I have twelve days left. One dead Vrakhir to show for it. Brencis is still sat in his castle absolutely loving himself and my family are almost certainly done for. This is entirely my own fault and I am having the time of my life.
The Blood of Dawnwalker is the first game from Rebel Wolves, a studio founded by Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, the director of The Witcher 3 alongside a load of other ex-CD Projekt Red talent. You play as Coen, a half human half vampire trying to save his family from the vampire lord Brencis and his three lieutenants in the valley of Vale Sangora before thirty days run out. I have been playing for a while now. One lieutenant down. Twelve days left. The maths is not in my favour and I have made peace with the fact that this is probably going to end up as a revenge story rather than the rescue mission it was supposed to be.
Let me talk about the time mechanic first because it is the thing I had the most complicated relationship with. When Rebel Wolves announced that time would pass with every quest and every decision I immediately started catastrophising. What if I go the wrong way. What if I miss something important. What if I run out of time before I have seen everything the game has to offer. I really hated it at first. Like properly resented it. And then something shifted and now I think it might be one of the smartest design decisions in an open world RPG in years.
Here is why. Most games like this make everything available all the time and nothing has any real weight because you can always come back to it. Every quest becomes a box ticking exercise. Go here, do the thing, come back, get the reward, repeat until the credits. Dawnwalker forces you to actually decide what matters to you and only do those things because you genuinely do not have time for everything. I have stopped doing quests I am not interested in. I have stopped going to markers just because they are there. Every hour I have spent in Vale Sangora has been an hour I actually wanted to spend there and that feels genuinely radical for this kind of game. My terrible time management is nobody’s fault but my own and honestly I love that about it.
The story has me completely hooked. Vampire fiction is my absolute weakness. Always has been. I think vampire stories are just the best, there is something about immortality and hunger and the slow erosion of humanity that I find endlessly compelling and Dawnwalker understands that instinctively. Is it doing anything supremely new with the genre? No honestly it is not, the beats are familiar if you love this stuff as much as I do. But it does them with such confidence and atmosphere that I do not care even slightly. Brencis is a properly unsettling villain. The valley feels genuinely oppressive. Coen’s push and pull between his human grief and his vampire nature is exactly the character work I wanted from this.
The combat took me a long time to warm to. A really long time actually. The parry and directional block system is beautifully designed for a one on one fight where you can read an enemy carefully and react precisely and feel genuinely clever for doing it. The moment you are facing a group of three or four things simultaneously though, and all of them are hitting you from different angles, it starts to feel like the system was not quite built for that situation. The early hours involved a lot of dying to groups of enemies in ways that felt slightly unfair before I worked out what the game was actually asking of me. Once it clicked it clicked properly. But the learning curve is steeper than it needed to be.
The one thing I wish was in the game is stealth. I am a creature of the night. I can climb walls and leap across rooftops and Shadowstep through darkness and I cannot sneak past a single guard. That does sting a little. I get it though. Building a genuinely good stealth system on top of everything else Rebel Wolves were already doing would have been an enormous undertaking and stealth in this genre almost never works properly anyway. I understand the call. I just wish it was there.
The world is gorgeous. Vale Sangora is one of the best open world environments I have explored in a long time, dense and grim and full of places I actually want to go to rather than just markers telling me I should. The night and day cycle changes how the whole place feels completely and the vampire powers at night make traversal an absolute joy once you have a few of them unlocked.
Now the bugs. I have to talk about the bugs. Five PlayStation crashes across my playthrough. Fallen through the map four times, two of which happened at moments that made me want to put the controller somewhere it was not designed to go. Some performance issues that come and go with no obvious reason. Rebel Wolves are patching and things seem to be improving but at launch this is rougher than it should be. If I am being honest and only looking at the technical state of it I struggle to give this more than an:
But here is the thing.
It is a vampire game. A proper, gorgeous, bloodsucking, creature of the night vampire game that had me completely hooked from the first night cycle to the current moment where I am twelve days out with almost no hope of saving anyone and fully committed to making Brencis pay for it instead. One extra point for letting me be a vampire. Obviously.
So…