Overview: 4.0/5.0
Vampyr is an action-RPG where the player assumes the role of Dr. Jonathan Reid, a newborn vampire (Ekon) and well-respected surgeon in 1918 London. The player must balance medical ethics with the need for blood, while also trying to cure London of the latest flu epidemic and solve the mystery of their own transformation. Piece of cake, right?
Developer: DONTNOD
Genre: RPG
Release Date: June 5, 2018
Platform: Nintendo Switch (Also available on PC, PS4, & XBOXONE)
Price: $49.99
Mechanics
The most fascinating mechanic in this game is the way in which difficulty is configured. With the default settings, as you kill citizens and become a stronger Ekon, the difficulty of combat decreases. This is a logical explanation for the RPG mechanics in place - experience points and leveling up. I first started Vampyr when it was released for PS4, but was almost immediately discouraged by the difficulty of combat and the plethora of stat bars and controls for attacks. Soon after release, they announced that they’d be adding a story mode, and soon after that, they announced a future release for Nintendo Switch, so I decided I would revisit the game when those two releases were available. In theory, I love this approach to difficulty and XP. In practice, I am terrible at combat with lower difficulty settings enabled for other games, and chose to use Story Mode for my playthrough. However, I do think that players with more RPG experience would enjoy this approach to difficulty.
Vampyr is primarily focused on talking to citizens and crafting - crafting weapons, serums, and medicines. By talking to citizens, completing quests for them, learning their secrets, and curing their ailments, the player can increase the quality of their blood, and therefore increase the XP gained from killing those citizens. The player will need to drink blood in order to survive, but can choose the source of this blood. The player can choose if they kill citizens, and which citizens those are, or sustain themselves by only biting adversaries in combat or even rats from the sewers and alleyways of London.
I spent a LOT of time chasing down citizen quests and chasing down citizens to cure them. The game provides a list of citizens and identifies those with ailments. However, the player must rely on their own memory of where specifically each citizen can be found. There is no way to track a specific citizen on the map, only quests, so I spent hours wandering around the various neighborhoods when I couldn’t remember where a specific character was. The game also has no fast-travel ability, and walking across the map only to find out I forgot to unlock a gate from the other side the last time I was in Whitechapel did get frustrating. The map isn’t particularly large, but it did feel expansive, especially when the only usable (see below) mode of transportation is walking.
Narrative
I do not typically prefer RPG/combat-heavy games, but I could not resist the allure of another DONTNOD choice-driven narrative. DONTNOD excels at making the player aware of their choices throughout gameplay, and presenting the player with choices that represent larger ethical questions but don’t have clearly-defined consequences. This game is no exception. There are a handful of significant events throughout the game where the player has a meaningful decision to make, typically to kill, turn, or spare a pillar of the community. In some cases, additional options are made available based on the player’s interactions with others in the community or the player’s skill levels. Like previous DONTNOD games, it’s not always clear which choice is the “best” one. [Spoilers ahead.] Spare a man and suddenly there are cult activities in his vicinity. Forget to level up for half the game and suddenly you’re woefully unprepared for a boss fight with the sister you thought was dead. Well, ok, it’s pretty clear that not leveling up is going to bite you later. Pun very much intended.
However, after spending so much time finding and curing citizens and struggling to keep the districts from crumbling into decay, I was disappointed in not seeing the end result of that work. The mechanic of curing citizens does reinforce the narrative very well. The player feels the constant threat of illness, which seems to return the moment you turn your back. Even when all citizens in a district are healthy, its status hovers just above serious and the player never truly feels at ease about the state of the city. There is so much focus throughout the game on these district statuses, that the ending of the game felt incredibly abrupt. The player cannot even review the ending status of each district, or view a summary of citizens saved/lost, etc. I believe that most of the choices in the game had effects, some more subtle than others, but the inclusion of some sort of review at the end of the game could have made a big difference in making those consequences felt.
OH. And can we please talk about the female partner-slash-love-interest that’s not only a sex object? Love it. Lady Ashbury is a character with depth, who contributes meaningfully to the plot, and who happens to be a woman. But her gender is only addressed in the context of sexist exclusion, and she is dressed elegantly and femininely without absurd cleavage. It is so sad that this is such a remarkable achievement.
Environment
Who doesn’t love early-20th-century London? The imagery for this game is lovely, even with the quarantine barricades and frequent corpses in the street. The graphics do feel a bit dated, even to the point where I might guess that this game came out before the Life is Strange franchise. The character models in particular feel a bit stiff, and frequently conflict with other items in the environment. Something about Jonathan’s eyes is just unsettling, and not in an oh-I-get-it-he’s-a-vampire kind of way, since no other character’s eyes look that way. Regardless, the atmosphere is decidedly old London, and is supplemented by a fantastic soundtrack.
Performance
Technical performance is not at the top of my list for evaluating games. I generally only notice if it interrupts gameplay. For the most part, this game runs well on my Nintendo Switch. However, the load times were significant, and occasionally the game paused to load at odd times - in the middle of combat, for instance. The game also seemed to require load time time to “catch up” after any attempt to run for more than ten seconds, so it was ultimately more efficient to walk everywhere.
Summary
It took me two attempts on two systems and a lot of play time to complete this game, mostly due to my inexplicable need (and ultimate failure) to cure every single citizen and my lack of combat skill. However, I sincerely enjoyed the unique and successful execution of RPG mechanics in this type of narrative. DONTNOD continues to make innovative narrative games on their own terms, and the results speak for themselves. I’m looking forward to returning on a new save file to wreak as much havoc as possible and see how it affects this version of London. And now I’m desperately wondering what The Council could have been, if DONTNOD had executed it instead.
Welcome to the rollercoaster of emotions that you would expect from the finale of Life is Strange: Before the Storm. In case you were craving a few hours of whiplash between heartbreak, turmoil, anxiety, adrenaline, affection, and heartbreak again, Deck Nine has your back.