The Blood of Dawnwalker - To Feed or Not to Feed
Even amongst the plethora of monstrous creatures dreamed up and documented throughout the ages, vampires possess a unique darkness that fascinates above the rest. It isn’t just that they exist only in the shadows, with many iterations literally unable to walk in the sun – it’s the loss of humanity that comes from feeding on others, removing their lifesource to sustain your own. The darkness is existential, and raises questions about the soul – what becomes of one whose humanity is necessarily in danger every time they feed? Can they still call themselves in any way human, or are they something else entirely? The Blood of Dawnwalker follows a character who grapples with these questions in real time, highlighting the true cost of power to both Coen the protagonist, and the player who controls him. And how much of your character’s humanity are you, the player, willing to sacrifice?
From the start, Coen is a character plagued by misery and hardship. His family struggles in the 14th century against an oppressive regime that feeds off its people, in a way that can easily and not-so-subtly be likened to real world capitalist and dictatorial structures. For us, ‘bleeding them dry’ is an idiom, but for Coen, a reality. The residents of his town of Laslea are regularly forced, as are others all over the surrounding areas, to pay blood tribute to Brencis – a grotesque and cruel leader and a creature known as a ‘vrahkir’ – or simply, a vampire. Coen’s mother struggles to remain present in reality, constantly weakened by the feeding, his father works the mines, and Coen feels the weight of responsibility for caring for his siblings on his shoulders. His world is bleak, and this feeling permeates every crevice of this game.
In the beginning, The Blood of Dawnwalker teaches you that time is a precious commodity. There’s only so much time in the day to be used to help your fellow villagers and carry out chores for your family before the horrors visit town again, and you’re forced to prioritise. Coen can help a local farmer chase his troublesome pig, or help his siblings learn to fish by the river. He can save his neighbours from committing sacrilegious acts against the church and drawing its ire, or take the time to help the local bully stand up to his abusive father. There are so many things to be done, so many wrongs to be righted, and you simply can’t address them all. For me, a person who does every side quest in every game no matter how mundane, this took some adjustment. It’s stressful, knowing that you can’t solve every problem, but in that sense the mechanic works perfectly as intended. From the start, you feel time pressure in Coen’s life. So when things take a darker turn, that sense of urgency really sets in.
Just as you’re beginning to get a sense of life in and the desperation that surrounds the town of Laslea, Brencis and his entourage attack. An uprising gone wrong leads to a massacre, and to the kidnapping of Coen’s family. In 30 days, they will be killed – and Coen must be the one to save them. But Coen, caught up in the failed coup, is changing. After an attack by Brencis, he has become a ‘dawnwalker’ – human by day, vampire by night, his control over his own actions constantly in flux. From here, things remain bleak. Coen has only one goal – save his family – but he is also a man with dreams and principles who is learning what that means. His interactions with those around him can be kind and compassionate, or matter-of-fact and cruel, and these decisions are only partially tied to how much of his humanity Coen is willing to sacrifice for his goal. The rest of the time, it feels like the game is guiding you to shape what humanity would even look like for someone like Coen, who has experienced so much loss. The way it succeeds in this aspect of its narrative is something I haven’t seen an RPG like this manage in quite some time.
Then there’s the other side – the vampire side – that has a very real impact on not only Coen’s power and control, but on your experience of the game as a player. Advancing Coen’s vampire abilities often means performing actions that would compromise his humanity, and the moral code you may have forged for him. The game posits this as something it will punish – if you let Coen give in to his cravings for blood and his bestial urges, he will become someone you cannot control. In his vampire form, if his health gets too low, Coen can simply attack his friends in the middle of a conversation without giving you the option to stop it. As soon as I learned that this was a possibility, I became terrified of allowing Coen to do anything that might make him lose control over his hunger. I wouldn’t allow him to become someone I couldn’t control, just as he didn’t want to allow himself to meet that same fate. It made me feel so strangely attached to him in, again, a way a game of this kind hasn’t managed to make me attach to a protagonist like him… perhaps ever? Our fates were tied. We could make ourselves powerful, gain new abilities, and maybe come closer to achieving our goal – but at what cost? What would we lose along the way? Coen might have, at some points, been willing to find out – but I wasn’t.
So, in writing this review, I will say that there are some mechanics of this game that I simply didn’t engage with until it was too late for me to realise that they probably wouldn’t have caused the destruction I was so concerned about after all. In the early game, everything is positioned as a danger. ‘You must be quick, make choices, you won’t have time to do everything – so prioritise!’ or ‘Don’t give in to Coen’s vampiric powers too much, or he will become the monster he most despises!’ I’m paraphrasing, but everything feels like it’s leading to a catastrophe. The more I played, however, the less this sense of urgency bothered me. I started to see what it would look like to take my time doing side activities, and found that while some of them uncovered fascinating stories and allowed me to spend time with deep characters I grew to love, many others were very mundane – and these two things would ‘progress’ the game the same amount of time. So I did what I needed to do, and left a lot behind – but I wasn’t disappointed in the way I expected to be.
At a certain point, progressing Coen’s skills also begins to cost you time. There are three main branches – witchcraft, which can grant you supernatural abilities in human form, swordsmanship, which can strengthen both offense and defense in combat, and vampirism, which enhances and plays on your vampiric traits. For most of the game, I avoided engaging with any skill upgrade that wouldn’t directly and immediately benefit me, because the time was too precious to waste on something that wouldn’t advance my story. Vampirism, unlike the other two, includes a ‘corruption’ mechanic that unlocks new branches as Coen gives in to his ‘vampiric’ urges and does things like drinking human blood. I didn’t want Coen to give into his urges, so I didn’t chase corruption, and basically blocked off a whole skill tree for myself. By the time I got to the end of the game I realised I needn’t have heeded the game’s warnings so literally, but by then it was too late.
But the thing is, The Blood of Dawnwalker embraces darkness often enough that I could never truly trust that it would let me avoid taking the most morbid actions. Depending on your choices, key characters can die unexpectedly or suffer extra trauma at your hands. You can accidentally kill your friends. Your decisions shape the world and the story, and the world and the story are horrible and bleak, so why wouldn’t I think the game was going to make me pay for my attempts to chase power? For the most part, there is a thematic thread here that the game nails, but by the time I got to the end, I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed by how some of my actions didn’t have consequences. I followed huge questlines through to the end that amounted to nothing, developed (sometimes unexpected) relationships with characters that didn’t go anywhere, and was left with a sense that I had, despite my intense focus on using it ‘correctly’, somehow wasted my time. There’s inconsistency in which of the game’s warnings to heed, and the way its systems are explained, that didn’t properly reveal itself to me until the end, and I’m disappointed.
That’s not to say that the rest of the game was perfect. The combat, initially interesting and engaging, became repetitive quickly. It can be approached in one of two ways, depending on playstyle – omnidirectional, or directional combat. Omnidirectional combat is the same as many action games – one button for defence, one for attack, with no other nuance to it – but it depletes stamina quickly. Directional combat involves blocking or attacking actively in directions relative to where the opponent is attacking from, and can lead to some decent buffs, as well as reducing stamina use. At first it was great fun and super satisfying – there’s nothing quite like the ‘cling’ of perfectly deflecting a sword strike. But then enemies are damage-sponges and take a little too long to kill, even at high levels, and they always come in groups – so fights feel a little too long. When he’s in vampire form, Coen can even switch between fighting with a sword and fighting with his claws, Wolverine-style, but I identified little difference between the two. There is some variation in the types of enemies Coen will face that is largely location-dependent, but most of these different enemy encounters play out the same. By the end, I dreaded being approached by anyone or anything, because it would just mean the same lengthy back and forth, even with the occasional ability thrown in for good measure.
Whenever I wasn’t in combat, for the most part, I was having a great time. The quests are interesting and somehow feel varied enough, even if most of them just involve going to a new location and searching an area for useful items. Some of them require Coen to use time-of-day specific abilities, like a spell that allows him to essentially speak to the dead in his human form, or his vampiric abilities to scale walls and shift over great distances with ease. The characters Coen meets along the way are layered and compelling, even if I would say that, like The Witcher (which many of the Rebel Wolves team worked on in the past), the attitude towards women in this world can sometimes leave a lot to be desired. If you want to call it ‘historical accuracy’, then sure, but I’m just saying – we’re dealing with vampires here, we could probably have introduced a little more feminism into the 14th century.
The Blood of Dawnwalker is one of those games that gives me pause as I try to sum up my thoughts and find a way to give it a score. The way it explores themes of humanity, hopelessness, desperation and family responsibility is unparalleled in recent times, particularly in a game of this type. But inconsistent systems and repetitive combat detract from the experience in a way that frustrates me. It’s clear that this game wants you to replay it to explore different outcomes in its conclusion – and part of me is compelled to do so. But then I go right back to being frustrated that it couldn’t give me a neat, holistic experience of the story in the way I felt I was promised, so I’m torn. If you can take your time with this game and space out the repetitive encounters, I believe you’ll find one of the most complex and raw explorations of what it means to be human, especially in times of desperation, that I’ve seen in a game in quite some time. Or you could just pump up those vampire abilities, and maybe you won’t run into the problems I did – only you can decide if it’s worth the risk.
Player 2 reviewed The Blood of Dawnwalker on PC using a code kindly provided by the publisher.
