Vampire: The Masquerade has been around for a very long time, originally as a tabletop board game, but also has history in the video game world. With the huge hit “Bloodlines” back in 2004 to even “Bloodhunt” the online battle royale game that just released mere weeks ago. With Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong things are a little different as far as gameplay goes. This one developed by Big Bad Wolf Studio and published by Nacon, rather than getting an RPG experience, you’re dealing with a more conversational and investigative approach. An approach that while very different, may also be something less interesting to today’s gamers.
The story of “Swansong” is actually very convoluted and not even friendly to those unfamiliar to the franchise. The characters speak as if you already know everything that’s going on and there are dozens of different factions and specific terminology that can easily go over your head. To counter the confusion the game thinks having a codex in the menu explaining all of its lore to you is enough for you. To some maybe it is, but I often felt like “Swansong” does a lot to try to keep newcomers away and only appease fans of the IP. Although, even as a casual fan myself, I often don’t feel like they succeeded appeasing almost anyone. You play as three characters; Emem, Leysha, and Galeb. All of which have their own unique abilities to help with the overall mystery of the story. Galeb is older and has better conversational experience, Leysha can turn invisible and go into places that may be off limits and so on.
The game is sectioned off into scenes, with each scene there are actually three different story threads from each character. Scene one doesn’t end until you’ve played with each character. While playing you will run into multiple conversational situations that depending on how you develop your different skill trees could go in a more positive or negative direction. The leveling system and skill point system is a bit of a mess here, seeing as how there is so much to choose from and you’re not really sure what will be more useful for the character going into the next scene. There is no combat whatsoever in the gameplay, so these skills are all conversation and investigative based. Most of the game plays out like an overly complicated version of a telltale game with over-bloated dialogue that can sometimes really kill the pace and test your patience. Which is a shame, because when the story picks up near the end it’s quite good… assuming you haven’t made terrible decisions along the way.
A mechanic that is also fairly unique, but also just adds to the overall convolution is your willpower meter and hunger meter. You will run into instances where you can choose a specific line of dialogue that may benefit you in the future, but will cost you some willpower. Sometimes if you make the right choices, you are rewarded some back. As far as hunger goes, there will be obstacles you can overcome easier but will cost you to be hungrier, if you max out your hunger you will risk doing something stupid and hurting somebody you shouldn’t have. To bring the hunger back down you will need to feed on a human in privacy, which sometimes can be easy, other times trickier. There is also a meter while feeding and if you drain the human of too much blood you could kill them by accident which will raise suspicion. By raising too much suspicion your skills become penalized. That’s the thing with this game, there is so much going for it, but it can be so convoluted and the narrative really struggles at helping you know your needs for further scenes. Decisions you make early on could have terrible ramifications way later to the point you have forgotten that happened or known if it was even an issue.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong seems to beg the player to give it repeat playthroughs, but I often wonder if gamers would even stick around to finish its first one. The puzzle solving can also be obtuse and overly complicated, leaving you wandering around for a while before you finally figure out a stupid little thing you needed to continue. The game isn’t short either, it may take you over twenty hours to finish, mostly due to its overstuffed dialogue. While the voice acting is quite good, the padded dialogue really stands out like a sore thumb. The character animations as well are severely undercooked. Everyone is stiff and walk/talk like robots, there is no proper sync with the dialogue and the movement of mouths. As a fan of the franchise, I constantly gave “Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong” more passes than I should have as I played through it. Many of which I know many won’t be nearly as forgiving for.
So, while my experience was more-so an okay to good one, I know for a fact I was letting too much bad stuff slide. My personal score would be closer to a 7 out of 10, but I need to score it more pragmatically and at the very least take off another point. I do give them props for trying something a bit different, there are so many ingredients here that should have worked, but most felt like half-measures rather than full-ones. I’m hoping “Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2” isn’t too far off, because this world is very rich and worth exploring. If you feel like you may have the patience for “Swansong,” don’t say I didn’t warn you.
6/10
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Gaming since I was given an original Nintendo as a kid. I love great storytelling and unique ingenuity. When both collide in a single game, I'm a happy gamer. Twitter/IG @NickNavarro87
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