Normally before I do my reviews, I do a little research on the game. This time, however, I just jumped right in because I felt the name gave the story away. Vegan and Vampire are two words that simply don’t go together, and, well, the developers at Digitality Games definitely showed players that. Voltaire is seen eating broccoli and is immediately ostracized and left to fend for himself. I will say that I was impressed with the opening cutscene of Voltaire: the Vegan Vampire. I’m always thoroughly surprised whenever indie games from smaller companies have voice acting, so that’s something I really appreciated – even if most of the game didn’t have it.
Apart from the opening cutscene, the game’s style and the environment reminded me of a more kid-like, Don’t Starve. By this I mean the animations, enemies, and story are a lot softer, which I appreciate as Don’t Starve to me was a difficult game. The game is still very much task oriented, and there are a lot of tasks.
To start, there’s a crow that sends you missions from Voltaire’s uncle Frank and Stein (a little joke on Frankenstein). Those dialogues are always fun just because of the cute little banter between both Uncles. The missions themselves aren’t too hard either – if anything they lagged behind my actual progress in the game. I may be wrong, but I feel like most players will explore and interact with a majority of the map before progressing very far in the game. I had figured out that I needed to actually sleep to progress the game, built a well, and used soul stones before the missions had even told me to. Not to say I did it all at once, but I do wish the missions kept pace with the player a little better.
Aside from that, I like the attention to detail with Voltaire and the plants. You can go around the map collecting seeds to plant which will restore your hunger – which is something I’d say you need to do every day. Voltaire’s hunger depletes extremely fast without any buffs to him – everything he does costs around 5 hunger – so working on that is essential. Of course, different plants will restore different amounts of hunger to him; some plants also have additional buffs such as speed boost for a day. Some plants don’t restore any hunger to him at all and serve offensive purposes only, which I had to learn the hard way after my first day restart. Had I been paying attention, I would’ve planted them earlier, but I thought all the plants were to restore hunger. I also didn’t realize that the Veggiepedia tells you what type of enemy each plant attracts. It took me almost an hour to realize why some nights I’d have really hard mobs and other times I’d have easy ones. I guess the payoff for plants that give more hunger is fighting harder mobs.
The last thing that I think is worth mentioning is the boss fight. I think I had to fight him around 3 or 4 times because I couldn’t figure out how I was supposed to kill him while defending my house. This is because all the mobs usually come through the walls/gates and onto Voltaire’s property, but the boss just circled it the entire time while also sending smaller mobs inside. I did figure out how to beat him eventually, which was satisfying. I’m just really glad Voltaire, himself, doesn’t actually take any damage – just his crops and house. Otherwise, I feel like surviving every night might have been extra hard. Oh, and before I forget to mention, I thought it was pretty cool being able to potentially reset the skill tree or continue with it if something just wasn’t working out. Although I never used it myself, I could see where it could potentially be helpful – even if you do lose more loot as a tradeoff.
With that being said and sitting down with this game a little bit more, it definitely gives a mix of Plants v. Zombies and Don’t Starve. I’m not sure if either of those games were inspiration for the developers, but the vibe is definitely there. Safe to say, I enjoyed the game, especially playing during the night and fighting the mobs (even if they did destroy my crops).
Check out the Voltaire: the Vegan Vampire Trailer:
Voltaire: the Vegan Vampire for PC via Steam Early Access. and the Epic Games Store.
Related: Reviews by Maryanne Fadonougbo
"I've enjoyed gaming since I was little, playing games like Pokémon, Rayman, and Naruto every day. Besides that though, I've always had a love for writing. Now I am combining the two for the best of both worlds! My ultimate goal is to do narrative design for video games."
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