Vampyr

Vampyr comes from the developers behind Life is Strange, although the two have little to nothing in common aside from your choices carrying weight; that is the major theme that ebbs and flows throughout Vampyr perhaps even more-so than its sister series. In Vampyr, you stalk the streets of a fictional plague-ridden Victorian London. The game starts off with its best foot forward and, fortunately, does not let up until (a bit before) the end. As you begin to unravel the great mystery of what exactly is happening, you will meet many interesting characters and fight against enemies both human and monster. The combat is serviceable; it is not what will come to mind whenever I remember the best parts of the game, but it still does what it needs to and does not, for me, detract from the overall experience (the same is true for the graphics; serviceable, but not notable). Instead, it’s one pillar that works in tandem with the real meat on this game’s bones: the social simulation and the story. I will not divulge anything in the story aside from what I already have. The social simulation aspect is quite robust and makes for a great vampire roleplay experience; aside from the standard enemies you fight, the game has a finite number of well-developed and interesting NPCs scattered throughout the city for you to prey upon. You will meet and interact with them throughout the story and, if you so choose, you may end their stories prematurely. Sucking the blood out, and taking the life, of one of these characters comes with its set of benefits: you will get a massive helping of experience points to spend on upgrading your vampiric self. However, these major decisions also come with their fair share of consequences. Killing off one of these characters will impact the society and characters around them; sometimes for the better, but more often than not for the worse. The game’s world is divided into districts, and killing someone important to upholding a district could destabilize that area or even destroy it. These decisions, should you choose to make them, change the game in major, exciting ways. In order to upgrade your character using the experience you have earned, you are required to go to sleep. The upgrades will take effect as you slumber and you will wake up the following night to a sort of after-action report of what has happened to the city as you slept. It is here that you see the effects your decisions have on the world as the game progresses. However, this does ultimately bring me to my one, major, final flaw with the game - the game’s moral/karma system is directly opposed to the kind of game this is. There are characters that the game outright tells you will continue to do awful things unless you permanently stop them; on one occasion, I discovered a character was a serial killer and they said to me that they would not stop killing unless they themselves were stopped forever. So, I did what any upstanding citizen should do and sent them to an early grave. All good, right? However, killing even ONE character (even this serial killer) will prevent you from getting the good ending at the end of the game’s gripping story. Essentially, you are punished for being a vampire in a vampire game; the entire elevator pitch for this title is one of allowing you to prey upon a city as you see fit - reshaping it through brutal terror or ****** justice - and the game itself is ultimately opposed to this. Whether you’re a dark antihero slaying the criminals and making the city a better place, or a total psychopath that’s hell-bent on destroying every morally righteous person they meet, the game punishes you just the same. In order to obtain the only non-depressing ending to the story, you’re required to totally abstain from the most intriguing aspect of the experience. It feels like this system and its end-game consequences were designed and implemented by two separate people that were either at odds with each other, refused to communicate, or both. What’s even worse is that the game itself never communicates to you ahead of time that killing absolutely any citizen (even the murderous psychopaths) will trigger a bad ending by default, so what it’s ultimately doing is encouraging you to do something that it then chastises you for doing without warning. Ultimately, I am left frustrated and conflicted with this title. Up until the eleventh hour of my time with it, I was ready to deify it as a criminally underrated gem and one of my personal favorites of the past few years. However, the sour taste the ending leaves in your mouth is so fundamentally broken and self-contradicting that I have trouble even recommending this game despite how deeply I enjoyed most of it.