Vampire: The Masquerade – Coteries of New York Review for Steam

Vampire: The Masquerade-Coteries of New York is a visual novel by developer Draw Distance where you try to navigate vampire politics and build up a network of vampires to rely upon. For those of you who have never heard the term “visual novel” before, it is essentially as it sounds: it has static pictures accompanied by words that say what is happening in the scene with the occasional opportunity to pick a decision/path for the characters to follow. At its best, this can create a novel where every decision has an impact on the story, resulting in multiple different endings. This game is not one of those games.

While Vampire: The Masquerade-Coteries of New York has 3 different main characters to choose from, your choice of character only really changes the game’s opening hours and the inner dialogue of the main character. Everything else is more or less identical between the 3 characters.

Each night you usually have 1-2 opportunities to create or strengthen a bond with any available contact. While these interactions have choices available in them, it seems more like there are some “wrong” choices that end the relationship between you and the contact, while not picking a single “wrong” choice ends with the character joining your social circle. However, the only noticeable effect of gathering contacts is on the game’s ending and even then, it just decides who helps you out of one situation that arises in the game’s final hours. It just feels weird that a game with gathering social contacts as the focus ends up with said contacts playing little—if any—role in the story as a whole.

In fact, many of the game’s choices feel inconsequential. There are the occasional “wrong” choices that result in the death of the main character and a game over, but for the most part, the game’s story appears to stay on the same path regardless of what you do. In a way, I suppose this makes sense; you’re supposed to be dealing with puppet masters that have been pulling strings from behind the shadows for centuries, outsmarting them should be hard/impossible. That being said, as the choices don’t seem to matter, once you finish the game the only things left to see are the social interactions with contacts you missed the first time through. As it is a “visual novel,” it is like a book; no matter how many times you read it, the story doesn’t change. While I realize that most games have a fixed ending, a visual novel only offers choice as a form of gameplay. To have even that taken away reduces this to being the same as a digital book with pictures.

The only reason I can see for someone picking this up is for the story. Not to say that the story itself is bad, far from it. It takes place in the universe of “Vampire: The Masquerade,” a rather old game series. Organizations present in the previous games play a part in the story in this game. My main problem is that Vampire: The Masquerade-Coteries of New York feels like it is simply setting the stage for another game—hence the fixed ending that so bothers me.

While I didn’t enjoy my time with this game, I understand there are people who enjoy visual novels. As such, I think a fair rating for it is 7/10.

Check Out the Vampire: The Masquerade-Coteries of New York Trailer:

Vampire: The Masquerade-Coteries of New York is available for PC via Steam.

For more information, please visit: https://drawdistance.dev/vampire-the-masquerade-coteries-of-new-york