In The Blood of Dawnwalker’s Vampire Story, Death Is Not Always The End

The Blood of Dawnwalker's best feature might be that it sometimes takes choices away from you.

In this story-driven action-RPG, you play a vampire, but even the most good-guy vampire ever still has an insatiable hunger for human blood. Sometimes in Dawnwalker, that hunger can get the best of you, even if you're actively trying to resist it. Whether you're talking to your best friend, working to bandage an injured comrade, or battling opponents to save your father's life, when the hunger takes hold, your actions may suddenly be out of your control. Dawnwalker is a game all about making you live with the consequences.

I recently played about four hours of The Blood of Dawnwalker and what I liked most was how much developer Rebel Wolves leans into the possibility of player failure in the game. Well, "failure" isn't really the word for it. Sometimes people die whether you mean them to or not. But ultimately, that's part of the story you're building, and for Coen, your half-undead protagonist, life goes on.

Take, for instance, a story quest in Dawnwalker's prologue, which sets up just how nasty things have become for Coen and his fellow humans in 14th-century Europe. As the Black Death swept through the valley where you live, a group of powerful vampires called the Vrakhiri offered a reprieve--the humans are given the vampires' healing blood in return for their total fealty. 

The quest has you brewing up a potion for your ailing mother, who is so disengaged from reality that Coen and his father are struggling to get her to eat. You need her to be lucid, because tonight is the Blood Mass, when the vampires show up to exact their tithe of blood from the villagers. If your mother is out of it during the mass, the vampires will notice, and they don't leave people they perceive as weak to live for long.

Were you listening to the recipe Anca gave you? Your mother's life might depend on it.

So you head to the local herbalist, Anca, to get something that will help Mom keep it together long enough to get through the mass. Anca tells you to mix three spoonfuls of the powder she gives you into water that is hot but not boiling. But then Anca asks if you want to hang around for a bit so she can continue the Latin lessons you've been having with her. And then a storm hits and a tree falls on the hut she uses to dry out herbs, so you race out and help her gather the stock before they're destroyed.

When you finally get back to your mother some time later, you have to mix up the concoction. Do you remember the recipe? I did, but several of the other people I spoke with at the preview did not. During my story's take on the Blood Mass, Coen's mother lived through the event. In the games played by those other folks, she drew the vampires' attention and didn't fare so well. 

Consequences in Dawnwalker's story aren't just the result of moments like correctly brewing up a drug, though. They're also borne out of its brilliantly executed time mechanic, which forces you to think carefully about what actions you take, and when. You start Dawnwalker's prologue in the morning before the Blood Mass and have several in-game hours at your disposal. What you do with that time is up to you--there are side quests you can undertake all over the place. Time advances when you take on quests, not when you're running around between them, and you're told how long each task will take, so you can make decisions about what sounds important and what maybe doesn't. But crucially, you can't do everything.

Completing quests often requires using Focus to find clues in the environment.

One woman in the village, a seamstress, was charged by the vampires with sewing a banner to display in the church--replacing its cross--but when you find her during the prologue, she's crying out about how the banner was stolen. She entreats you to find the thief, because she fears the vampires will kill her for failing them. So you start searching for clues, using Coen's Focus ability, a sort of detective vision that highlights things in the environment, like footprints or important objects.

I didn't complete this quest, and in fact, failed to do so by accident thanks to another one of Dawnwalker's smart mechanics: Time is also advanced when you level Coen up to unlock new skills and perks in the game's extensive skill tree. Most of those skills require Coen to literally read a book to learn, rather than the ideas just popping into his head as is implied by leveling trees in other games, and reading takes time. So when I opted to stop at one of the shrines scattered throughout the world and level Coen up ahead of the mass, I accidentally chose his improvement over completing the seamstress's quest.

She was right about how the vampires would react. Arriving at the Blood Mass, we were greeted by her body hanging from its rafters, left there as an example to everyone else of the price of failure.

As senior quest developer Patryk Fijalkowski told me, how you spend your time also affects how quests can play out, even if you don't just skip them altogether. In another prologue quest, you're tasked by a farmer with tracking down his brother, Lazar, who you'll discover has fallen into a cave. Hidden in the cave is also an undead mini-boss creature. If you wait too long to go after Lazar, instead of finding him hiding in the cave, you might discover his body, explained environment artist Adam Payet.

Fail to help the seamstress and you'll see how the vampires reward her for her failure.

"Even if you know what's going to happen, and you want to go underground, and you know that there's that mini-boss, and you've got a couple of skill points--do [you] risk leveling up now, [and maybe not leave] enough time for him not to die, or do [you] go under-leveled and just try to beat that undead anyway?" Payet said.

"That friction is what we're aiming at," Fijalkowski added.

But Dawnwalker's coolest demonstration of narrative branching and consequences came later in the prologue, after Coen undergoes his vampire transformation. It happens when a group of villagers head to a local silver mine to gather metal they can turn into weapons to mount a resistance to Vrakhiri rule; not all popular vampire lore is taken as real in Dawnwalker, but its vampires are vulnerable to both sunlight and silver. The Vrakhiri, who are supposed to be off on the other side of the valley, show up in force and kill most of the rebels, but leave several alive in the mine after infecting Coen. It's a sadistic punishment--the Vrakhiri want Coen to wake up ravenous and start murdering his friends.

Through some lucky circumstances, you're saved from immediately killing all your pals, and instead fight your way out of the mine using your cool new vampire powers, which include deadly claws and enhanced speed. Combat in The Blood of Dawnwalker is pretty standard for the genre and has you blocking, parrying, and dodging incoming attacks, then striking when there's an opening. How much blocking and attacking you can do is determined by a stamina gauge that refills over time. Timing for parrying and dodging is important, with windows that give you time-slowed "perfect" versions that let you counterattack and which don't cost stamina, so it's in your best interest to develop your fighting skills just to keep your defenses up. 

You can also set the game's combat to be "directional" to experience the challenge as its developers intended, which adds the caveat that you have to press the right analog stick in the direction a blow is approaching from to block it, and use the direction to dictate how you'll swing your sword to try to find openings in an opponent's defense.

Once you get the hang of it, The Blood of Dawnwalker's directional combat system is intuitive, but fights are still tough, especially early on, since enemies hit pretty hard. In vampire form, Coen can heal himself by drinking blood, and you can do that with a special attack that has him quickly appear behind an opponent and sink his teeth into their neck. But the ability has a fairly long cooldown, so you can't rely on it to survive.

After you escape the mine, you can pursue the other vampires back to town, or you can divert to a burning building up on a hill, where Vladimir, Coen's best friend and the leader of the rebels, fled in the confusion. The Vrakhiri's soldiers have him trapped there, and if you kill them, Coen will try to convince his friend that it's safe to come out, in spite of Coen's vampire transformation.

After a few dialogue choices, I managed to talk Vladimir out of the burning building, but the battle with the two tough soldiers--one of whom had been, effectively, a mini-boss--had left me desperately weak. Crucially, Coen's health bar is also his hunger level, and that bar is split into two main chunks. If your health is over the middle line that separates them, your hunger is under control. If it's under it, Coen starts to struggle.

Once Coen is transformed into a vampire, his hunger can influence him in conversations.

In conversations in which you're hungry, a new option appears when you have choices: "Give in to the hunger." And the hungrier you are, the more the other choices on the menu move and flicker, sometimes disappearing or switching positions with each other. "Give in to the hunger" might suddenly flash from the third position on the list to the first, catching you off-guard when you're trying to choose something else.

But if you're hungry enough, the choice can disappear altogether, and I had only barely won the battle with the soldiers. I never had a chance to mess up picking a response to Vladimir after I talked him out of the burning building. The hunger overtook Coen and he attacked and bit the man, murdering him, before I could do anything about it. Whoops.

It was a great moment, where my fighting ability conspired with my vampire nature to change the outcome of a story beat. Fijalkowski and Payet told me that this moment was somewhat atypical, though--the developers don't want to routinely punish players for being bad at combat by making them rage out in conversations. So you won't be regularly thrown into conversations right after a fight, and instead will have the ability to initiate conversations yourself, which gives you time to maybe hunt around the area for a few small animals you can drain to sate your bloodlust. But managing your hunger is still important, and it's something you'll need to keep an eye on, lest you find yourself losing control.

All in all, it seems like a lot of people can die in The Blood of Dawnwalker as a result of choices you make, actions you take, and unforeseen consequences. The last two hours or so that I played took place after the somewhat more linear prologue, opening up into Dawnwalker's open world, where you're free to explore and address problems as you like. Your main goal is to rescue Coen's family from the castle where the Vrakhiri are keeping them, but you only have 30 in-game days to do so. The general idea is to use the time to gather allies who can help Coen in that final assault.

You'll need to figure out how to deal with each of the Vrakhiri lieutenants.

Dawnwalker maintains its narrative freedom by working on a framework that's reminiscent of Shadow of Mordor. In that game, the story had you working to take down a number of lieutenants in order to weaken and draw out tougher Mordor leaders, and all those parts worked more or less independently of one another. The same looks to be true here, both in that you can take part in quests and activities that will anger members of the Vrakhiri and draw them out, and that the story is made up of a series of smaller, discrete goals and chunks. 

This is how The Blood of Dawnwalker allows you to get so many people killed, whether on purpose or by accident. Your goal is to get to the Vrakhiri castle and save your family, but how you end up there, and with whom, is pretty open-ended. If you "fail" a quest or "accidentally" eat your best friend, it might affect how you go about attacking the castle, but it doesn't change the fact that you eventually will. If you eat the wrong guy and it closes off your ability to complete a quest, you just move on to the next one--or maybe to another approach to that quest.

"When you have this sort of approach, it's kind of freeing that you can kill everybody, because at the end of the day they are not permanently needed for you to experience the story," Fijalkowski said. "You experience a different kind of story, but it will still be coherent and whole."

You might talk your way through a situation during the day, or murder your way through it at night.

Fijalkowski and Payet explained that a lot of quests can be pretty malleable, and how you approach them changes depending on when you approach them. Coen isn't just a normal vampire--thanks to some supernatural shenanigans, he reverts to his human form during the day, and only becomes a vampire at night. That gives you options for how you take on problems. As a vampire, you might infiltrate a stronghold by using your powers to climb a wall or teleport to a window, but you'll be attacked on-sight. As a human, you can talk your way in, convince people to help, lie or use guile to get what you want, or help people to get them on your side.

Functionally, the human/vampire dichotomy means that the Dawnwalker experience balances a lot of different elements. Human Coen fights with a sword (although you can pull your sword as a vampire) and unlocks a different set of abilities to use in battle. You also can't heal by drinking blood during the day, which means you have to rely on items like food if you get into trouble. The combat system is largely the same when it comes to parries, dodges, and strikes, but feels a little different depending on what weapons and abilities you're wielding.

But more interestingly, the balance of human and vampire means that, just because a quest went badly for Vampire Coen, that doesn't mean Human Coen can't pick up the pieces--or vice-versa. Some actions and deaths will lock out pathways and quests, but not all the time; Fijalkowski said the developers don't want players to necessarily feel punished for their choices. So while you might kill someone who was important to a certain quest, there are often other paths you can discover that might let you complete it.

Managing time is a big part of the Dawnwalker experience--you'll need to pay attention to how long quests take, and think about when you want to undertake them.

All in all, The Blood of Dawnwalker seems like it offers a ridiculous amount of flexibility in how you can play it and how its story can shake out. Once you have access to both human and vampire forms, quests have lots of different ways they can go. 

More than anything, my The Blood of Dawnwalker experience was one of consequences, both foreseen and unforeseen. From which quests to pursue, to when to level up, to whether you're at risk of eating someone important, it's a game that's constantly giving you choices to make, and in the moment, a lot of them feel like they might be life-and-death. The Blood of Dawnwalker releases on September 2 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.