Vampyr (2018)

I wanted to like this game so much, even though goth vampire historical fiction isn't exactly my aesthetic. The storytelling is very deep, which I appreciated, and is the main thing driving my belief in the game's potential. Unfortunately by the end of the first chapter I just couldn't make myself continue investing time in the game.

Sadly, the combat gameplay oscillates between unplayably frustrating and mind-numbingly repetitive. I found myself dreading every combat encounter not because it was too hard - I dispatched all enemies with only one player death - but because it wasn't at all fun to engage in and it dragged out an already painfully dragged-out experience.

This brings me to the crafting system, which is necessary not just to maintain your combat edge, but also to make the medicines necessary to drive the story forward. The downside of this system is that it forced me to spend a great deal of time running around on the streets digging through trash cans in the hopes of finding crafting materials or junk I can trade for materials. Not an uncommon gaming mechanic but, not ideal for a narrative-driven game. Wasn't fun and really just further reduced any cinemattic feel the game had.

And it IS a narrative-driven, role-playing experience, as is what Dontnod is known for (I am a big fan of Remember Me and Life Is Strange), and the game certainly delivers on being role-playing centric. There is a lot of talking. Like, a LOT of talking. Like, TOO MUCH talking. The problem with this is twofold: one, the dialogue options are often repetitive, with multiple ways to ask the same question, and tiny extra details (that are critical to unlocking hints about each NPC's full story) included by, essentially, repeating variations on the same dialogue 3-4 times. Then, after you've talked to a DIFFERENT NPC to unlock a hint about the first NPC, going back and repeating a new variation on that dialogue AGAIN to get the final details. The pacing is just... too slow. The second problem, and the one that ultimately ended my interest in the game, is that the pivotal dialogue options - ones which, indicated by the Y symbol, signify an irreversible choice which will alter the course of the narrative - are often entirely inscrutable, with the choice text indicating a completely different path than the one they activate. I realize this is an issue in all dialogue choice games, as it is hard to boil down lengthy, complex dialogue choices into a short, pithy phrase, but I found this game's to be particularly egregious. Basically, I didn't feel like I was choosing the path of the narrative at all, because my impression of what the choice phrase represented was never remotely similar to what the writers intended.

I wanted to like the game because I saw the potential of this gentleman doctor struggling to maintain his compassion and humanity in the face of universal despair and his own primal darkness... but then every time I tried to choose compassion it instead came out as psychopathic manipulation.

I really liked this game, especially the aspect of talking to people and discovering their lives. The premise is interesting. I'm a sucker for vampires in old London. I wish they would have improved on the combat. The fights were easy because I selected story mode but nonetheless frustrating to navigate.

The lock-on mechanic doesn't work because you're supposed to move your mouse to switch between enemies. As I'm trying to look with my mouse at my surroundings in the middle of a fight, my target suddenly switches and Reid starts swiping at the air because I suddenly selected someone who is 5 meters away. You cant fight normally in this game because you're never locked on to the target you actually want to fight and you get peppered with bullets because you cant look at the other enemies around you. I tried fiddling with the control screen but it doesn't work.

I selected story mode so the fights are easy but nonetheless frustrating to navigate. This game is more enjoyable if you run past every guard and just go through the next door. That's how I spent the last two chapters. Overall, I would still recommend this game because it was so interesting to discover new characters and their stories. Maybe not at full price though...

This is one of those games that has a lot of interesting components, but the execution is flawed (and often tedious--I enjoy the idea of the hint system, but collecting some of them is an exercise in frustration) or sadly underdeveloped. The idea of a doctor having to balance his newfound vampirism against his desire to help and heal people is a very interesting one that wasn't drawn on enough. Likewise, some of the game's most emotional moments ended up falling flat for me because there wasn't enough investment in the relationships for me to really care about what was happening.

Ultimately, I found the game moderately enjoyable, but don't feel any need to replay it to try other paths. If you're intrigued by the concept, it's worth looking into, but I'd pick it up on sale or via Origin Access. Three stars out of my customary four.

LIT ON THE SPOT REVIEW

Vampyr is a third-person action role-playing game that excels in making its mechanics, systems, and presentation mirror its protagonist’s inner struggles. It associates vampirism with disease and corruption, immersing the player in a hostile and claustrophobic city, whose inhabitants are at the mercy of predators of every kind – including the protagonist.

The game starts with a discussion on mortality. Dying is described as a relief, a blessing, which immediately frames the protagonist, Dr. Jonathan E. Reid, as a damned character: his vampire condition is not a superpower, but a curse. This notion is further reinforced by the tragic events of the opening: a young woman is relieved to discover that Reid is alive and goes on to embrace him. However, since your vampire vision is active, you can only see her as a shadow housing a huge amount of vividly red blood. She sees Reid as a loved one, whereas he sees her as less than human: she’s food.

Dr. Reid soon finds himself lost, drifting amidst the chaos of his own anger and hunger. Another doctor, however, after finding Reid in front of a corpse, understands his condition and decides to lend a hand. Dr. Swansea gives Reid an anchor: the protagonist is to live and work in the Pembroke Hospital, helping its patients, which gives a shred of normality to his new life. In return, he must also help to discover a cure for the epidemic that is striking London. While in the hospital, Reid meets another vampire, Lady Ashbury, who will serve as his mentor while assisting in the search for the identity of his maker.

Vampyr takes place in London, which is depicted as a decadent, putrid city. The Spanish Flu is ravaging the land, and the people are becoming desperate. There’s a priest who only thinks about purging and cleansings by fire. There’s a boy, amidst all the madness, suffering from depression. There’s another one who won’t leave his house because he fears human beings more than monsters and the plague – and not without reason. There’s a mad woman who thinks she’s a vampire, and a man who lets her bite him because he’s alone and in need of company. There’s a gay couple who refuses to go to the nearby hospital, fearing reprisal for their love. After all, London is full of “greedy cockroaches who feed on despair.” The city is on the verge of collapse. And you can clearly see that by the crumbling state of the buildings, by expecting death at every corner – which may guard bloodthirst vigilantes or feral vampires –, by not being surprised in seeing impaled corpses decorating rooms painted in blood.

You start the game in a part of the city that seems beyond salvation. The police have forsaken it. At night, criminals and vigilantes prowl the streets. There are buildings hiding hundreds of corpses. People are scared, defenseless, bewildered by all the violence. When Reid asks his mentor who was the man he had hunted, lady Ashbury promptly answers: “Criminal, Victim, Hunter, Prey.” You know violence has become the norm in a city when these roles have become interchangeable and there is no difference anymore.

Vampirism is just another nail in London’s coffin, just another epidemic. In Vampyr, it is a moral disease, the consequence of a society that is already putrid, corrupted to the core, filled to the brim with rot. Here, contrary to what happens in classic vampire stories such as Dracula, the figure of the vampire is not tied to a foreign menace, but to a threat that comes from within. The story associates the creatures with some mythical figures of England’s past, such as certain renowned knights and kings, precisely to reinforce this theme. “People will always believe in monsters. It’s easier than accepting their own darkness. We can all be monsters,” a bartender says to Dr. Reid. Vampyr’s narrative puts enemies within one’s own family, within one’s own countrymen, within one’s own past.

The game’s story ties blood with hate, and puts vampires in the upper classes of society. Those of noble lineage can live well, drinking people’s blood, while the common folk become Skals, a type of vampire that is ugly and, after becoming a pariah, being relegated to the slums and the sewers, also becomes feral. Vampirism is depicted as a cycle: it will always strike when a society is at its worst; when the rich are preying on the poor, when two men must hide their love in public lest they become hunted, when the solution offered in dire times is not to help the other and try to reconnect, but to further separate people by walls.

While the people in the poor districts of London fear going out on the streets, while they fear for their lives, a sidequest in the wealthy district of West End has Reid finding an exquisite restaurant for a bored gentleman to go. A woman preaches about women’s rights, but there’s no one on the streets to hear her speech. A man warns about the vampire menace in the same street and to the same audience. A few blocks away, vampires are prowling dark alleys, killing anyone who gets near them. You meet characters who are communists and it’s no coincidence that the worst outcome for their district is when they are put out of the game.

The tone of the narrative is dire. Reid’s workplace is described as a “giant morgue disguised as a hospital.” When he meets a secret society of vampires, there is no glamor to the situation, only harsh judgment. The Ascalon Club is a group of vampires who thinks themselves elite. They are old, wealthy and very white. They like to chase foreign vampires away from England, and talk about supremacy and pure blood. “What we need is a wall,” one of the wealthiest members of the club says to Reid. “As long as the right people are at the right side of the walls. That’s all that matters.”

Reid’s investigation on the identity of his maker quickly gives place to a more pressing matter: saving London. As the story progresses, the more dilapidated the city can become. London is divided into districts and each one has a single person as its pillar. During the game’s chapters, Reid will eventually face a choice regarding the fate of that person, which can impact the whole district. The wrong choice may invite chaos in, resulting in the deaths of various people in the district, decreasing its health status. And if it becomes too low, everyone there dies.

Every NPC in Vampyr has a name and a story. You can talk to all of them and discover their secrets. And you can drink them after that. As it usually reinforced in Gothic narratives, there are horrible consequences when secrets don’t remain secret: when Reid finds information about a person, the blood level of that person increases – and the higher that level the more attractive they become as food, giving more experience points to the player. And, in Vampyr, you can drink almost every NPC, depending only on your level.

Vampyr excels in tying gameplay and story together. The difficulty, for example, is directly tied with the decision to feed on human blood. Drinking the people of London makes Reid considerably stronger, which makes your life – as the player – considerably easier. This makes the player share Reid’s temptation to drink blood. Every citizen is a potential meal. Every conversation can be a prelude to slaughter. And people’s secrets usually are secrets for a good reason, often safeguarding misdeeds that can tap into the player’s morality, encouraging them to kill: “that woman beats her daughter all the time, maybe the daughter will be better off alone.”

And the choice of killing someone is not just a moral one, having practical effects on the world. People will react to the death of others, and each death will also decrease that district’s health status. Mastering every skill available will mean the fall of London, making Reid the strongest person in a dead city. On the other hand, if the player wants to try a pacifist playthrough, they will also have to care for the health of every citizen, as they often get sick, and Reid – being a doctor – must craft the right medicine to cure them.

A full pacifist playthrough can be quite difficult to achieve, though. Besides the fact that it makes combat a lot harder, the choices regarding the pillars of each district are not easy ones to make, since their outcomes are rarely obvious. Sparing a person may appear merciful at first glance, but can lead to horrible consequences later. This makes each choice meaningful, carrying a lot of weight – and the game autosaves after each one, preventing the player from abusing the save system to circumvent a bad choice.

Vampyr, however, occasionally fails during some of these moments by not making it clear what each choice means. One example can help explain the problem. During a climactic moment, Reid discovers the identity of the person that was blackmailing Lady Ashbury, because they discovered she was a vampire, and confronts that person. Reid is faced with three options: to make that person quit their job (“I look away but you resign”), forget (“You will forget all about this”), or kill them (“I’m ending this right now”). The latter is very clear, but the first two choices are not: you can make the person forget, but forget what? Only that Ashbury was a vampire, since that is the root of the problem? No, it means that she will forget everything about her philanthropic activities that were banked by the blackmail money. And the first option, to make her quit her job, may seem harsh, but Reid will offer to finance her activities to compensate the resignation – a vital piece of information that is not shown by the text that accompanies the choice. Therefore, the problem is not that the outcome of the choices can be out of your control, but that the choices themselves, because of how they are written, are not clear regarding what they actually are.

The level design is also far from stellar. You find locked gates blocking your progress around the city, for example, but some – like the one in Whitechapel – could have been easily bypassed if the protagonist could just jump over the small ledge at its right. He can’t jump over it, however, forcing the player to find a way around it – and let’s not forget that Reid can, well, teleport with his vampire powers. This artificiality in the level design is all over London, making the player frequently question why they can teleport to certain areas and not to others.

The combat, in turn, becomes as complex as the player can make it. If they start to drink everyone, they will have a plethora of skills to use, and they will wipe the floor with most enemies, summoning shadows from the floor to grab and pierce them or throwing blood spears at them. If they want to avoid confrontation, on the other hand, they can bypass some combat encounters with a stealth skill. The combat itself is simple: each enemy has a health and a stamina bar, as does Reid. The action is slow-paced as basic actions, like attacking or dodging, consumes some of the protagonist’s stamina, making him unable to act for a while if he runs out of stamina. Depleting an enemy’s stamina stuns that enemy, making them vulnerable to be bitten – what increases Reid’s blood gauge, which is used for vampire skills. Some weapons are better at hitting the enemy’s health bar, while others fare better in depleting their stamina, and some increases your blood gauge. The player, then, will have to be able to read their enemy well so that they can dodge, attack and use skills at the right time, while choosing carefully what type of attack is best for that moment.

Finally, the game could use some quality of life improvements, such as enabling fast travel between safe houses and showing discovered NPCs on the map, so the player doesn’t have to wander around looking for them if they forget where they are.

Vampyr is one of the best vampire-themed games out there, succeeding in making all of its parts work together to reflect the protagonist’s curse, immersing the player in a harsh, violent and despair-laden setting. It may have some problems regarding the artificiality of its level design and how it makes some of the player choices vaguer than they should be, but it certainly compensates these flaws with a well-crafted story, tragic characters, and strong atmosphere.

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Game misses the chance to become AWESOME, badly!

If only they could do better on,

• Combat system,
• Bugs, glitches,
• Loading screen wait time. (i've SSD tho)

But overall i liked the game, a good purchase if you buy it with a big discount.

• 1900s London represented good, i love the art-style.
• You can feel main character's dilemma, nice storytelling.
• Role-play elements are good, but could be better.
• A Vampire game :)

I would like to play Vampyr 2.

Another example of a game ruined by unnecessary combat. Not only your character is slow, fragile and does little damage, but even the most random enemies have undodgable attacks, they come in two or threes and can hit you even if you're just about to land an attack. On top of that, the camera does not cooperate and there's no visual cue when enemies are attacking from off screen. All put together means that you die... a lot; having to put up with long loading times each time. And while all of that would probably not be an issue if fights were few and far between, Vampyr delights into throwing into random encounters almost at every street corner.

The whole thing about the morality of feeding on citizens could be interesting, but it's made mute by the combat, also. You constantly kill and feed on faceless and infinitely respawning thugs, so why all the drama about killing and feeding on other humans all of the sudden? How is that the situation of an area is so heavily influenced if you embrace this one guy, but the dozen or so corpses that I left rotting on the street doesn't seem to do much? Similarly, your character will remark on how disgusting it is to drink rat blood but the pile of corpses on your wake seems not to bother him. He will also talk about his enhanced reflexes and strength, but the truth is that you can easily get your ass handed to you by a random bloke with an axe.

This game would've been much better and consistent without combat. Just keep the social interactions and leave the slashing and shooting on the cutting room floor. Speaking to people and finding about them was interesting. They all have their small stories, web of relationships and small secrets. Most of them don't weight on the main plot, but that's fine by me, since having a game in which people's lives are not subservient to so main characters journey can be refreshing.

The frustrating fighting that blocks a good dialogue-based story, reminds me a lot of Deadly Premonition. But while the later's combat was dull but easy, Vampyr's is unforgiving and unforgivable.

I was drawn to this game because I thought it had an interesting premise. Essentially, you play a doctor trying to cure the Spanish flu in London, with a twist. You are also a vampire, and so you must decide how or whether you will sustain yourself. In the game, you are given the ability to feed on NPCs for a massive boost to your experience--but in doing so, you affect the environment of the whole game. A dead NPC might cause other NPCs in their social circle to leave the city, become sick, or die. NPC death will also increase the number and level of enemies in the area and affect the ending of the game. The concept reminded me of Dishonored, one of my favorite games, so I was excited to start playing.

In reality, it didn't quite play out that way. For one thing, the main goal of helping people doesn't make sense if you also walk around killing them. For another, you do a lot of talking to the citizens in this game and come to know them as well as the major characters, so that makes it difficult to kill them too. In the end, it's not difficult to say you won't kill anyone and stick to it, but I had a feeling that I was supposed to be going back and forth about it the whole time.

The other drawback--losing out an experience--wasn't such a headache as I thought it would be either. I was at a lower level than enemies for almost the whole game. However, most of the time that could be managed by taking on a more defensive combat strategy. When that didn't work, there are plenty of side quests that can be completed for experience instead. I never felt like I had to kill a NPC to manage the difficulty.

The game does bring some weight in the decision to kill through the story, however. Throughout the main story line, you are forced to confront and spare or kill (or sometimes a third other option) the 4 pillar members of each district. These characters are distinct from regular NPCs in that their status affects almost every other character in the game. In the beginning, the decisions seemed easy. As you play, however, it becomes more difficult to discern the "right" choice, and the choices have even more impact. So my expectations started high, fell, and then picked back up again as I played.

Story-wise, the game is excellent--probably the best part of the game. That said, I thought the ending dragged. When you beat the game you are forced to play a final chapter which is pretty pointless because the game is already over. In it, the final conversations are meant to reveal the last mysteries of the game. But at that point, these are pretty minor loose ends, and it gets into lore that is not explored at other points in the game, so it felt more confusing and boring than anything.

Besides that, the game offers nothing particularly special. The combat does offer you some cool abilities, but it can also be clunky, repetitive and boring. I also wish the game had been shorter--I'd love to do another playthrough where I make different choices, but after the time I've already spent on this first one, I'd rather move on to something else. In the end I'd give it 3.5 stars.