Bloodlust Shadowhunter is a fan-made indie game made by a sole entity who made a random PnC adventure game I played a few days ago. The puzzles were interesting enough in that game that I thought i'd look at the most recent game made, which is stylized in the Vampire The Masquerade franchise. The game itself is very unique and has the kind of strong sense of vision that come from smaller productions. This is in short not at all bad recipe for a retro/nostalgic kind of game with a new face.

Sitting down to play this I expected to be awful across the board. It's strong points are its' creativity and it's fan service to World of Darkness. It very much is a unique approach in the sense that it overall plays and feels look an older style computer-assisted Role Playing game, but in that there are different elements and modes in it.

You have a small city hub free roaming area with various people, vampire clans, and quest givers and lots of secrets. Good music and atmosphere add to the political intrique of modern vampire lore with quest progression that has handmade hints and other things designed to make one think a bit.

The other 'half' of this game is a handful of endless infitie dungeons that exist, many are optional. (Much of this game is just what you explore and find.) The game is still played the same way in these dungeons, but it starts to essentially become a third person action rpg that feels like a mix of diablo and dungeon master. While most dungeons dont really need to be explored deeply. It's a fun challenge to see how far one can go, and how quickly. As you go deeper it starts getting increasingly harder and more difficulty to see, which is one interesting detail in the game (you have a flashlight with batteries that run out and need to find new flashlights or develop your vampire sight ability, or you can just 'make do' without) the enemies also have spooky glowing evil eyes. This game is suprisingly creepy and I had many jumpscares. (often they spawn behind you or while you are looking at inventory, character, journal etc)

this game also has a very wide variety of various 'minigames' (that are actually well done minigames) such as lockpick, hack, safe crack, wire snippers, etc. often these are to access areas or mostly loot containers. generally they are optional and i found myself just opting out of them.

The game is very light with CnC and dialogue (no real trees) and character building is and skill development is quirky, very rough and significantly unbalanced. fighter caster thief are the archetpyes and caster immediately stars off with a very strong skill that you can dump points into, and really do very little else.

the game has a really convoluted story and most quests seem to pile up and send you on various errands. it does however have a good setting and a few intersting characters, there are also well done cutscenes. unfortunately the worst bits are technical problems, this game crashes and runs my computer really hot. the shadows look awful (and can't be disabled) were it not for the bad shadows, crashes and awful optimization i would reccomend this easily.

This game saves automatically as you play it so crashes arent an issue really.

While most would say this is quite bad, (and i wont exactly argue) i have played worse. Still its unique and I actually had a lot of fun playing it, so its not tha bad.... I am glad it is over though as getting stuck in a dungeon can last way too long and overall this game was very hard to figure out how to complete and i could not have done it without various posts i read about the game. I look forward to the rumored sequel.

Graphics 2. (cool cutscenes, great color and textures but awful shadow issues, and the player character for wizard looks like a goofball and can't be changed)
Sound 3. good and creepy and hypnotic. enjoyed the voiced dialogue.
Gameplay 3. The free roaming city area stuff and fast paced dungeon crawling is overall good and fun, but it can get old. a lot of the game can be wandering around and the dungeons can get reptitive quickly. Story/writing. 2. Bare bones mostly. anyone who takes it upon themselves to play this game the game will make you want more. (It does however have a nice ending.)
Overall Design. 3 strong coherent vision and theres a lot to like about the general design with all elements. It plays nicely but its a shame its so rough. A lot of things are worthy of expanding more such as clan rep system and other RPG things.
Technical 2. Very rough, But it does work. No save game corruption. No game getting stuck. I dreaded these things as I neared the end and didnt know if I was just missing something, or if the game was borked. It somewhat ruins the enjoyment of the game.

final score 2.5
in conclusion this is the third unlicensed indie VTM game you never heard of. I found it better than it looks but its aquired taste taht probably warrants right mood and patience and about 25 hrs. There is no telling how many secrets exist in this game.