As the world waits and waits for Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, a sequel that seems increasingly distant, can you believe it was ever scheduled for 2020? – I remember a vampire role-playing game that I almost missed. One of similar size and similar tone: pensive, melancholy, dark. A game about drinking blood to sustain yourself and fighting demons, yes, but also about deciding what kind of vampire you want to be and what kind of morals you want to have, like being undead. Are you a monster or are you still a person?
Vampyr is the game I'm talking about, released in 2018 by Focus Home Entertainment and Life is Strange studio Dontnod, so there was some fanfare around it. But lackluster reviews sank it, and the game floated down the river, beating most people, and would have passed completely if it hadn't been killed off by the (then) new wave of subscription services. They resurrected it and gave it another chance (see also: A Plague Tale: Requiem by Focus Home) and I'm so glad they did.
I think there's something about rediscovering a game in solitude, away from all the launch noise, that makes the review more forgiving. The pressure is gone; and the pressure on Vampyr when it originally came out to fill the vampire RPG void left by 2004's Bloodlines (the sequel had yet to be announced) was great. A lot of people wanted the game to be about a lot of different things and it fell short for a lot of understandable reasons. But rediscovered a couple of years later, you can find a surprisingly thoughtful and accomplished vampire story.
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What I like most about this is the central conceit: in the game you are, or were, a doctor in life, so you took a Hippocratic oath to behave in a certain, ethically upright manner and, for example, not to clothe yourself. their patients. But now that you are dead and hungry for blood, this oath that formed you morally serves as an obstacle. Will you take the lives of people you once swore to heal and help? It's a duality that you struggle with throughout the game: whether or not to give in to your more monstrous side or hold on to the person you used to be.
The game supports this mechanically, which is something I love, because it's pretty easy to ignore the philosophical ramifications in games, but you can't ignore the mechanics. In Vampyr, if you want more power, so who? No Do you want more power in an RPG? – You have to drink people's blood to get it and “hug” them, and there is a whole system of fattening them up to kill them that revolves around this. I say gain weight but really what you are doing is improving his approval rating towards you, because the higher it is, the more juice you will extract from him and the greater the reward you will get. However, again there is conflict, because the more you get to know someone, to improve their approval rating, the less you will want to sink your teeth into them, but can you resist? Not everyone will be a scoundrel who exploits others.
There's also another downside to drinking from the walking blood bags you encounter: game endings. The twist to the story is that the more people you “hug” (that's the game's slang for the ritual of drinking their blood), the less desirable the ending will be. The best endings are for those who abstain, but if you do, Vampyr will be fiendishly difficult to complete: you'll need at least some of the supernatural powers it allows you to gain from drinking blood. Not only are they fun, but they are essential to overcome the bosses that we will encounter along the way. It's a tough game in places; Try it without powers at your own risk.
Linking game systems to game philosophies is something that excites me because it is deliciously efficient, everything is interconnected: nothing floats superfluously. I'm also a big fan of the foggy London dock where Vampyr takes place, 100 years before the game's release, when the capital was reeling from the expense of World War I and was devastated by the merciless Spanish flu pandemic. Playing it in 2020, during a pandemic of our time, was an uncomfortably pertinent experience. The Spanish flu, however, provides a wonderful smokescreen for the vampirism and undead society that you will discover throughout the game.
Overall, it's gruesome and dirty, bitter and depressed, which aligns perfectly with my impression of vampires from Anne Rice's iconic stories. To me, vampires are Louis from Interview with a Vampire, wandering through time and grappling with dark thoughts as they become something more, something timeless and free from the rules of humanity. Beings who observe, reflect, and generally get a little depressed and look great while doing it. That's the mood in Vampyr, and it's all anchored by one of the most hauntingly beautiful soundtracks I know, one that I enjoyed so much that I sought out Vampyr composer Olivier Deriviere to talk about it.
It's not perfect; Vampyr is repetitive and one-note, and somewhat restrained in its scope and ambition, but it has a sophistication that surprised me throughout. I just didn't expect it to be so good. I kept telling people excitedly about it, as if I had discovered it buried somewhere, forgotten, which, of course, I hadn't. But Vampyr had been overlooked, which is a shame, because in this long wait for Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, it is the best vampire RPG we have.