Ever since I first got infected with Porphyric Hemophilia in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind or ran amok in Los Angeles in Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, I’ve been patiently waiting for an open-world vampire RPG that I could really sink my teeth into. Frustratingly, despite numerous attempts in all those years, I hadn’t found anything that quenched that long-standing thirst. With The Blood of Dawnwalker, an RPG that shares a ton of DNA with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt made by some of its former developers, my hunt is finally over. Not only does it take the vampire fantasy to the neck-xt level, it also smartly finds workarounds for some of the limitations that can be a *bit *annoying (like having to stay out of the light), and introduces other interesting and clever ideas along the way. The day/night cycle that has you switching between human and vampire consistently makes for compelling questing, the limited time you’re given to complete your adventure makes even minor decisions carry enormous stakes, and the numerous ways to make its bloody tale your own have motivated me to rise from the coffin and replay this journey more than any game has in quite a long time. This is the vampire RPG I’ve been waiting for and I find myself entirely under its spell.
The Blood of Dawnwalker is a third-person action RPG that puts you in the shoes of a no-longer-fully-human protagonist with long hair and facial scars who runs around using swords and magic to kill monsters in a gritty, dark fantasy setting. Perhaps not the most original premise from a bunch of former Witcher devs, but hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t pull it off the stuffed unicorn. You play as Coen of Laslea, whose town is taken over by vampires, then through a series of unfortunate events, is infected with vampirism and begins practicing the dark art of witchcraft on the same day. Tough break! Naturally, you set out on a roughly 40-hour quest for revenge against those evil bloodsuckers, using your unique abilities as a Dawnwalker (someone who has all the strengths and weaknesses of a vampire by night but a human by day) to save the valley of Vale Sangora from the clutches of evil.
While the premise is pretty basic, Dawnwalker excels in the telling, with a cast of extremely well-written characters across the board, a world that’s filled with more mysteries than you could ever hope to uncover during your time-constrained journey, and some weirdly impressive arguments for why maybe vampires should be in charge of the world that made me pause to wonder if I was, in fact, the baddie. I instantly found myself eagerly spending time with Anca, the kind witch with a tragic past who split her time between either teaching me latin and magic or shamelessly flirting with me. Meanwhile, Crake, the rebel leader with a tendency to be heinously cruel in service of the cause, and Lacra, an allied vampire who casually committed war crimes half the time I hung out with her, managed to win me over despite being huge pains in my ass. Even the primary villains, like Brencis, who envisions a world ruled by vampires, and Ambrus, the footsoldier who revels in the displacement of the hierarchy of nobility and fancies a gentleman’s duel, were all incredibly compelling figures.
Dawnwalker’s best and most unique feature, quite appropriately for a game all about vampires, is its day/night cycle and the time mechanics built around it. As a spell-slinging human by day who turns into a blood-sucking monster by night, just about everything you do changes depending on the time of day. For example, in your human form you’ll guzzle down food and medicine to heal yourself, battle with swords and a fistful of witchcraft spells, and move around the old fashioned way by running, jumping, climbing, and whatnot. As a vampire, all that food and medicine is completely useless to you and your health can only be restored by consuming blood, plus you’ll primarily fight with your bare claws and gain a whole bunch of neat movement options – that includes teleporting around as a cloud of smoke, walking on walls and ceilings like the creepy little creature you are, and even turning into a wolf.
That means instead of building one loadout of armor, weapons, consumables, and abilities you’re happy with, Dawnwalker requires you to maintain two separate builds, which gave my stat-obsessed brain twice as much to joyfully tinker with. My vampire build was an absolute terror on the battlefield, with all my abilities centered around feeding off enemies to continually restore my health, and I sought out as many items as possible that increased my claw damage to turn myself into an unkillable unarmed freak of nature. Meanwhile, my human build primarily relied on high risk/high reward spells that put a whole bunch of nasty status effects on my foes at the cost of draining my own life and making me quite squishy. These two extremely different ways to play meant I was almost sitting forward during combat. Best of all, each of these loadouts is kept separate and automatically toggled between when you switch forms, so you don’t have to manually swap out all your armor and weapons twice a day.
Speaking of fighting, you’ll be doing quite a bit of that, since you’ll primarily solve your problems in Vale Sangora with the pointy end of your blade. The combat is quite good, with the caveat that it has a bit of a steep learning curve I suspect will be equally divisive. The main way in which it sets itself apart from most RPGs of this kind is that it uses a directional parry system where you have to match the direction the enemy is swinging, which kinda reminded me of For Honor. You can also just block attacks like normal, but doing so is fairly impractical (at least on higher difficulties) since it drains your stamina and doesn’t provide the openings for counterattacks that are so vital to success.
It sounds simple, but it took me longer than I’d like to admit to feel comfortable with it. The first handful of hours were fairly frustrating, and I frequently found myself fumbling through most combat encounters while cursing my ancestors. But there was light at the end of that tunnel – once I got over the hump and this system clicked, I grew to not only like it, but also feel pretty damn good at it. Now I’m able to down even the most formidable hordes without breaking a sweat, and that mastery felt earned beyond my stats going up. (Granted, I insist on playing most games on the hardest difficulty, so it’s quite possible I was just making things especially hard on myself and you’ll have an easier time from the jump.)
Aside from parrying, though, you’ll be using a pretty familiar bag of tricks for an action game like this, with a combination of standard attacks, special maneuvers that are specific to whichever weapon you’ve got equipped, and a bunch of abilities you can activate on a cooldown. Naturally, all of this will differ depending on whether or not you’re in human or vampire form, which goes a long way toward keeping things from getting too repetitive. For example, as a human, I fancied status effect spells that drained health and stunned enemies at the cost of my own life force, but as a vampire, I’d pummel things mercilessly with my bare hands and banshee shriek in my enemy’s face if I was feeling cheeky.
That said, these bouts definitely have some relatively minor but pretty obvious places they could improve. For example, the lock-on function consistently gave me trouble when trying to target a specific enemy, and it stayed annoying no matter how long I practiced with it. The camera could also get caught in odd spots in a way that was similarly aggravating. And while the variety of enemies you encounter is pretty good overall, the more common beasts you run into in the wild, like wolves and boars, appear way too frequently – by the end of my time with Coen, I was fully pissed off at the mere sight of the overpopulated canines.
While adventuring out in the world, certain activities are only available at specific times of day. For example, you’ll need access to your vampire form’s superior movement capabilities in order to climb to the top of lookout towers and add nearby points of interest to your map, while rituals that require blood magic are only available in human form. But even activities available at any time, like most side quests, can have drastically different outcomes depending on which form you take. Some characters will be less likely to trust you if you interact with them in vampire form, while some areas might be inaccessible if you choose to tackle it while human. If you really muck things up, your character might just straight up murder a super important NPC because you stupidly interacted with them while in a state of overwhelming blood thirst. Not that I ever did that at all, because I’m super smart and very good at video games.
The most interesting aspect of The Blood of Dawnwalker’s day/night cycle is how it ties the passage of time to specific actions you take, giving you a finite amount of time to complete your overarching quest. After the story’s opening chapter, you’ll have exactly 30 days to bring Brencis’ rule to an end, and that deadline is stressfully enforced as almost every action you take costs a certain amount of time to complete. There isn’t a ticking timer or anything – in fact, you can freely explore the world or just stand around idly as long as you want without time passing. Instead, time is treated as a resource: want to buy the next level in a particular skill? Well, in addition to the skill points required, you’ll also have to pay the much more costly price of the hours it takes you to train in it. Want to help that old man with his minor problem because you’re roleplaying as a good person? Fine! Go right ahead… but that’s one fewer segment of time you’ve got to potentially complete a more substantial sidequest.
At first I thought I might find this limitation irritating, since I quite enjoy taking my time to smell the roses and mark every checkbox off my list in these kinds of open-worlds, but I quickly realized how treating time as a currency makes just about every aspect of Dawnwalker better. No matter how hard you try, you won’t have enough hours to complete every side quest, buy every skill, or tie up every loose end as well as you’d like, which means you’re forced to compromise, pick your battles, and make hard but impactful decisions almost constantly. For example, early on in my travels, I talked my way into a prison camp to get some intel from a prisoner there, one I would have gone out of my way to rescue under normal circumstances. But when I saw that it would cost me three pips of time to do so (each day has 16 total), I decided to leave him to rot instead. I was forced to make compromises like this every step of the way, all in service of ensuring I had enough time for the important stuff, and I regularly found myself surprised at my own decisions. Fittingly, it made me feel like I truly was letting the darkness of my new vampiric abilities compromise my humanity in my quest for revenge. It’s brutal, nerve-wracking, and completely awesome.
This harrowing time-crunch ultimately has a pretty enormous impact on how your journey ends as well. I won’t spoil anything, but alternate endings will only open up to you if you’ve met certain characters or taken specific actions. On my first playthrough, there were entire supporting characters and story components I completely missed out on, and I didn’t realize the scope of what I hadn’t seen until I took an entirely different approach on my second playthrough. In a third (much shorter) playthrough, I just went for a brute force approach to see what would happen if I rushed straight to the end without meeting anyone while leveling up as little as possible, and I was not disappointed by the hilarious result. This is one of those games where I not only wanted to play through multiple times, but it almost felt mandatory in order to see everything Vale Sangora had in store. I can’t remember the last time I’ve felt that way about an RPG.
One thing I often worry about with open-world RPGs is just how bad their performance and technical bugs might be, and The Blood of Dawnwalker thankfully finds itself on the less egregious side of the spectrum. Sure, on a standard PlayStation 5 it’s got the occasional framerate wonkiness, the camera sometimes clips through stuff in awkward ways, and an enemy will occasionally go right through the floor when you kill it – but almost everything I saw like that was pretty minor and uncommon, and I never had a single hard crash, broken questline, or anything else frustrating like that. The worst thing I encountered with regularity were blurry textures on characters’ clothes (or sometimes detail in their faces), which would distractingly never smooth out from time to time. Importantly, the version I played did not include the 60fps performance mode that was recently announced, so I can’t say just how well it holds up on that front, but I wasn’t particularly bothered by the 30FPS quality mode since it usually looked and ran well enough anyway.
The Blood of Dawnwalker is my new favorite vampire game and one of the best story-driven RPGs I’ve played in a long time. The day/night cycle that has you juggling human and vampiric forms is awesome, and the constraints placed on how you spend your limited time ends up being one of the coolest, most wonderfully stressful parts of the adventure. Combat has a bit of a learning curve to it, but gets under your skin in all the right ways once you get the hang of it. Combine that with a story filled with memorable characters, gut wrenching decisions, and more endings than I’m ever likely to see, and this adventure kept me firmly in its thrall. Even if you aren’t particularly into the vampire fantasy, this is one that any RPG fan should absolutely not miss.
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