Vampire: The Masquerade gained its initial following in its tabletop game format, pulling players into the World of Darkness full of the undead and other occult creatures and lore. The game series saw early video game adaptations around the turn of the century, but largely went quiet after that. Recently, however, Vampire: The Masquerade has been making a comeback in the world of video games, and now players have a new title to check out: Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong.
Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong is an RPG that thrusts players directly into the world of vampiric civilization, with three playable characters acting on behalf of the Camarilla, one of the largest vampire organizations in the World of Darkness. The three playable characters of Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong, Galeb, Emem, and Leysha, are summoned at the start of the game to unravel a brewing mystery following an unexpected attack on a vampiric gathering celebrating unification.
After meeting with the de facto ruler of the Camarilla, Prince Hazel Iversen, players are placed in the role of each playable character with a different role to pursue. All three playable characters are sent on their separate ways to determine the cause and culprit behind the attack, and to determine if there are any remaining survivors to rescue. The decisions made, actions taken, and story progression is largely up to the player, with multiple potential paths to follow. One of the game's greatest strengths is each area is steeped in secrets and mysteries left to unravel, allowing players to access additional story and unlock additional experience points. However, abject failure is also a possibility, as players can potentially leave or fail to achieve the goal they set out to complete.
While nearly all vampires in The World of Darkness are gifted with special abilities and powers, individual vampire clans mean each vampire has its specialties. When a human is 'embraced' and turned into a vampire, they become a member of the clan their Sire belongs to, and obtain abilities therein. Galeb, the eldest of the playable characters, is a Ventrue, while Emem is a Toreador, and Leysha is a Malkavian. Each clan gives the characters a unique perk and advantage, and they're assigned to investigate accordingly. Galeb's gameplay largely focuses on direct investigation and interrogation of lesser minds, while Emem's clan allows her to achieve the goals her Prince sets through conversation, persuasion, and mobility. Leysha, on the other hand, is valued by the Prince for her Malkavian curse, as it allows her to have unique insights into her surroundings and occasional visions showing her the past or future.
Big Bad Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong sticks close to its tabletop roots, relying on a character sheet for players to level up and employ gained experience points. Players can either choose from a pre-established role for each character to start, or can assign their points individually as they see fit. EXP is awarded at the end of each character's gameplay session, and the points can be assigned before switching back to their story.
Experience points are divided up between a few different paths. Players can invest their points into their base attributes, like Physical, Social, and Mental, or into Skills or Disciplines. The character's attributes have an impact on their overall skills and disciplines, and can help to provide a boost. The Kindred's Skills are utilized in both conversation and investigation, giving players the opportunity to do things like gain access to locked computers, doors, to understand their surroundings better, or to gain information from otherwise tight-lipped NPCs.
Disciplines, however, are determined based on the character's clan. Malkavians, for example, have the ability to use Auspex, gaining insight into their surroundings, and Obfuscate, which allows them to disappear entirely or alter their appearance to move around more readily in areas like crime scenes. Some disciplines are more focused on conversation, like Galeb's Dominate, while Emem's Toreador Celerity allows her to move at high speeds and access areas that mortals can't reach. Players will likely find that their invested points are never wasted, but there are also opportunities that may become inaccessible depending on the route players take, starting as early as the tutorial levels.
While these skills and abilities are easy enough to choose from, there's a good chance that players who are brand new to the World of Darkness will be a bit confused early on. The game drops players directly into the scenario, without any real introduction to how the World of Darkness works, what the individual clans are, the conflicts between particular Kindred groups, and so on. Those who are familiar with the tabletop game or spin-off games like Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines will likely be right at home here, but those who have never tried out VTM may need some adjustment time.
There's very little handholding in Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong, so players should expect to utilize their memory and wit. The game lacks a map, so players need to investigate every nook and cranny to uncover the game's every secret. Codes and passwords aren't remembered by the character, so the player should plan on memorizing or writing them down when discovered. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is largely up to the player, as some enjoy being let loose and allowed to make their own decisions, while others may prefer a bit more guidance.
However, there are some drawbacks to the game's mechanics. Moving around in most areas is slow, as players are limited to a maximum movement speed of a gentle jog, and are often required to walk instead. In a game that relies heavily on exploration and frequent backtracking, it can make getting around a chore. Players also don't have the option of skipping or speeding up the vast majority of conversations and internal thoughts. It's a surprising choice, as the vast majority of RPGs and similar investigation and story-heavy games like Detroit: Become Human or Telltale's The Walking Dead allow players to speed up conversations, but players here will find they have to listen to every single word before moving on. It becomes particularly frustrating when players are searching through points of interest and accidentally trigger one they've checked before, as their character will repeat the same thought without the ability to skip it, and in some cases, the player can't move until the thought is done.
The game also isn't without its bugs and quirks. While odd hair physics and clipping tend to be a common part of games, in one with a heavy emphasis on conversation with little movement occurring within, it was distracting to see a player character's hair frequently emerging through their chests after clipping through their backs. Biting human victims to drink their blood is limited to an extremely few number of NPCs in each area, yet the biting cutscene would sometimes exhibit heavy clipping and occasionally a large space between the vampire's mouth and their target's neck while they were allegedly being bitten. Some conversations glitched, in one instance leading to the player character becoming mute during a conversation, and in other cases, leading to some odd visuals and eventual crashes. Following one particular conversation glitch with Leysha, the world could no longer be properly interacted with, and ultimately the game froze upon trying to exit the area, requiring a full restart to fix.
Overall, there's a lot here that fans of Vampire: The Masquerade are likely to love, and the wide expanse of skills and choices to make should add a fair amount of replayability to the story. However, newcomers to the franchise would do well to read up on the way the series works as a whole before getting started, especially if they lack experience with tabletop games and the way that experience is rewarded and utilized.
Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong releases on May 19 for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S, with a Nintendo Switch version in the works. Game Rant was provided a PC code for the purposes of this review.
Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong
Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong is a role-playing game developed by Big Bad Wolf and published by Nacon. The video game is based on the tabletop RPG Vampire: The Masquerade and is the latest edition in the video game series. It is a story-based single-player game, in which the player controls three vampires from different disciplines, switching between them as the game progresses. The player upgrades their characters throughout the story with skills and stats, which makes it easier to advance in a world with humans that might realize they are in the presence of a vampire.