that both the guides and Reddit threads talk about the justifications people have for embracing citizens, or even for turning Mr Brexit into a vampire at the request of the Camari — sorry, Ascalon Club. A lot of the justifications extend far beyond the scope of the game. Turning Mr Brexit into a vampire or not has very little actual impact on the game, and killing Carolyn has very little impact on the game. But both of those choices hint at things that might happen in the future, and in the case of which crossroads characters you allow to die or turn into vampires, things that might alter the fate of London. Its easy to get caught up in that and want to make decisions that might change the world for good or ill, or that might make your eternity easier, even if those things never come up in the game.

All of that is commendable and speaks to good writing, but for me the justifications were different. When I was met with the realization that Carolyn Price was an abusive mother, I was torn. Johnathan’s pleas to her to get help hint at a reconciliation, a healing. They imply that with psychological help she could see her daughter as a person with agency of her own and not simply an extension of herself. Anthony Howell, Reid’s voice actor, does a good job at conveying the master surgeon’s emotional depth.

But there’s no way to make her better. There’s no way to bring about that hinted at reconciliation, that implied healing. So I ate her instead.

The game wanted me to conceive of a world beyond the game, but gave me no means to actually move things in that direction. So I shrugged and ate her, because she’s an abusive mother. Her killing Carol is also never going to happen, despite Jonathan’s warnings, but that one at least is something that believably is likely to happen after the game ends.

There are many places where you’re given a choice between three options, usually marked by the same red Y featured in the game’s logo. A good deal of these choices, which are presented as being meaningful crossroads do nothing. Often only one of them will completely lock you out of an option. Sometimes you do have to pick the right one, but more often than not nothing will change. You’ll learn whichever hint about a person you were meant to learn and the game will not treat your choice as being particularly relevant.

At other points, these choices really are a meaningful crossroads, where your choice determines who lives and who dies, and the effect it has on the District or the city as a whole is dramatic. Then other times you turn someone into a vampire and its not really a big deal. Its hard to draw any thematic conclusion from this when there isn’t really any thematic throughline. The first of the major branching decisions actively punishes you for using your vampiric powers to take control of the situation, and the correct answer is to have chosen to simply do nothing but fingerwag like a mortal. In every other situation using the blue labeled option, the one that signifies vampiric mesmerism, is the best one.
The game wants you to heal London, and in key moments your decisions actually matter, but in so many other ways they don’t. The outcome to Doctor Jonathan Reid’s personal story isn’t even part of the main storyline. There is no failing London the way that so many players seem to have failed Whitechapel, using their vampiric abilities to mentally dominate Dorothy Crane into shutting down her illegal dispensary and breaking her mind until she becomes a powerful skal. You will always save London from the skal epidemic and yet you can rarely save any of the individual people in it.

Also, I seriously have to talk about the first major crossroads choice.

The second chapter of Vampyr concerns rooting out whoever is blackmailing the wealthy Lady Elisabeth Ashbury, the benefactor of the Pembroke Hospital, and a powerful vampire. Tracking the culprit down leads you to Whitechapel, one of the game’s many districts. Each District is a mostly self contained area of the map with one or two safe areas where the nonplayer characters mill about waiting for you to pry into their lives with questions. The Citizens of a District are all organized into groups of one to three called social circles. Characters in the same Social Circle will have Hints for each other, and some quests will have you choose between two people in the same social circle. Embracing one member of a social circle is also where you’re likely to see those few dramatic changes where a character will become despondant and succumb to the plague, becoming a skal, or give in to their anger and join the Priwen Guard. If you know about them in advance, you can even embrace key characters and gain one of the better ends AND the experience boosts normally associated with wanton murder by fighting the friends and lovers of your victims and staying below the limits of acceptable murder. It doesn’t count to kill an enemy, even if they’re a named character.

Blackmail in Whitechapel also introduces you to the Community Pillar system. Some characters have no individual social circle, but instead hold the entire district together, and without them, the District will be plunged into disarray, lowering the Status and subjecting everyone to illness, meaning that if you want to keep the District from going hostile you’ll have to take over and constantly hand out drugs. Each of the District Pillars might also end up dead by your hand if you fail a crossroad decision. No pressure.

Every one of those three way Y decisions for one of the District Pillars starts out with two mundane options (usually [SPARE] or [EMBRACE]) along with a third, blue text option that only turns up if you’ve done a proper investigation and learned all that you can about the Pillar in question. The blue option, which always involves some sort of vampiric power, either [TURN] or [CHARM], is also always the correct answer, at least from a mechanical gameplay standpoint. Since the option only shows up when you’ve done more work, it represents a reward for doing your due diligence as a doctor.

Except for the first time.

The first time that you use the blue option to [CHARM] Dorothy Crane after finding out all of her backstory, your reward is to utterly destroy the woman’s mind and leave her completely incapable of helping the people of Whitechapel. Her clinic closes down shortly after. Her accomplice leaves his house in disarray and lives on the streets. Dorothy Crane’s dispensary becomes a filthy, skal infested place, with Nurse Crane herself becoming an Ill-Formed Skal.

This introduction to vampiric powers is really impressive, and it does give the message that using your vampiric abilities isn’t always the best course of action. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t really follow through with that. When met with the next crossroads choice, you can either let the Sad Saint of the East End continue his life as a corpse eating skal or you can embrace him and end his unlife before he gives into temptation and eats one of his flock… or if you asked all the right questions and investigated, you can force him to drink your blood and become a full ekon, which is without a doubt the best end, both in terms of mechanics and outcome and simply raising him up to be a slightly better undead abomination. The only downside is spending precious experience.

When you’re forced to turn Mr Brexit — Aloysius Dawson, billionaire tycoon, vampire wannabe, and wall fancying Scrooge — into a vampire by your vampire boss, simply killing him then and there or giving in and turning him into a vampire does terrible things for the people of London. If you do your investigating first and ask around about him (and ask the specific people who give out the hint you need), you learn that he used to be a #woke billionaire philanthropist until his brother died and he became paranoid of meeting the Reaper himself. A personality trait you can cure him of by grabbing his head and making demands with your smooth silky voice. Your boss at the Camarilla (a joke I already made once) will be angry and kick you out, but he’ll still be around later to offer you the blood of his supposed sire without so much as a boss fight, and in exchange for dealing with the other rich ekon vampires around the city wanting to square up with you, Aloysius will die peacefully and leave his fortune to the poor, healing literally every single person in the city of any ailments they had.

Letting Aloysius die a peaceful death is also the only time where a character dying actually makes things better for the city, which is something the game could have sorely needed.

There are two more options to transform people into vampires. One does nothing but give you a homoerotic scene where Reid forces his blood down the leader of the Priwen Guard’s throat. A scene that would have been more meaningful if McCullum had actually played an important part in the story beyond simply showing up twice at this point to taunt Reid. Whether you spare or turn McCullum doesn’t matter, and in the next chapter he’s there to give you the blood of King Arthur no problem. Because he’s important to the story in Chapter Six, you don’t even get the usual option to kill him.

The final crossroads Y choice is to decide what to do once you find out that this whole bloody skal plague mess was the fault of Doctor Swansea, the man who found and rescued you from your state of confusion, and has been your best friend in the weeks since. Having been beaten and tortured by Priwen, you realize the source of the Skal epidemic has been right at the hospital with you, giving you a bed to sleep in. And you’re given three choices: [LET DIE], no doubt painfully, [EMBRACE] him and end his life (and also get that sweet experience boost), or pay 3,000 experience and [TURN] him, even though his medical ethics caused him to do the unthinkable, and the result has nearly destroyed London.

Swansea is the perfect place where the various options could be meaningful, but aren’t. Embracing or Turning him makes no difference beyond gaining all of his juicy experience, and if you’ve already missed out on the achievement for Embracing no one, its really just a matter of how painful you want his death to be (or how much experience you want for this story beat). However Edgar dies, his death will sink Pembroke into despair, causing the largest dip of any character’s death. If you turn him, however, he will go to work the next night, cheerful as ever despite being a ghoulish cadaver. Despite claiming that your blasphemous gift is a curse, to let him live with the guilt of what he’s done, you’re left with the implication that his unethical experiments will continue — though he claims he now only experiments on himself, having learned his lesson — and that his pride and arrogance might even make him want to take up the mantle of leadership in his secret society.

None of that extends beyond the first ending of the game, much less the final credits rolling. Mechanically and within the narrative scope of Vampyr, saving Edgar Swansea by turning him into a vampire has no negative repercussions other than hinting at something bad that might happen well into the future.

Every crossroads choice to determine the fate of a District Pillar rewards you for learning more, and liberally using your vampiric abilities, while the only thing resembling an upside to dooming Whitechapel is that your new vampire girlfriend is proud of you for technically not killing anyone. Yet for quite a while I agonized about such crossroads choices. When I came to the end of Sean Hampton’s questline and saw that blue choice, I sat there for a good few minutes before eventually deciding to turn the game off, take a shower, and gather my thoughts. I didn’t want to doom another District. I didn’t want to leave Sean a skal, always craving flesh, but I also didn’t want to sacrifice my experience and turn him into an ekon only to have him be even stronger and potentially more dangerous. In the end I decided that it would be the right choice, that he would be “cured”, and “uplifted” from a skal to an ekon. And it was the right decision. Because it was always the right decision to use vampiric powers, except when it came to Dorothy.

I think what bothers me the most isn’t really that Blackmail in Whitechapel is the only mission where learning more and using your powers is absolutely the worst possible choice, its that aside from poorly conveying what Reid will do in that case, the outcome to every major decision is ultimately a binary of whether someone lives or dies, and other than letting Aloysius die a natural death, the answer is always to make sure a character lives, even if it means blessing them with the curse of undeath. Except McCullum, for whom literally nothing changes mechanically, since he isn’t a District Pillar.

Of course, I think its worth looking deeper into why turning people into vampires is something the game so strongly encourages (except, again, in the case of Aloysius Dawson).

Vampire has some really inconsistent politics, and I had a bit of a laugh at them on my playthrough. It talks a lot about class disparity. The Spanish Flu can take anyone at any time, but its the poor who are hurt the most. Its the poor who don’t have access to healthcare. The poor are the ones who struggle, and the Pembroke Hospital, which looks after the poor, is in a constant battle to provide for them.

The poor react in various ways, some good and some bad, with one group in the Docks being the Wet Boot Boys, a gang of criminals, while the other group are Trade Unionists who are routinely labeled Communist. The Pillar of the Docks, the one who becomes a skal that you can turn into a full vampire, runs a night shelter and styles himself as a priest despite having been on the receiving end of a real priest’s abuse.
The rich of the city are almost entirely insulated from the real problems of the city. You rescue a few of them from having been captured by vampires, and your old war buddy is obsessed about vampires, but by and large they seem unphased by the epidemic. The Pillar of the West End is the richest man in London, and he’s also the human member of the vampire Hellfire Club, Ascalon, which as I previously joked holds the position in the narrative of the Camarilla, that ancient group of elder vampires in Vampire: the Masquerade that secretly controls politics on a global scale as a catch all for world domination conspiracies. They’re wealthy elite vampires who secretly control British politics and protect the Empire from threats.

At no point is it ever really brought into question whether or not they have the right to manipulate politics. They’re rich, they’d be manipulating politics anyway, after all. The most that the game criticizes them for being too distant and uncaring. They face criticism from Reid for wanting to kill all the skals and going along with Aloysius’ plan to build a wall — which is without a doubt the most on the nose political reference in the game — and of course Elisabeth hates them for their misogynist ways. But there’s never a criticism of what they do. Only the choices they make.

This doesn’t really stand out much, though. Throughout the game there are dialogue options for Reid that are incredibly #woke. He’ll criticize inequality and chastise the slumlord, but never once does he actually address the fact that he’s an incredibly rich doctor from a wealthy family. His vampirism is much the same way. The game’s loading screens and the crossroads choice to [TURN] both McCullum and Swansea seem to imply that to be an immortal is a curse, a living of suffering, and longing for the sweet embrace of death. But that never really seems to actually be the case.

Reid is chosen as a champion by the Myrddin Wyllt, an ancient Celtic figure that is also Merlin, to cure London of its skal epidemic, and he’s given the option to live a peaceful life, if you’ve managed to kill as few people as possible. In fact, the only ekon you meet who suffers is William Marshal, who was poisoned by the Disaster — the chosen-by-evil entity at the heart of the plague — and chose to cure Elisabeth instead of himself. Even then he lives in relative peace hidden away in Elisabeth’s manor until she finally decides to chop his head off. Myrddin Wyllt himself never really seems to be suffering. In fact, he was never mortal, and never knew a life before immortality and blood.

The game presents vampirism not as a curse, but a blessing. The ekon of the Ascalon Club are all well-to-do and wealthy, and vampirism does not actually bestow any innate negative desires on its victims. There’s a lust for blood, but the narrative implies that death isn’t a necessary aspect of feeding. Elisabeth even feeds Marshall her own blood, and yet she still lives. Blood isn’t a requirement, its simply an addiction, something that vampires want and desire, but don’t need. The game even makes this clear by allowing you to get through without embracing anyone (although eating Priwen Guard members or draining their blood with hacksaws and surgical knives doesn’t count).

Random ekon show up as minor enemies in the later half of the game, wealthy vampires from around Europe who have come to watch England die and want to take part in the chaos. They’re old money with no empathy, but vampires as a whole aren’t inherently evil. We’re shown that through the actions of Johnathan that we take part in, as well as Elisabeth’s caring ways. Not to mention the beliefs and writings of the Brotherhood of Saint Paul’s Stole, the secret occult society of mortal scholars that Doctor Swansea belongs to who make it their mission to find and talk to vampires, learning their stories, occasionally providing them with blood, and at least if Swansea himself is any indication, turning a blind eye to the wanton murder that they can cause for their fix. The Brotherhood’s writings treat vampires as respectable fellows, ignoring their inherent bloodsucking and predatory nature, and the harm they’ve done to the world — much like liberalism, and Vampyr, treats billionaire philanthropists, who donate fractions of their wealth to good causes while hoarding the rest and causing disparity.

The skals, however, don’t seem to get the same treatment. They’re the vampire proletariat, and practically zombies. Malformed and hideous, even when compared to the pale, red eyed examples of ekon throughout the game, skals are the standard enemy for most of the game. They scrounge in the garbage, eat corpses, and transmit their curse through bites. It isn’t until the later half of chapter three that you learn skals can be just as human as an ekon, and even then they’re still living in the sewers like vermin and only one of them gets a name and title card. The Ascalon Club wants the skals wiped out, and its easy to see why, considering only about two dozen of them aren’t ravenous monstrosities spreading plague and death.

The Vulkod don’t even get that much. They’re just big dumb blue beasts who serve as the servants of better, smarter vampires. And might be the same thing as the “Beast” type Werewolf enemies? Either way, its hard not to feel like some sort of racial implication is there. Fergal Bansha, the first Vulkod you meet, is the big dark skinned servant of Ascalon who shows up to threaten you and is later a boss fight without any real lead up or personality, and then later Lord Redgrave… doesn’t really give a shit that you killed his man? Not that it matters, because you never see another Vulkod of any importance throughout the game.

All throughout the game, being an ekon is treated as being almost more than human, but rarely like you’re a soulless demon the way that other franchises treat vampirism. You still have thoughts and emotions, and there’s a hierarchy of vampires, and in the end its vampires who can save us from the Disaster. Although its also The Morrigan and her vampires that caused the Disaster, so, hey, just like how neoliberals treat wealth and the disasters coming from inequality, though if I’m being honest I’m probably putting more thought into Vampires-as-metaphor-for-wealth than the game did. I doubt that they intentionally set out to say that the vampires are good and the rich people are vampires, and the rich people are good. It just comes out that way because, well, liberalism is the dominant ideology of the Western world, and “maybe the billionaires are the problem” tends not to come up much.

The Ascalon Club is condemned for its sexism but not its right to exist because, well, someone has to protect the Empire, right? Just don’t think too hard on what the Empire is, or who it needs protecting from.

There is, however, one place where Vampirism is treated as a curse, an undesirable outcome that results in damnation…

In my writing about this game, I’d almost entirely forgotten about Jonathan’s sister. Her death is the catalyst for the entire game, but in a lot of ways, she isn’t really important. She’s another one of those aspects of the game where the themes and plot fall short.

As I said earlier, Vampyr ostensibly portrays itself as a game about choices. You the player don’t ever actually make the choice to embrace Mary, not even in a cutscene with a single choice. Jonathan might make the decision to rip his poor sister’s throat out, but you the player never do.

Jonathan also never chooses to turn Mary, but that’s exactly what happens. Regardless of your choices, at the end of Chapter Three, you’ll face Mary in the cemetery where you watched her being buried, and once you’ve defeated her you’ll put her down like a dog — the metaphor that she gives — because she’s too mad to continue existing, cursed forever to hear your thoughts the same way that Myrddin’s occasionally intrude upon your own unlife.

Not only is Mary coming back to haunt you a punishment for a choice that you as the player never actually made, she’s also an aberration among all the other people whose lives you can end with a bloody pair of fangs at the throat. Many of the named characters can give in and become skals, and one can even become one of the werewolf like vulkod beasts, but never at Reid’s hands. Or fangs, as the case may be. No other ekon is created by accident, and while Mary’s strength is remarked upon (she’s likely stronger than Jonathan at this point, no doubt from eating NPCs), no one comments on how odd it is that she was turned without drinking any of Jonathan’s blood. But if the game is never going to comment on it, there’s no real reason I should. The wiki says his blood got on her lips, and I don’t remember it being mentioned but whatever.

The biggest problem is that Mary is there and then gone. She’s important in the first half, and Jonathan’s motivations are, rather selfishly, to find his Maker, blaming him for Mary’s death, even though Jonathan was the one who tore her throat out, and as the rest of the game tells us, he made the decision to do so of his own free will, even if he was under duress and really really famished. There’s even a different outcome based on whether or not Reid has killed anyone up to this point, with Mary embracing their mother in response to Johnathan’s arguments that he needed to devour the souls of the innocents so that he could search for answers. But Mary herself is a thematic and narrative dead end. She has little to do with the overall plot to end the skal epidemic, and while she does have to do with the themes of consequence, she’s the consequence of an action that you, as player, never actually chose to make.

Even her angry, hateful nature never amounts to anything, except perhaps, if I stretch, the parallel to the Blood of Hate. But Mary isn’t an Ichor. She’s not the Disaster. She’s just angry because much as Johnathan heard Myrddin’s voice, she heard his. Except that after Mary is driven mad by Johnathan’s voice, Myrddin is practically silent until the end of the game. Its a “this could be you” that goes nowhere.

Yet the entire thing is really well done. It was very emotional, and I loved it. I loved this chapter, and I loved the encounter with Mary, even though the combat is terrible. Even if the only difference between eating the priest Mary brought or not eating it, is whether Mary scolds you or whether she regains her own health. There was never going to be any difference in the outcome, but it was still a satisfying story all on its own. Which is really something worth mentioning.

What’s also worth mentioning is how the game treats women in general.

Mary is just one of many crazy female bosses. There’s a specific type of enemy that is a skal utterly ravaged by pestilence, that spews out toxic bile that deals aggravated damage, and explodes into a cloud of poison when it dies. All of these Ill-formed Skals are women. There are a few scant werewolves that are also gross plague beasts, but mostly the worst enemies are the women infected by plague. When you finally do investigate into the source of the epidemic, you come across more women who are mutated, eventually tracking the source of the spreading infection down to the old theater, where a delusional actress awaits you dressed for Baladi and carrying a cavalry saber in her one good arm. Her other, a twisted, cancerous mass that springs out across the combat arena to swat at you, is covered up for the first half of the fight as she battles you to a rendition of Habanera from Carmen. Later Reid puts together that this twisted, hate filled mutated skal woman is also the same as the other twisted, hate filled, mutated skal woman from earlier in the game, and that minor NPC that you meet twice before she’s revealed to be the first of the game’s two final bosses. When you track her down the second time, you learn that she’s ill and mutated, and Reid seems to have hope that she can be cured. You never see her again until she’s murdered all the people who were helping her and is the final boss.

The game has a ‘thing’ with mothers. Emelyne Reid is a distant, flighty persona, not all there after the disappearance of her husband and the death of her family. If she survives her encounter with Mary, she’s left confused and mentally vacant, believing she’s talking to her dead family when there’s no one there. She’s probably the nicest mother in the game. I’ve mentioned before how Mrs Goswick and Mrs Price are terrible mothers who deserved the cold embrace of death, but its a terrible relationship with her mother that leads Doris Fletcher, the actress, to become an Ichor skal, and brings about her desire to see all of London infected by both the skal epidemic and the Spanish Flu.

Fletcher’s mother, Harriet Jones, is perhaps the second worst mother in the game. A violent old bat even before her transformation into a “Disaster”, Harriet was terrible to her daughter and then terrible to London. Of course, I did say the second worst, because the final boss is the mother of all vampires, the Red Queen, the Celtic Goddess of death and doom herself, the Morrigan. Or at least her avatar. Once you trounce your mother’s avatar, she goes back to sleep, for now.

When speaking with Myrddin Wyllt later, he explains that he essentially embraced Jonathan to entertain their mother, because if she doesn’t cause a little chaos, kill a bunch of people, spread a plague or two every now and then, she gets really bored. But if Reid hadn’t been there to give her a good fight, she’d have emerged fully and swallowed the stars, you know the drill. You can also ask him about why all the Ichors are bitter women, as if men couldn’t handle becoming one. In his typical aloof tone, Myrddin sarcastically says that its lucky there was only one Disaster, then. Women, amirite? This guy knows what I’m talking about.

There are people with father issues, though they’re few and far between. Reid’s father is a distant man who left his family to go die where they couldn’t see him. You do a treasure hunt that he left you, and learn how much he loved his family. There’s also one woman you rescue from an incel vampire who talks about her complicated relationship with her father, who died trying to save her. Biggest of all is Lady Elizabeth Ashbury, whose maker is another of Merlin’s chosen champions, though William Marshal saw himself as a champion of God, and Myrddin Wyllt as the Archangel Michael. A couple thousand years and apparently he never realized he was a vampire.

Ashbury herself is one of those women who is treated a bit awkwardly, with her role being to mentor and fall in love with Jonathan (even if you eat her adoptive daughter). When she finds out that it was Swansea using her blood for unethical blood transfusion experiments on Harriet Jones that created the skal plague, she freaks out and flees, understanding that she’s a healthy carrier for the Disaster plague because of very complicated things that happened centuries ago that frankly aren’t important.

After mercy killing her Maker, Lady Ashbury is even ready to take her own life in the flames of the burning library beneath her castle, wanting to end the line for good, to make certain that the plague will never spread again, or at least not because of her. It takes Jonathan’s conscience to pull her out of it. This is what your gameplay has lead up to. Depending on how many people you’ve embraced — and only embraced, meaning that one of the better strategies to get a good ending is to embrace only certain people so that their loved ones become miniboss enemies, who you can then kill for the same amount of experience points — you’ll get one of four endings:

• Reid convinces Elizabeth that he can cure her, and that until he does they can live among the wilds, never giving in to their cravings because he hasn’t killed anyone other than Mary.
• Reid convinces Elizabeth that he can cure her, and until he does they’ll stay locked away in her castle with only Old Bridget, the sewer skal (and eventually the internet) as their connection to the outside world.
• Reid attempts to convince Elizabeth that he can cure her, and she rejects him, saying that she can’t trust him after he’s betrayed her (though how, specifically, I don’t know). She pushes him away and walks into the flames. Jonathan then goes on a depression induced murder spree.
• Reid doesn’t even bother to attempt to convince Elizabeth he can cure her and just gives a straight up supervillain speech. He only succeeds in convincing her that there’s nothing left to live for if he’s a monster, and then he goes on a wrath induced murder spree.

I got the third ending, and it felt suitably bittersweet narratively, but from a thematic and gameplay standpoint, they all just fall flat. The culmination of your choices throughout the game — which, again, are at some level forced by your skill; if you aren’t good enough to beat a boss, you will need to murder some people, assuming you have a finite amount of time on this planet and don’t want to spend it grinding by killing the pitiful amounts of experience you can get from enemies or the slightly less pitiful amount of experience you get from using medicine on Citizens… which requires you to murder enemies for ingredients or money to buy ingredients — are two levels of good ending and two levels of bad ending that only actually matter in the game’s epilogue, and the only of your choices that matter are whether or not you killed named characters, regardless of the morality of the characters you did eat.

I know that game designers also have a finite amount of time on this planet and don’t want to spend it coding branching paths, especially when they’re already worked to the bone in ever expanding crunch time, but its still always so disappointing when these choice driven games end up having endings that don’t really meaningfully care about the choices made throughout the game. Especially when ultimately what matters isn’t how Reid confronted both his immortality and the Skal Epidemic, it was his relationship with Lady Ashbury, something that the player has no actual control over. A moral choice becomes a metaphor for love.

Having your ending tied to your morality is fine, but having your morality tied solely to how many people you chomped on is a bit frustrating, especially when you can murder thousands of people by the time the game is over, but (most) of those living breathing humans have no name and are just working class racists trying to kill you. Having District health only go down when you kill people and only go up when you heal them is frustrating. The game feels like it wants to give players grey moral choices, but having a grey morality means having choices that don’t always give good or bad responses. Having District Status go down when I give one of the game’s two serial killers medication because they’re more able to take lives would be a great mechanic. Having the District Status go up when I murder one of them would also be good. Having choices that result in some good things happening and some bad things happening would also be nice. There are only a scant handful of places where murder improves a life unequivocally, but even then that stands as a strike on your permanent record, and you’ll still get a worse ending.

I like Vampyr. I really do. I’ve complained about a lot here, and in some ways after finishing it, I’ve come to like it a lot less than I did when I was actually playing it, but I think that, too, is something that can be enjoyed and savoured. A lot of games and movies and books are actually pretty shitty and lackluster when we look back on them. Star Wars and Harry Potter are both massively popular franchises, but its very easy to critique them and find flaws in their narratives and themes that encourage a deeply problematic worldview. Both franchises are still ones that people love, even when they’ve torn them apart and criticized the themes of divine right, strength of blood, and moral relativism that always favours the heroes. Making you ignore those things and enjoy the ride is something to be praised in a game, and even during the story beats with Mary — a segment I called a plot cul-de-sac earlier — I was engaged and emotionally invested in Doctor Jonathan Reid’s story and his quest to save London from the wrath of an eldritch horror.

I just feel like a lot of the disparate elements don’t really come together well. The game is greater than the sum of its parts, which is good, because most of those parts are actually a sloppy mess when examined.

The combat feels so at odds with the well done narrative parts of the game, but even many of the well done narrative parts don’t work well when combined. The tight systems driven gameplay is interesting, but unfortunately rather shallow. And the investigation parts of the game — which were by far my favourite, this game is without a doubt the best detective game since Murdered: Soul Suspect, which I’ll cover one of these days — all only really mean getting more story out of people and getting more experience, but most of those people you honestly have no reason to murder. All the good parts of the game of course feed back into the combat, which isn’t that great. But at the same time the game would feel very hollow without some way to show off the fact that you are a powerful undead monster capable of utterly murdering scores of people… assuming you’ve fed. Which you only need to do because the game keeps leveling up all of its human threats.

Its one big loop, but the most obvious part of that loop, the combat, is not very good.

But I did say that I liked the game, so I want to end by talking about one aspect that I think the game does incredibly well.

Vampyr is a better Vampire: the Masquerade than Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, and frankly better than the bloated shambling corpse that is Vampire: the Masquerade to begin with. I know that its something of a bad idea to admit, but I hate Vampire: the Masquerade, and I even hated Bloodlines. I have this irrational hope that Bloodlines 2 will be a game that I actually enjoy, because I am a fool.

For the benefit of anyone unfamiliar with the tabletop roleplaying scene that exists beyond Dungeons & Dragons, Vampire: the Masquerade was a roleplaying game from the 90s that took Anne Rice inspired brooding vampires and brought them to the dining room table with a Shadowrun inspired rulesset of rolling fistfuls of the same kind of dice (in this case ten sided ones). Since this was the 90s, there was also the liberal application of “cool” stereotypes and lots and lots of edgy bullshit. It was a setting that got flack for pandering to SJWs before “pandering to SJWs” was a thing, while also being a setting where Asians all know about the supernatural and are proficient at kung fu (regardless of their specific ethnicity), but pretend to be ignorant. The “World of Darkness” game line was big and varied, with Mages and Werewolves coming out alongside Vampires, and eventually they were joined by Changelings (people, usually children, who found out they were actually faerie nobles), Demon, Changing Breeds (werewolves, but not wolves), Mummy (they’re mummies), Wraith (ghosts, kind of?), and a whole host of incredibly offensive and bad taste vampires from non-white countries.

Vampire was always the biggest property. Masquerade had a few features that have become popular since. The main one is that all of its vampires are part of one of a handful of world spanning secret conspiracies. The main one of these, the one that players are assumed to be a part of, is the Camarilla. They’re the vampire “good guys”, for a rather relativistic definition of “good”. The Camarilla is primarily composed of elder vampires who get together and plan out their secret plots. The Camarilla could be summed up as every antisemitic conspiracy theory of Jews controlling the world, except that they took the metaphor of Jewish people as vampires and said “vampires are sexy”. Usually players will still be at odds with the members of the Camarilla, namely the “Prince” of their city, but often players will have personal goals to join the upper echelons, or they might even start as high ranking members of the city.

Vampyr also has something similar, in the form of its Ascalon Club. Now, the Ascalon Club that you meet in the game is rather lackluster, and with the city falling apart, you really only meet a handful of them, and they all use generic models except for Lord Redgrave, who could be said to be the prince of the city.

Vampyr clearly took inspiration from Vampire — both Masquerade and its later reboot of Requiem. There are similar terms, like aggravated damage and embrace, although the latter is used very differently (in Masquerade and Requiem, it means to turn someone into a vampire). The Ascalon Club feels far more Requiem than Masquerade, with its focus solely on England, but its hard to imagine that Dontnod were completely unfamiliar with Vampire.

There are other similarities, of course. The Nosferatu are hideous and malformed vampires who live in the sewers in Masquerade. They have unearthly strength, but they’re all grotesque, and must hide themselves away from prying eyes. This isn’t much different from the Sewer Skals, although the Nosferatu have a lot of frankly ridiculous baggage, like the fact that in the modern setting of Masquerade, they’re all computer nerds and have a high tech surveillance network (which, remember, this gameline ended in 2004, back when blackberries were considered cutting edge). The Sewer Skals don’t have any hidden cameras, though Old Bridget does seem to have a lot of knowledge about what goes on in London. There are other differences, of course, and the idea of Cannibal Human Underground Dwellers isn’t limited to Vampire: the Masquerade and Vampyr. But it’s not not a similarity.

Where Vampyr really shows its hand as a game inspired by Masquerade, and where, I think, it really outdoes Masquerade and in particular where it ends up being much better than Bloodlines, is with the eldritch horror of vampire progenitors.

In Masquerade, the first vampire was Cain, who was cursed by God for killing Abel, and whose damnable progeny was the cause of the great flood. Its this great flood that gives the oldest and most powerful of vampires their moniker: Antediluvians. From before the flood. The Flood. While Requiem would later choose to give vampires varied origins, with many of the lineages converging from different parts of the world, Masquerade instead tied its vampires heavily to a Christian mythos. Woe be to any immortal when the antediluvians rise. Because they’ll eat 1d4 investigators per round.

Masquerade is far from the first vampire setting to have ancient all powerful vampire originators whose awakening foretells the end of all things. After all, like a lot of things including the vampire secret society, White Wolf clearly cribbed the idea of vampire gods from Anne Rice, with The Queen of the Damned coming out a few years before Masquerade. In it, the vampire queen Akasha is awoken by the Vampire Lestat, who in the previous book joined a rock band. I really need to go back to that audiobook, it was a ridiculous concept. Akasha’s awakening is less dramatic than the whole blood on the moon, star of destruction thing that Masquerade would later adopt, but the concept of the antediluvian ushering in a global catastrophe is all there.

Vampyr has a similar plot, but in my opinion it handles the details a lot better. It feels more like Requiem, where although the primary origin of vampires given in the game is that of the ancient blood queen of the Celts, there’s hints of foreign vampires like the vulkod, and even the terms “skal” and “ekon” aren’t exactly British. Much as games of Masquerade will often feature parental troubles, and tease the appearance of antediluvians, so too does Vampyr with Jonathan trying to figure out who his Maker is and eventually — rather unceremoniously at the last minute without much in the way of investigation — learns that he was chosen as the champion of the Myrddin Wyllt, and sets off to fight the avatar of the mother of all vampires, who will still one day wake to the song of eternal hunger and the Blood of Hate and, I don’t know, devour the world or something.

The tying of vampirism to the Arthurian myths and Celtic lore is something that feels unique and interesting, but at the same time still in the vein of Akasha and Cain, though it definitely leans more towards the side of Requiem than Masquerade. This is a positive for me, since I find Requiem’s more varied and less certain origins to be better than the Masquerade way of doing things, where there’s only one single source of vampire and that’s the blandly Christian one where the Christianity references are about as deep and meaningful as the ones found in Neon Genesis Evangelion. If anything I wish they made the connection between Myrddin Wyllt and the Merlin of Arthurian legend more overt. It does get dropped, almost as an afterthought in the epilogue, that King Arthur was both a vampire and one of Myrddin Wyllt’s other champions.

The way the game teases at this deeper and more powerful entity that serves as the source of all vampires while still giving you the chance to meet her avatar and face it in combat to make sure that she stays both entertained and asleep is a balancing act that I much prefer to the way that Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines constantly teases the presence of Antediluvian power on the events of the city, but the ending is several slogs through corridors and corridors of gunfights with a very early, very shoddy version of the Half-Life 2 engine that all culminate in a bunch of unsatisfying nothing. I know Bloodlines has its fans, and people even like the ending, but I’ll talk about how much I dislike that game later. Suffice to say, I think Vampyr handles its ancient evils in a much more satisfying way.

If anything, my only complaint is that Vampyr teases at things early on, ignores them for a bit of faffing about, and then in the very end of the third act and in the epilogue it gives you all of its lore and tells the Arthurian connection mostly through late game dialogue. At least Bloodlines does layer the implications on thick throughout, even if ultimately they amount to nothing beyond the idea that maybe Cain was your cab driver and wants you to blow up some no account Prince in the boonies, for no real reason. For shits and giggles, I guess? But no, this is about what’s good about Vampyr, not what’s bad about Bloodlines! Stop that, me!

Anyway, I really did like this game. If you haven’t played it but still read this, hopefully I haven’t put you off of it. I feel that I’ve been too hard on a game that I really did enjoy. Its not the main story with the skal epidemic that is the interesting part, its the way that you uncover everyone’s secrets and pry into their lives. If anything, the reason that I have so many criticisms of Vampyr is that every part of it — except the combat, which I can’t stress enough is pretty tedious and feels so at odds with the good parts of the game, even though its an integral part of them — is so good that I really wanted more from it.

I wanted more people to investigate. I wanted more stories. I wanted the stories to be more impactful. I wanted my choices to have more consequences, both good and bad, beyond Murder Bad, Medicine Good. I wanted more interconnections between the characters. I like the concept of social circles and Pillars and District status so much that I actually want to incorporate it into my notes for running a tabletop game. I feel like breaking the setting down into discreet parts where there are six or seven individual little NPC groups that have information about each other, all tied around a central character, can be very useful. You could reflavour the abstract notion of “status” to be how well factions actually view your players’ characters. You could expand the concept of Pillar to have it so that you can replace the “Pillars” of a community with ones who favour the players. Even using the Hint system could help with running a roleplaying game. Simply give each character a few facts about them that the players will need to pry to learn, or even that they might need to do some snooping for. Its not exactly unique, but framing it that way can be really helpful.

There are so many things from Vampyr that I want to see more of. I hope that other games learn from it. I want to have more games where you talk to characters, and learn about their lives, and then use what you’ve learned to decide who lives and who dies. But I want there to be meaningful choices, choices that change more than whether a handful of characters join an enemy faction so you can kill them with a clear conscience later. Vampyr’s District stuff, the way that you talk to characters, is so very good and I really hope to see more like that in the future. Its not quite an adventure game or a visual novel in those parts, but it still feels really good, and its obvious why the most popular thing this developer did was one of that new style of adventure games that focuses more on dialogue than on rubber chickens with pulleys in the middle.

I’ve had a lot to criticize — and I feel bad, because in editing this I thought of all sorts of things I want to talk about — but in the end Vampyr is something I want to see more of.

Also this isn’t a review or anything, so I don’t talk about things that I can’t critique the politics or theming of, or talk about what kind of ludonarrative it invokes, but the music in this game is really good. The West End District’s safe zone music is this really haunting strings piece that reminds me of Silent Hill. Why do only indie games seem to release their sound tracks?

Thank you once again to everyone who read to the end of this. As usual, if you like what you read, you can support me on Patreon, or give me a one time donation. I haven’t written much lately, even by my own lackluster standards. My dad keeps going in and out of the hospital, and that’s been stressful to deal with, as well as giving me all kinds of financial worries. A lot of people really came forward and supported me and I can’t thank you all enough.

I’d also like to thank Casey Explosion, without whom this analysis wouldn’t be possible, because she gave me the game.

I know I didn’t actually do Bloodlines like I said I would at the tail end of the last one, but I did still talk about vampires. I’ll do Bloodlines next. Unless I don’t.