This Game Sucked – Vampyr (Review)

Vampyr.

Not vampire, Vampyr, is a vampire game from2018.

A vampire game that I had very high hopesfor, probably too high hopes.

The trailers looked good, I loved the atmosphere.

It set a dark, moody tone.

London, 1918, in the middle of a citywidepandemic.

Is that too topical right now? Don't worry, this one has vampires.

Unfortunately Vampyr is not a very good game.

I hope that sets the mood well enough.

Mind you, I certainly tried very hard to likeit because I was truly looking forward to this game initially and even after I had realizedthere were too many problems for me to give it a thumbs up, I kept playing because I hadhit my sunk-cost fallacy point of no return, I had to finish the game.

I put around 48 hours into Vampyr at thispoint which is 1 hour more than I put into Sekiro and I LIKE Sekiro.

At the same time, I was hoping that perhapsthe ending or at least latter half of the game would redeem the entire playthrough.

And it never did, it just made things worse.

It was extra frustrating because the gamedid everything ALMOST right.

They were ALMOST there but didn't manage togo all the way.

Certain things they did do well.

The music in the game is fantastic, it's soatmospheric it really sets the tone well.

And when you walk around 1918 London the settingitself is also marvelous.

If only they'd put more detail into what theyhad I firmly believe I would have loved this game.

As it stands, I do not.

I'm going to tell you why this game is notvery good, but I'm going to be all in-depth about it so first, for those of you who aren'tinto spoilers, here's the why in short.

It's not very engaging, the conversationsare dull and somehow it all still manages to be confusing without having that crazy”I'm a vampire” feeling.

It looks nice though and definitely had alot of untapped potential.

I won't start the review off with spoilersso you can keep watching a little longer if you like, I sure would, but I'll give youmore than ample warning when we get to spoiler territory.

So let's begin.

I've lost touch with the real! I'm aware that a lot of people really likethis game.

I actually played the game at release andI raised a lot of eyebrows for not liking the game.

And I'm sure I'll get a lot of angry commentson this, very late review, as well.

Yes I know this game came out ages ago butI'm not exactly known for jumping onto any new thing in a timely fashion.

If you love this game, you will hate me afterthis review.

And that's ok.

But maybe after I tell you why I don't likethis game, you'll at least see my point of view and only tell me to walk off a very smallcliff where I only break a few bones and not straight into the Grand Canyon to my imediatedeath.

So step by step, we'll start with, the combat.

Ever since I played this game all the wayat release, two new difficulty modes have been added.

One that's easier than the original difficultyand one that's harder.

So for the sake of this review I dragged myselfback into the game to replay it on the hardmode to see how much of a difference it would make.

My original playthrough was done on what'scurrently known as “normal” mode.

I went with the pacifist route as I usuallydo in games where that's an option.

Playing the game in this way is meant to makecombat harder from the get go so I suppose in a way, I picked hard mode anyway.

That's because in this game your combat skillsare determined by how much blood you suck and the only way to suck blood aside fromthe occasional quest completion and the like, is to kill people.

Literally suck them dry.

So I decided against that and went withoutlevelling up for the majority of my playthrough.

By the time I reached the final boss I waslevel 25, compared to my hardmode playthrough where I decided to go full crazy vampire modeand kill anyone and everyone humanly or inhumanely possible, where I was level 50.

Which is the max level but apparently you can still get points even after that.

I literally doubled my level and here's thekicker, I played that hardmode in the single most shallow way possible.

Let me explain blood first for that to makesense.

In Vampyr any person that isn't a vampirethemselves has a few important stats.

First, their mesmerize level.

This can be as low as 1 or as high as 5.

Doctor Reid, that's the player character, also has a mesmerize skill and depending on how good at hypnotizing he is, he'll be ableto lure his victims away to a secluded area to suck on their blood, bla bla bla.

The weaker willed the person, the easier itis, you get the idea.

Next there's their blood quality.

As you might've guessed, the better the bloodthe better the experience sucked out of them.

Some people are sick and that makes theirblood worse and some people you aren't personally acquinted with and that means their bloodis also worse.

Yes, that's right.

If you don't know a person well enough ona deep personal level then their blood will become bad.

Why is that? No one knows, vampire magic probably.

That means that if you want the most out ofa single victim you'll have to make sure they stay healthy and you'll have to get to knowthem.

We'll get to how that works later but at leastnow you know the basics of blood.

So when I say I played hardmode in the singlemost shallow way possible, what I mean is that I didn't cure any of the sick and I didn'tunlock any of their personal hints.

I didn't know a thing about anybody and theywere all dying of the plague.

My level 50 vampire was still, technically, underlevelled for the amount of people he killed.

And it didn't matter at all.

The thing about the combat in Vampyr is thatinitially it will look flashy.

In your levelup tab you have a few options.

You can upgrade your health of course butalso the amount of blood you suck in combat and how much damage that blood sucking does, yes they're seperate stats.

You can also upgrade how many items you cancarry and most importantly you can pick new skills entirely.

Like bloodshields or bloodclaws.

And the bloodclaws look very cool until yourealize that it's all you really need.

Because the combat is ridiculously easy.

I want to make sure I don't understate this.

The combat is ridiculously easy.

Until it's annoying.

Not hard, don't mistake it for hard.

Just annoying.

The most trouble I've had in the game wasa boss I tried to take on while I was 13 levels below them which meant she was able to one-shotme.

When you take a good long look at the talentsavailable to you, you'll soon realize that first of all, you will never really have enoughblood available to constantly spam more abilities than just the one of your choice alongsideyour heal and your ultimate ability.

Each ability has a bunch of upgrades availableand before you finish maxing those out, unless you are going for a full aggression playthrough, you won't even really have points left to invest in much else.

Here's those skills.

Autophagy, I probably mispronounced that horribly, that's basically your only way to heal, you will max out this skill and yes it costs bloodto cast.

Then there's Body Condition and Physical Prowesswhich increase your health and stamina respectively, you want to max those out too that's a no-brainer.

Blood Capacity increases the amount of bloodyou can hold and Big Thirst increases the amount of blood you absorb in combat usingyour bite ability.

Definitely get those maxed.

Hard Biting increases the amount of damagedone through bite which, you're going to be biting quite a bit so you might as well andFast Regeneration increases your life regeneration when you bite.

Those are all passive skills and all of themare an upgrade no matter your playstyle.

That's a lot of points gone already.

Let's make it simple, you will want to getthe offensive ability Claws and the Ultimate: Abyss.

And now I'll tell you why.

You have two aggressive resources, staminaand blood.

On practically any single enemy, any singleone, you can apply an easy stun tactic.

You have an actual physical weapon in yourhand that you can attack with but it drains stamina, you have Claws but it drains blood.

You can find weapons, very easily I mightadd, that absorb blood as you attack.

Can you see where I'm going with this? You start by mashing your regular attack untilyou're out of stamina, then you use Claws.

While the enemy is stunned and while you usethe ability your stamina regenerates, yes really.

That means right after using Claws you cangenerally continue attacking with your regular weapon again and most enemies aren't thatsturdy unless you go wildly out of your level range And guess what, if this ridiculous stunlockcombo doesn't work for you, each enemy, aside from some bosses, in fact I think it's justthe final boss, is stunnable.

Not just momentarily knocked back by claws, properly stunnable.

You can stun them and drink their blood too.

And guess what, again, if all else fails youcan just use your Ultimate.

Abyss.

Glory be.

Because Abyss is so dumb it even works onthe very final boss.

And this ability is a straight up three orso seconds long stun during which you can go to town with your blood absorb weapon.

Or stun them really.

It's really that stupid.

Does that list of “things to do” sound complicated? Trust me, if you've played the game beforeyou know it's not.

And I've played the game before and I knowit's not.

I went in completely blind and I figured themall out easily and quite frankly I'm not that imaginative so I'm sure there are other peoplewho figured out even easier ways to deal with combat Now a criticism I often hear about this sortof gameplay is “well, if you only use the cheesy abilities of course you won't havefun”.

But I have not one but two responses to that.

Firstly, if you give players this option soreadily, so easily, do you really think anyone's going to go the other route.

Intentionally nerfing oneself? Most people wouldn't, you have to activelythink to yourself: “you know what, I won't use those abilities, they're just too powerfuland it would make the game too easy”.

And that's also not fun, that's very silly.

Secondly, I've tried the other abilities.

One of them, Coagulation is also pretty stupidI might add, but most of the others are straight up boring or very, very bad.

Abyss is by FAR the superior ultimate as Rageis practically useless on bosses and Blood Cauldron, while also fine, is just as boringas Abyss.

Your character stands there and does somedamage then moves on with life.

It does not change your gameplay in the slightestyou're just going to take slightly longer killing the thing.

The majority of the other abilities that Ididn't mention are defensive like invisiblity to get out of combat or a ranged attack thatisn't worth bothering with.

The other abilities aren't just worse they'realso equally boring to my original playstyle.

And if you want to combine several of theabilities to perhaps create something interesting you can't most of the time because they allcost blood so instead of weaving interesting attacks through your regular melee jabs youjust sit there wondering where the hell all your blood went.

The worst thing is, you can't really skipfights in an area you're questing through.

You can't open doors while you're being attackedso if there's a group of random guards surrounding the one door you need, you have to fight throughthe whole lot of them just so you can open the door behind them that they didn't haveanything to do with in the first place.

And don't get me wrong, at the beginning Ithought the combat was pretty fun, the problem is the repetition.

If you want to make fights feel like theymatter you have to make sure they're different each time and none of them feel like they'rejust there “for the hell of it”.

And practically every single fight in Vampyrfeels that way.

There are a few boss battles of course andsome of them are interesting, but even then, those boss battles get rehashed time and timeagain when they show up as regular foes after the fact.

Not to mention that sometimes the foes aremagnetic, apparently.

Why are you lying to me? The combat isn't fun.

It's a chore.

But surely the rest of the game isn't.

Well it certainly isn't banking on the dialogueI can tell you that much.

Vampyr was created by DONTNOD Entertainment.

The same DONTNOD that created the originalLife is Strange, a game I thoroughly enjoyed despite the ending and the sometimes veryawkward popculture references.

It's still one of my favourites to this dayfor multiple reasons.

However, at this point I almost feel likeit was a fluke.

Because Vampyr's writing was awful and I didn'treally enjoy Life is Strange 2 either, don't worry I won't bother you with that one.

Vampyr's writing is so impressively dull thatI started skipping dialogue altogether.

If you've ever been to one of my streams you'llknow that, that isn't something I do lightly.

But when I say each NPC had the same questionnaireI really am NOT kidding.

Ok so, age and name? 15, Mick.

Occupation? Bootblack.

Bloodtype, diseases and where do you see yourself in ten years? What's this about sir? And why did you give me a random medicinefor something I probably don't even have.

Goodbye! ————————-As Jonathan Reid you are apparently afflicted with a hyper-fixation on people's occupationsand their life in London after which you will inevitably ask everyone a series of personalquestions.

Every single conversation with an NPC thatisn't directly involved in the main story is just a glorified exposition dump and nothingmore.

Yes I am Mister Person.

My job is Sweeper.

My life in London is Garbage and I have anaffair with the Lady from the fishery, thanks for finding out, my blood now tastes yummy.

And yes, because there is only a single London, every single person says the exact same thing when you ask them about the situation in London, making the entire dialogue option EVEN more pointless, outside of the fact that we alreadyknow the situation is terrible without even having to ask anyone.

Even when a character had a moderately interestingbackstory or a secret worth finding out they weren't really worth knowing about becausethose characters would have no significance to you as a player after finishing that veryshort questline.

And that wouldn't be too big of a problemif it wasn't for the fact that the characters themselves left about as much of an impressionas a helium balloon.

As it stands their only use is to be bloodbags.

Juicy, experience filled bloodbags.

The quests they send you on aren't generallyvery interesting either.

I'm not even sure you can call them questsas such.

Sometimes you'll find items around town thathave some kind of significance to a certain person.

Finding the item will either unlock a newdialogue option or you'll simply be able to bring it to them so they can tell you aboutit so you get to know them a little better.

And outside of the fact that these conversationsare generally just very bland, I don't mean to rag on the voice actors here I'm sure theywere doing their very best to pull something out of this script, something that just wasn'tthere.

The choices you, as a character are allowedto make are also odd in terms of how your character actually voices said choice.

So you see, I'm just more of a chocolate than a vanilla kinda gal.

Hmm .

.

how to respond do this, such choices.

.

I suppose chocolate's fine.

It's not my favourite, but I can certainly compromise on your statements.

INCESTUOUS HARLOT! Jonathan Reid has a habit of becoming strangely forceful for no reason whenever he's tryingto get anywhere with any given person.

You'll be having a rather calm conversationone minute but the next you choose a dialogue option that apparently landed in the “aggressive”spectrum and Doctor Reid flies straight off the handle because he didn't agree with theprostitute's slogan “The plague sucks but I suck better”.

It's incredibly jarring when your voice changesso strangely in the middle of a conversation only to go back to your previous tone oncethat particular dialogue option has concluded.

And this is just as strange when it comesto NPCs and the way they react to you throughout your playthrough, things get wildly inconsistant.

During my first day in the hospital you'reassigned to at the beginning of the game, I awkwardly shuffled passed everyone in thehospital in plain sight, victims in front of my outstretched-obviously-mesmerizing handsbefore I murdered said victims, leaving their bodies for anyone to find on the hospitalfloor.

Nobody bats an eyelid, still.

Not even the doctor who brought me in, knowingfull well that the moment he brought a new vampire into the fold, suddenly people starteddying.

Boy, I wonder what the correlation is! (Nobody tell him) As I shuffle off with yet another victim someonein the background loudly proclaims: The hospital is so lucky to have Doctor Reid you know! Nobody calls me out, nobody treats me differently.

The people that didn't trust me before, stilldon't trust you and the people that didn't care, still don't care.

That statement becomes even stranger whenyou realize that this game has a system in place that's intended to punish the playerfor killing innocent humans.

I say innocent humans because throughout thegame you are in fact killing regular humans that are part of the quote unquote “enemyfaction” left right and center.

Apparently, even though these people do thinkthey're serving the greater good and all they're trying to do is protect the population fromvampire attacks, we're happy to slaughter them at will.

And there really aren't any options to dealwith them in a nonlethal way like knocking them out or putting them to sleep throughvampire powers.

If you go wild and kill most or even all ofthe NPCs in a certain district, that particular zone will be overrun.

And there are a few problems with this.

There are four districts present in the game.

The Pembroke Hospital, where you start, thisdistrict is practically impossible to turn hostile because it's your main homebase andyou basically need at least one of the NPCs there to finish the game.

The Docks, Whitechapel and West End howeverare all ripe for the ruining.

When checking out any given district there'sa health bar on the left of the screen that tells you how well the district's doing, inother words: how many NPCs are still alive.

If NPCs are sick, they'll start dying offon their own, but you can also simply go out and kill them of course.

And that isn't all, each district also hasa pillar of the community and if that one dies the district's health will plummet.

They're all part of the main questline aswell so it's honestly pretty easy to accidentally kill them without during said questline.

And this game does not allow you to manuallysave, you'll have to download mods for that, so if you mess up a reaction you simply losethe pillar.

Remember how we talked earlier about how Reid'sresponses often differ wildly from what you thought the dialogue choice was going to be? Yeah, it's very easy to mess this up.

Although granted, the pillar choices in thisgame are probably the best, most interesting part by far.

Now you might think to yourself: “Well ifeveryone dies in a district or even worse, ALL districts, something terrible will happen, right?”.

You would think that but honestly not really.

You can't use some vendors of course and certainquests are undoable because the place is now filled with enemies instead.

That's probably the greatest deterrent forme, even more combat.

But otherwise the only true difference isthe ending of the game.

And while that's certainly a big enough dealto some, the game seems to imply that killing people would actively make the game harderfor you when it doesn't really.

Hell you can even completely circumvent mostof the trouble it gives you, which is really just the extra enemies, by waiting until you'veprogressed far enough through the main quest to reach mesmerize level 5, at which pointyou'll be able to kill every single possible NPC in town.

In fact, if you want to personally kill everyone, you kind of HAVE to do that because if you only kill a few people, then go to sleep forthe night, there's a good chance the rest of the district will fall into ruin overnightmeaning the NPCs all disappear along with their juicy blood.

Because time only moves if Reid sleeps.

But no, otherwise when it comes to the storyoutside of purely the ending, nothing really changes after a district falls.

No one makes mention of it, no one's concernedabout the districts around them falling rapidly, no one even wonders about your outdoor questingin said districts as a doctor.

Sure the place is overrun and you don't haveaccess to some people, but in games like these where they so clearly focus on the charactersand the story I would've expected there to be more narrative changes and less “now killmore things”.

You could say that most of the characterscould assume it was simply the disease doing its work but as this is a videogame, a storydrivenone no less, a small change in tone depending on how the districts are doing wouldn't havegone amiss.

Quite like the man yelling about the wonderfulDr.

Reid when we first arrived in the hospital, just a line while you walk through the hospitalhalls would've sufficed.

“I really feel the walls closing in on uswith so many people disappearing lately.

” If things are going badly, or: “I think wehave a fighting chance, we're going to make it!” if you manage to keep most if not allof the districts healthy.

When it comes down to it, that isn't eventhe weirdest thing for people to not comment on.

As you play through the game whilst drinkingat least a little bit of blood, you can see very obvious, visible changes in Jonathan'sface.

I am so obviously a vampire for most of myplaythrough it's actually upsetting but no one seems to ever make mention of it.

Hello fine sir, I am definitely not a vampire! That is until you meet a member of the PriwenGuard who immediately recognizes you as being a vampire by glancing at you sideways once.

You might say: “Well, he's a vampire hunter, of course he would know.

” You can't tell me that regular, non-vampirehunter people don't notice when the whites of your eyes have turned completely and utterlyblack as they had in my hardmode playthrough.

Someone at least gulp when they start a conversationwith me, I'm really not asking for that much.

As it is, the world feels very static, likethe characters themselves.

I can excuse most graphical sacrifices, usuallyanyway.

But in the case of Vampyr the facial animations(or lack thereof) are actually incredibly jarring.

You ought to report to Dr.

Swansea in his office, he's been looking for you.

Seemed pressing.

Yeah and she just looks straight up into the camera Look at her face, look at her face! She's like: You should find him.

Seemed pressing.

Like she doesn't care, she does not care.

Yeah I'm sorry but everyone's facial expressions are just this: I am excited.

Oh boy.

Oh now I'm afraid.

I am now overcome with joy.

You seem nervous! Are you certain? You seem nervous.

So nervous you lost your eyebrows! Sorry, my face is tired from dealing with everything.

Everyone keeps telling you about their variousemotions but none of them ever show it.

I am angry, they seethe at you in a blandtone of voice, as their eyes maintain the exact same shape they always have.

The only part of their faces that seem tomove at all are their mouths and sometimes they make very funny faces because of that.

They're also definitely overcompensating forthe lack of facial movements by making the NPCs sway their bodies all over the placewhenever you're trying to have a conversation with them.

Good evening Ello!Did I .

.

come at a bad time? What are you on about?I'll eh .

.

.

come back later.

.

.

There are a number of other, admittedly, nitpicky things that started bothering me throughoutthe game as well, though some of them I'll have to make note of during the spoiler partof this review.

The main thing that started to really pushitself to the forefront though was the lack of consistency in the world itself.

A person would tell you one thing and do another, items would be in wildly strange places and Jonathan wouldn't bat an eye.

If you've ever played the Witcher 3 and perhapseven watched a documentary or two on the game then you might've heard some of the developerstalk about how much time they spent in trying to make sure that the world made sense.

When you ran into a small hut in the fieldswhere two poor farmers lived, that hut wouldn't be stocked with food, no matter how much moreinterested they thought it would've looked.

Those two poor farmers, who already had aterrible harvest that year, would not have had access to several sausages strings swayingon the ceiling.

There wouldn't be any bread or ham sandwichesin their pantry.

In Vampyr however, they seem to have gonethe complete opposite way.

So you steal from the dead then.

That is correct.

So watches, broches, necklaces, wallets, that sort of thing? Exactly like those very solid items thatare definitely not chemicals.

Alright let me see your stock.

Got some eh, white phosphorus, codeine, opium, sodium hydroxide You might think that's an exaggeration but unfortunately it really isn't.

You see the pawnbroker steal wallets and watchesand when you walk over to check out his inventory you expect to see said items for sale so youcan take them apart for materials.

But no, the man sells nothing but a list ofchemicals.

On the same list of “things that don't makesense”, we find Doctor Reid prescribing medicine to anyone who asks willynilly.

In fact, they don't even have to ask.

Yes, we are a doctor and we can probably seta probable diagnosis but that doesn't mean we're literally God.

It's partially explained by “I'm a vampireand can see if people are sick” but it's honestly a pretty damn far stretch, because you stillhave Reid ask the patient about his symptoms.

Free drugs from an English doctor.

(Bronchitis? Hm.

) It must be my lucky day.

That was an expensive medicine! How can he say he doesn't need anything? Goobye Mr.

Petrescu.

Also just the fact that my medical analysis goes: “Hey, how do you feel?” “I feel tired.

” “Here, bronchitis!” Apparently: “I am very tired” translates to:”you probably have bronchitis”.

Of course the game requires you to be ableto set a diagnosis fast because otherwise how are you going to keep your district healthy, but the way they go about it is honestly a little ridiculous.

When it comes down to it, I feel like thegame could have benefited tremendously from having less characters around but going moreindepth with the ones that are there.

As it stands, every single NPC has their ownlittle questline that isn't very intriguing, they all have their own very samey dialogueand they all have wooden faces.

More time spent on the details of each characterwould've done the game a world of good.

They also don't have an ounce of subtletyto them.

I was never torn between decisions when itcame to killing or not killing a person.

The only reason I didn't really kill anyonesave a single person on my first playthrough was just because, well, I'd decided not to.

But it was pretty obvious who the bad peoplewere in this game.

They literally tell you to your face.

If you're quick and cautious you'll be able to avoid the.

.

.

savages.

No! When I need a checkup, I'll go to a bloody doctor.

Not some back-alley clinic full of sick foreigners! Why don't you just give me the option to punch him at least? Just, just give me the option! I'll deal with the consequences! But give me the option to punch him! And your only recourse is to either straightup kill them or to let them do their thing.

After you do eventually kill them they geta little “last thoughts” monologue where they try to make you feel bad for killing them, except that it never works because the game has turned every single one of them into amoustache twirling villain.

None of them seem to have any regard for theirown life in this case either.

There's an even better example of this inspoiler territory but at the very beginning of the game there's a man you meet near theHospital who had just been in a fight and was on the verge of dying.

You can help him of course but he insultsyou almost immediately when you approach him.

And I don't mean insult you in a “stay away from me” kind of way, no he basically says “hey, dickface, help me right now or else”.

Or else what, you're dying.

No sane person would go about asking for helpthat way.

The guy's a criminal so that's one way toexplain it but criminals generally also don't want to die.

A final note on the quests in general beforewe hop into the spoilers.

As said, you can pick up smaller quests inthis game outside of the main story.

Those quests mainly revolve around pickingup an item here and there and then bringing it to the designated person who will thentell you their lifestory.

Riveting as that no doubt sounds, quite afew of them can be picked up before you can even finish them at all because you can'tgo into the area that holds the item.

This is something you're going to run intooften even in general.

Certain doors are arbitrarily locked off becausethe story requires you to take a different entrance so an event can trigger.

That's all fine and dandy but it makes sidequestinginfuriating.

One door will have opened earlier but nowit's closed because the main quest said so, it'll open a quest or so later but you won'tknow that until you try.

It also doesn't help that when you open yourmap to set a custom marker so you know where you're going, you can't do so anywhere nearthe selected quest because the cursor magnetizes to the center of the area where that questis.

Like so.

Ok, if you don't know what I'm trying to do.

I'm trying to put a marker over.

.

.

Over.

.

.

OH MY GOD LET GO! I'm trying to put a marker just above it so I can go to the, to the alleyway but.

.

.

Ehm.

.

.

Eh.

.

Yeah.

.

.

The power of Christ does not just compel me, the power of Christ is making my cursor.

.

.

Magnetize to the side.

If I just, if, if I just do it very ca-, I'll just, how about just the entrance? How about, how about D'OH MY GOD! Small things like these are the reason I couldn'tever truly immerse myself into the game.

They stacked up and every time I thought Iwas on a roll something would happen that ticked me off momentarily, immediately knocking me out of the moment.

Oh and, on the list of most minor of inconvenienceis the translation as well.

DONTNOD is a French company so their gamehad to be translated to English and that didn't always go as well as you'd hope.

Spelling and grammar errors are all over theplace which is a bit of a showstopper when you're streaming and trying to read a letterout loud only to run into the weirdest set of words you've ever seen shoved into a singlesentence.

I wouldn't normally have much of a problemwith that if it wasn't for the fact that generally games get playtested before release and Ifind it difficult to believe that no one caught on to this.

Because there are so, so many of them.

I've lost touch with the real.

Right, that's all I have for the non-spoilerterritory.

If you haven't played the game yet and wantto go in entirely unspoiled then this is the moment where you will want to bow out.

I'll give you a moment, you might be holdinga very hot cup of tea.

Have you set it down.

Alright, alright close the window.

Good.

Let's get on with the main story.

You play as Jonathan Emmet Reid, a doctorfresh from the war, here to visit his sickly mother.

Alas, your fate was intead to be bitten bya vampire upon making it to the city proper.

He's left for dead in a mass grave where hewakes up, thirsting for blood.

Unfortunately for him, the only nearby sackof blood is his dear sister Mary who had come out to this specific place looking for you.

You immediately jump her and suck every bitof her blood in seconds after which she also immediately dies, falling to the floor whilewearing the expression of most of the still alive NPCs.

Jonathan at this point gives her the lightestof all pecks on the lips.

I need you to remember this point, we'll getback to that.

Straight away the Priwen Guard, vampire hunters, find him and Jonathan has to run for his life until he finds a knife at which point youstart murdering them without any issues.

Mind you, we don't drink their blood becausethat would be useful and we're trying to hold on to our “most wasteful vampire in London”title, we just slash them to pieces.

In the meantime we figure out that the sunburns us, the Guard is made up of very dumb, very deaf people and that touching thingsapparently gives us a short history of the object itself, except it doesn't always dothat only when the story says it should.

On the topic of visions, Reid keeps hearinga voice in his head who tells him an odd little story about a Red Queen but he doesn't knowwhat it means, except that this voice is the one who bit him and turned him into a vampire.

Reid tries to shoot himself and technicallysucceeds but when he wakes up in the morning, realizes he's not dead even after a directshot through the heart and so Jonathan's quest to find out who bit him begins.

The Guard found him again and the runningaway restarts until he makes it to a different district and the relative safety of a localbar where our good doctor starts asking random questions about everyone's lives and the goingson in the city, including the random murders taking place everywhere.

He meets a man called Doctor Edgar Swanseaof the Brotherhood of Saint Paul, the Brotherhood being a group that likes to research vampires, in a room upstairs who can answer some questions about his current situation but not all asEdgar is also here to investigate the situation to begin with.

So Reid is back to square one.

Until he eventually finds out that a man calledWilliam Bishop had visited the bar as well and he wasn't looking so good.

Strangely enough, everyone could tell thatsomething was up with mister William Bishop but when Reid turns into a full on vampireno one bats an eye.

Regardless, Reid follows the trail of murderuntil we find William who is seemingly feeding on a man called Sean.

Here's the weird thing, William had apparentlybeen feeding on Sean for a while now, just taking a little bit of blood every so oftenwithout actually killing him, yet, at least.

But we as Doctor Reid can never do that becauseof reasons unknown.

This is but the first of many broken rulesin this game.

Another wildly strange detail that's probablyinteresting to note is the absolute state of this area.

The place is littered with corpses.

A lot of them are stuck on stakes in a veryVlad the Impaler type fashion.

Others are just heads on sticks, there's awild amount of them.

Never, even once in this game is this explained.

The vampires we meet don't generally stakethings at random for aesthetical purposes.

The smaller, crazy vampires we meet are seenstraight up eating entire bodies on the ground.

But apparently this newly turned tiny manis really into immitating a Transylvanian count for no reason other than “I bet it looksgruesome you guys”.

There is literally no point whatsoever.

Especially because it doesn't seem like he'skeeping a snack for later as he's begging Sean for more blood when we find him.

And Sean, right after saving him, even saysthat William wasn't evil he just needed a drink.

As he sits there, surrounded by mutilatedcorpses.

Anyway, we save Sean after which we in turn are saved by Doctor Swansea on a boat whoinvites us to work at his hospital where, just before we actually enter the hospital, Reid learns how to mesmerize people so he can more easily drain their blood.

At this point we're also more or less informedthat no famished hunter can run for long.

Implying that if we don't drink blood we'lleventually just die.

We even find a note later saying basicallythe same thing: “They need blood to function”.

I'm going to go ahead and tell you this rightnow, that is a lie.

You can go the entire game without drinkingeven a tiny sip of blood.

There are zero consequences for not drinkingany blood save that you won't get as much experience but as we've gone over the combatsystem before, that really isn't a problem at all.

Reid gets to know the people around the hospital and the various other places we can alreadygo, as well as you can get to know a cardboard cutout, after which you analyze the bloodyou picked up from William Bishop, learn that it was a pointless endeavour and then we goto sleep.

In the morning he brings up his completelynon-existant “thirst for blood” again as Nurse Dorothy comes in to tell you we're all outof antiseptics so Reid goes out to an old morgue to alchemy up his own antiseptic whichis the first of his many miracles.

Upstairs we find Doctor Swansea holding askull in the most Shakespearean fashion possible who tells us about a certain Lady Ashbury, the Hospital's main benefactor, who needs the help of a vampire, but Lady Ashbury isalso a vampire except that someone else knows this and is blackmailing her.

We're tasked with finding out who the blackmaileris so of course we go off to ask the local gossip, Harriet Jones, who behaves like ahaughty princess and gives us absolutely no useful information whatsoever except the questsays that she did because now we know of a mysterious man visiting the hospital at nighteven though really Harriet only complained about the nurses being whores and carryingSTDs.

She tells you that she's sure one of the nursesis sleeping with someone but if you've done an earlier sidequest, which I did do duringmy playthrough, you already knew that Pippa Hawkins was sleeping with Milton, a vendorhanging out outside.

Reid doesn't ever actually bring this up andgoes straight to asking the nurses about “the strange man visiting one of the nurses duringher shift”.

But the only reason this questline existedwas so you could go out to look for Nurse Dorothy Crane who is in fact doing some shadythings on a boat just outside of the Hospital in clear view of everyone, might I add.

Game, if you were going to put a sidequestconcerning a nurse sleeping with a man in secret BEFORE a main story quest where wehave to ask about a shady man meeting a woman in secret at night, maybe you should haveinstead NOT done that.

The only reason this main story quest worksis because of apparent luck and if you're wondering, no that's not very good writing.

We didn't figure out the mystery of the manvisiting at night in secret because she wasn't being very secretive and the man technicallydidn't even visit the hospital.

How would Harriet Jones have even seen thisman visiting the hospital if their meetings happen on the water just outside of the Hospitalshe's in.

Anyway, we find Dorothy doing deals with a shady character and learn that she too posessesthe power of teleportation.

She j- ok, she yeah I'm pretty sure she's a vampire because she LITERALLY DISAPPEARED! LITERALLY! Like, at least make an animation that she's just boating away! But she's just like: Oh, well, I better magic my way outta here.

We follow the man who disappeared into the sewers but he was unfortunately killed bythe Sewer Beast, a wolf vampire who lives in the sewers.

But at least we find out that Nurse Craneruns a “free medical check-up” service for the poor in Whitechapel.

So we go to check it out and find Darius Petrescuacting as a doorguard for Crane's little medical clinic so we have to find a way to convincehim to let us in, which we do by eavesdropping on Darius and Nurse Crane.

They bring up a poet and a journalist whowander around the place a lot and each of these give you information you can use totalk Darius into letting you in.

When you go back to him you'll also noticethat you have the option to mesmerize him except that you don't because he requiresmesmerize level two and at this point in the main story you cannot have mesmerize leveltwo because it requires you to get past this particular quest.

Actually maybe they didn't playtest theirgame afterall.

You might think that's a petty thing to complainabout but this particular problem really puts the game's lack of polish on display.

This mistake on its own is not a problem, but it's this problem on top of many other smaller problems that make the game seem likean unfinished mess half the time.

DONTNOD at this point is no longer a tinyindie studio.

They made Life is Strange and it was verysuccesful and more importantly, it didn't have all these tiny mistakes bothering melike pinpricks throughout my playthrough.

And now with more budget, somehow they rushedmore than they did on their first game.

Leaving in silly, very obvious mistakes, likethis one.

Anyway, we convince Darius to let us in byusing logic that we would've probably used without knowing anything about the guy aswell and proceed upstairs where Dorothy Crane is struggling to keep a patient alive.

She asks for help and you can either be me, who doesn't know any medical terms and is not a native English speaker, or you can bea doctor who knows the English terms.

I let the guy die because I don't know whatquinine salts, a tracheostomy, thoracostomy, epinephrine or an intercostal artery is nordo I know what it means to “suture the artery”.

And then she gets mad at you for trying butit's ok because we get to take some of his blood for analysis.

We still have to confront her however becauseshe is in fact the blackmailer even though there isn't really any direct evidence ofthis except that she's helping the poor in a less than savory manner.

So really what Nurse Crane should have saidwas “what blackmail? I have no idea what you're talking about, how on earth did you come to that conclusion” and she could've talked her way out of itpretty easily.

But she doesn't do that, instead she heapssome more prejudice onto my character just like everyone else in this game, assumingthat we're stuck up and prissy and spoiled even though we're clearly not and she shouldknow this because we told her we fought in the war and even made a makeshift medicineout of whatever we could find in the nearby morgue when the hospital ran out.

But hey, we're stuck up nobility now and that'sthat, I guess, because Crane forgot that we've interacted before in any way shape or form.

You now get to choose how you will deal with Nurse Crane's blackmail.

You can spare her which will see her continueher work but move her blackmail crosshairs onto someone else.

You can embrace her which simply kills herand leaves the entirety of the Whitechapel district without medical aid.

Or you can Charm her which was my choice inmy first playthrough.

The charm option seems like the best ideabut it's actually the worst.

It's also a choice that you're required tounlock before you're even allowed to choose it and it means Jonathan will use his vampirepowers to make Dorothy forget everything about Lady Ashbury and the hospital she works in.

How did Jonathan suddenly learn to do this? We don't explain these things just acceptit.

However, doing this will result in Crane becominga husk of her former self, eventually turning into one of the crazy, mindless zombie typevampires, called skals.

These choices, the pillar choices if you will, are the most interesting part of Vampyr and I wish with all my heart that there was moreof this in the game.

Because these choices have an actual impacton the world around you.

People comment on it having happened.

Darius has to move out of the makeshift hospitalbecause it is now inhabited by skals and he's vocally bitter and resentful towards Reidwhen you find him again.

I felt quite bad for having picked the wrongchoice honestly.

It would've been incredibly cool if, aftera district fell, the NPCs that you didn't directly kill would come to the hospital district, instead of just getting crossed off the list as dead.

They could mope around the halls or sit againstthe outer walls of the building, casting suspicions on Reid or just generally being upset aboutthe state of their district.

That would've added so much life to the world.

No pun intended.

Regardless of your choice, the Priwen Guardbursts through the door to kill the patients in their beds because that is clearly howyou go about exterminating vampires, a lot of people definitely don't have bronchitisor the flu in this game, no they must've all been vampires.

Very justified murder right there.

Reid moves himself back to the hospital toconfront Lady Ashbury with the new developments only to find her sucking a man dry.

Of blood.

Until he's dead.

When you call her out on that behaviour shejust gets snarky with you even though really you have every conceivable right to be angrywith her instead.

Instead of simply explaining things rightaway or at least saying that she can explain, she just tells you she's embarrassed you caughther raiding the fridge at night.

The crazy thing is, Reid does seem to be okwith this.

After first being upset for about two dialoguechoices he literally skips into: “Anyway, I have concluded my enquiries concerning yourblackmailer.

” As if he didn't just see her bite a man todeath after specifically sending Jonathan out to stop a blackmailer who was, in fact, telling the truth.

And now we're happy to take vampire historylessons instead of pursuing this particular line of questioning.

And no, you don't get an option to have Reidsay: “You know, I'm a little uncomfortable with you killing people, please elaborate.

” You can ask her if Swansea allows her to killbut that's the extent of it.

And he's calmer in asking that than he iswhen asking the local waitress about their daily specials.

She explains that she only feeds on thosewho are already dying but again, game, Jonathan doesn't have to drink any blood throughoutthe entire playthrough if you simply choose not to and he's doing quite alright.

You get to ask Ashbury some questions now, about vampires, of course.

And, let's go over some vampire names firstbecause like many vampire-based fiction this game too just cannot help but give their vampiresnames other than just vampire.

Real, proper vampires like Jonathan Reid arecalled Ekons.

Ekons can make new vampires by having thevictim drink the Ekon's blood but the further down the line you go, the more the blood dilutes.

So Jonathan is a very high up Ekon, he canmake a new Ekon easily but then that Ekon can maybe create another decent Ekon but THATEkon will probably make a really shitty vampire.

That really shitty vampire that barely evenhas any real vampire blood is called a skal.

Then there's also different races of vampirelike the Vulkod who are just really big vampires but there are also Vulkods that look likewolves but use the stock bear roar sound effect when they attack and there's speculation thatbeast Vulkods are what Skals are to Ekons but the Priwen Guard calls all of them leeches.

And vampires as a whole prefer to refer tothe entire family tree as “Immortals” but the really, really important vampires thatare even better than Ekons are referred to as Elders or Ancients.

Is this needlessly complicated? Yes, probably.

The main most important point I need you tofocus on however is that to create another vampire, one must drink of the vampire's blood.

Here's the thing, Jonathan didn't do that.

We see in the opening scene that a vampirebites Jonathan and then we see him wake up in a mass grave.

Biting is apparently not part of the turningprocess whatsoever so first of all, what was the point of that bite in the first place.

Secondly, did he pull Jonathan's jaw openoffscreen so he could pour some blood in? If yes, then that's pretty bloody poor storytellingon the game's part.

How did Jonathan then get the blood in his body? Did, did the guy just knock me out? And then open my mouth and poured in some blood, swallow it! And then left? That seems a bit convoluted! Spiked his drink? They had art for everything but they couldn'tadd a single one where Jonathan drinks some Immortal juice? Instead we had one of a bite that didn't needto happen? This isn't the only time this becomesa problem however, oh no, let's move on.

So at this point, Lady Ashbury basically confirmsthat I was created by an Elder because only the powerful immortals can mentally call totheir progeny.

She also mentions that my creator has beenpretty cruel to me so far but those are honestly the main takeaways here.

We leave to analyze the blood from Crane'slost patient and develop a new theory on how the vampiric condition is transmitted throughthe flu which, isn't entirely true and isn't entirely wrong, but he goes to talk to Swanseaabout it anyway.

He's very excited about vampire blood in generalbut he also has the unfortunate task of telling Doctor Reid that his sister, you know, theone he killed at the start of the game, is about to be buried.

So we attend the funeral without being seenand have a bit of a breakdown until Ashbury shows up again to share some kind words thatamount to “I think you should just go to church honestly” and off we go to confess our sinsat church, only to be interrupted by a Vulkod called Fergal Bansha telling us to stop drawingso much attention because the Ascalon club doesn't like it.

The Ascalon club is a powerful group of vampireswho like to tell everyone else what to do.

And I think he was serious because not a momentlater my game crashed into a fatal error.

We finally make it to church and confess thatwe're very upset about our dead sister.

Apparently that was all we wanted so off wego back to the hospital but again we're interrupted, this time by the voice in our head who ofcourse is also our maker.

He actually appears before us this time andwe confirm that he is in fact my maker.

So now Jonathan has doubly confirmed the originsof his vampirism.

Keep that in mind.

Our maker likes riddles and he literally willnot speak a single straight sentence to us in one go.

He seems to imply that Jonathan was made avampire because he needed him to fight the current epidemic however and tells him thathe should seek the truth.

Reid is supremely confused by the whole thingand goes to meet his surrogate father, Swansea, again.

Swansea already has a guest however, the leader of the Priwen Guard, who isn't happy to see us.

He was here because the hospital was attackedin our absence.

There are injured patients which makes themdouble patients I guess, one dead and several missing.

Let's backtrack here to the non-spoiler partof this review.

When Jonathan Reid first entered the hospitalon my hardmode playthrough I killed everyone I could possible get my hands on at that pointin time.

Far more than just a single person died thatnight but no one cared even a single bit.

Now, a single person died and there's a fewmissing and everyone's up in arms about it? I wasn't exactly stealthy about it either.

Sure the game made me mesmerize my targetsbehind a bookshelf but I still left their bodies on the floor for anyone to find.

Not to mention that regardless of how carefulI would be (I wasn't) about hiding the bodies, that would still mean people had started todisappear.

So which is it game? Do you care about the hospital patients andstaff dying out or don't you? Swansea is actually more concerned about the public image of the hospital and if this newsbroke it could “ruin” them.

How? There's an active plague sweeping over thecity and you're the only open hospital as far I can tell.

What are they gonna do? Get a doctor's degree themselves before theykeel over dead? There's tents outside of the actual hospitalbecause we don't have enough beds inside to keep everyone comfortable, even though, youknow, most of the inside beds are empty for some reason but that's a whole other can ofworms.

If you need extra beds outside of your wallsI don't think you're wanting for patients as it is.

You're also running low on medical suppliesand your main benefactor is a vampire lady who doesn't give a shit about your reputation.

So what is the actual problem.

More blood for the blood gods I say, or inthis case, Ashbury, who might as well be your blood god given that she funds the whole place.

The dead lady is Harriet Jones, she isn't actually dead but they don't know this yet.

Instead, Doctor Edgar Swansea thinks SeanHampton was the culprit because he's also missing.

And now the Guard thinks the hospital is abreeding ground for vampires.

So Jonathan skips off to the docks to findSean and figure out what's going on but we're having a hard time finding him and all thewhile we're finding more mutilated bodies.

When we do eventually find him it turns outthat he is in fact a skal except he still seems to be in complete control of his actions.

He also now, suddenly knows that I'm a vampireeven though he's never had a clue before.

I guess vampires can smell other vampires.

He explains that he sees this event as a blessingbecause he can now walk amongst plague victims without problems, he also doesn't need todrink blood he only needs to eat flesh and it doesn't have to be living flesh either.

Sean denies having killed Harriet Jones tooso to prove it he gives you a key to the sewers where he says we'll find all the proof weneed and if after our trip there we still believe him a threat, we can come back andpass judgement as we like.

Once in the sewers we find Fergal again andhe's crushing innocent skals, with his unrendered graphics, presumably.

We defeat him and move on tofind Old Bridget, a skal who fosters a community of skals that are all lucid, just trying tolive their best lives in the sewers.

Bridget explains the Ascalon club to you andas it turns out they're mostly about gathering money and oppressing skals.

We also ask her how some skals like her andSean don't go crazy but her answer is “because the plot demands it” so that doesn't reallyget us anywhere.

Harriet also lives in the sewers now as avery, very one-side bloated skal.

The conversation we have with her is weirdto say the least.

She says people tried to feed her but she'sjust not hungry, but then immediately tells us that she'll be good as long as the peoplehere feed her and she will not shut up about how wronged she's been and how much no onecares about her.

Another strange note to make is that it seemslike Sean Hampton has always known about the sewer skal network because when Harriet pulledhim out of the hospital with her, he was the one who brought her here as well.

Bridget also tells us that “The Sad Saint”, meaning Sean, had always been kind to them.

So why didn't Sean recognize us as a vampirebefore in the hospital? Was he just trying to keep a secret? And if he already knew about all this, whydidn't he bring William to the sewers right away? Conclusion, Sean's a weirdo.

We learn that a shadow apparently killed all the freshly murdered people and that saidshadow hates Doctor Reid.

Upon returning we find Sean eating some fresh meat waiting for us to return and judge him.

Somehow our first question isn't “whose fleshis that?” but we proceed to make another pillar choicenot long after sitting down with him.

Sean seems very ok with the life of a skalso you can choose to spare him however, Sean is actually extremely wrong about the safetyof his condition.

Soon after leaving, Sean will infect the restof the shelter he works in with his vampirism and he himself will lose his mind and turninto a violent skal instead.

What's weird about this choice is that Seanshould've realized what was happening rather quickly and he'd have had ample opportunityto go live in the sewers instead or at least ask Bridget for help.

But no, he just goes crazy.

If you embrace him to death the district willbe very upset but at least no one seems to immediately die.

The option I picked was turn which causesReid to order Sean to drink his blood and this largely heals Sean.

He continues doing his thing and he doesn't need to eat fresh meat anymore which is nice.

Right after walking outside, another corpsegets dumped on the street but this one is carrying our mother's brooch so of coursethis requires some more investigating.

In the man's house we find a trail of bloodwhen we follow the trail all the way to the graveyard whilest jumping through some hoops, we finally find the church's Vicar sitting in the middle of said Graveyard.

Turns out, our sister is now a vampire, weturned her and she's very angry.

So angry she has kidnapped our dear motherand threatens to kill her too as she did with all the victims across town.

Ok.

That's a lot to unpack so, first of all.

She claims I turned her and brings up a kiss.

Let's just rewind back to the beginning wherewe killed our sister.

Stop, right there, that was our kiss.

Here's the problem with this entire bloodyscene, pun very much intended.

The blood on Jonathan's mouth at that pointwas not Jonathan's.

It was Mary's, you know, the person whoseblood we just sucked.

And even then that blood would not havebeen “drank” by Mary.

We gave her the tiniest peck on the lips.

Later on in this story we also turn someoneinto a vampire but we literally barf half a pint of our blood into his mouth and makevery sure he swallows the whole damn thing.

Mary did not drink our blood, I'm sorry, butshe didn't.

Even if you say that she somehow ingestedthe tiniest bit of our blood, somehow, that would not make her a vampire this powerfulbecause the game has already established that the amount of actual vampire blood in yoursystem matters.

Not to mention that the further down the vampirelineage line you go the weaker the vampires get, you know, the whole skal explanation.

So it would follow that we, Jonathan, as thesupposed creators of her, Mary, would be vastly more powerful than Mary to begin with.

Doctor Reid took quite some time to build up his powerlevel in the first place and weeven had some form of guidance and a safehaven to rest and build our strength.

We witnessed Mary's funeral not too long agomeaning that apparently she hadn't turned yet by then and she mentions having to clawher way out of her grave afterwards so how in the flying vampire fucks did she get thispowerful this fast on mediocre blood and zero percent guidance.

This game refuses to follow its own damn rules.

And as a total aside, she's also missingher damn leg graphics.

Ok moving on.

We kick her back into her grave after shekills the Vicar midfight and vow to find a cure for this vampiric plague.

After a good night's sleep we're invited toLady Ashbury's mansion to discuss the increased activity from the Guard of Priwen and a secondaryinvite for Jonathan extended to him by the Ascalon club.

When we enter her house we tell Lady Ashburythat whoever our maker is, he must be a powerful vampire.

I'm not sure why we're being vague about itbecause well, we've now met the guy already, but alright.

Ashbury then asks us how we got to that conclusionwhen she was the one who actually, quite literally, told me this near the very start of the gamewhen she told me not to speak of the voices to anyone for fear of being hunted for hispowerful blood.

But the game's forgetfulness does not end there, oh no.

Jonathan then has the option to ask Ashbury if it was her who made him.

(Yep, I said her in the voiceover) You know, the same question he asked her atthe beginning of the game and she whole heartedly denied it.

And now she does it again.

Shockingly.

Oh and also we're in a relationship now because boy do we have chemistry I guess.

Due to the lack of facial expressions in thegame it's pretty difficult to tell if someone is actually showing you any emotions at allbut she puts Jonathan's hand on her heart and tells him to look at her and now they'rein love.

Because he literally touched her heart, Iguess.

Pun absolutely intended.

We're off to the Ascalon club to meet LordRedgrave who is apparently also the offspring of a very powerful vampire called WilliamMarshal.

He's lying about that, by the way.

Without asking too many questions, Reid decidesto join the club through an extremely 10 year old-boys-making-their-boys-only-club-esqueritual after which the whole room starts chanting “One of us! One of us!” only barely swallowing “GoobleGobble” at the end of the sentence.

This particular club meeting is also attendedby Aloysius Dawson, not an immortal but one of the many “I'm very obviously a scumbag”characters in this game.

He's also the pillar of the current district, West End.

Reid asks him if he joined the club to becomean immortal himself which he fiercely denies, even though he cannot stop complaining abouthis impending death.

He's also very, very rich and wants to builda wall to keep the poor out.

Yes he's that type of guy.

Also yes, Doctor Reid asks Redgrave twicewhether he knows I killed Fergal and then we ask him twice whether that will be a problembecause this game just bloody loves to repeat itself so why the hell shouldn't I do thesame in its review.

And when we go outside.

I kid you not and boy I really, really wishI was kidding you.

When we go outside, Reid has the audacityto mutter: “I think Lord Redgrave just suggested I was sired by an ancient vampire.

” In case you were keeping count that's theTHIRD time someone's told the good doctor that he was sired by an ancient vampire andequally the THIRD time we're somehow surprised by this information.

Our investigation now leads us to the streetsof West End where we find out that there's a particular house that's been highly suspiciousfor a while now.

When we go to investigate two seperate houseswe find skals in each of them, all infected by a woman named Doris Fletcher who we canfind at her acting school.

At said school we find out that miss Fletcherhas been spitefully infecting everyone in the theater and planned to infect as manyother people as she could.

She, however, wasn't the first infected either, no, that was her mother.

Harriet Jones.

Yes the one from the hospital, the one thatnow sat in the sewers with the friendly skals.

We defeat Doris and she sets herself on firejust in time to miss the Priwen Guard barging in once more so Reid has to run for his unlifeagain, back to the Ascalon club to tell them what happened.

Lady Elisabeth Ashbury is also there becauseshe is and Lord Redgrave really just pats us on the head and then asks us to turn AloysiusDawson into a vampire.

You know, that guy who told us explicitlythat he wasn't there to become an immortal.

Apparently he cannot wait to become our progeny.

In any other game I'd give them the benefitof the doubt and say he lied to me or there were schemes afoot but given that Jonathanforgot he was an Elder vampire spawn three consecutive times, I'm inclined to say thegame just forgot about this one as well.

Not to mention that Ashbury tells us outrightthat Mr.

Dawson had spent his entire life searching for a way to cheat death and theydidn't think it was worth bringing up to the man who was about to make him his progenythat he'd been lied to? Calling this one another oversight.

Ashbury also finally informs us that Redgrave has been lying about his lineage and his blood quality is so trash he's only capable of creating skals.

So we, the very powerful Ekon, pay Mr.

Dawsona visit on his deathbed and we have yet another pillar decision to make.

Throughout the conversation he's a prick toJonathan so honestly, my first instinct was to kill him outright, so I did exactly that.

If you kill him you get kicked out of theAscalon club, big deal, they were annoying anyway.

If you turn him into a vampire he becomesthe actual devil himself and does everything he promised he'd do.

That means his own district will stay healthybut everyone else certainly won't and I guess you get to stay in the snobby club.

If you know enough about him you can alsocharm him which makes him turn his life around, give all his money to the poor, healing theentire town and then he dies.

Oh and you get kicked out of the club of course.

I'm ok with my killing option.

Lord Redgrave is very upset with you, veryupset indeed you can tell by his static expression.

Outside you find Old Bridget again who dumpssome exposition on you.

She doesn't tell you this bit yet but I willtell you now, Old Bridget is a progeny of Lord Redgrave, she was his wife and he madeher this skal while trying to preserve her beauty, that's how she knew to tell Lady Ashburythat his blood was trashlevel quality.

Apparently the hunters are making ready toattack the hospital though so we rush back home whilest killing all the very weak Ascalonmembers on the way there.

If you go off to find Lady Ashbury beforereaching the hospital, by the way, you tell her that the hospital was already attackedand they were probably after Doctor Swansea.

So I guess Jonathan Reid the vampire lordnow also has future vision.

At the hospital itself everyone is doing theirusual thing, not giving a damn about anything even though yes, Doctor Edgar Swansea wasbrutally dragged from his office by a group of Priwen Guards.

Reid, being the only person with eyes in thehospital, follows the trail of blood Swansea left only to find Mister Geoffrey McCullumwho thinks we caused the plague but before he can torture a confession out of us historture device malfunctions so we just have a boss battle about it.

When we defeat him we can choose to eitherlet him go or to turn him into a vampire as well.

Coincidentally there is more romantic tensionin this one scene than there is throughout the entire game between Reid and Ashbury.

If you spare him you will find him killingskals at a graveyard later, you ask him for an item you need and he gives it to you whileinforming you that they called off the great hunt, but they still do small hunts.

If you turn him you will find him killingskals at a graveyard later, you ask him for an item you need and he gives it to you whileinforming you that he feels smashing.

Personally, I spared him but the turning sceneis pretty cool so there's that to consider.

Reid decides to go to Doris's theater againto find Swansea.

How does he know he's at the theater, nobodyknows because nobody ever told us.

We just sort of assume he's there becausethat's where we saw them last time and Geoffrey says they found proof there? Just so you know, game, that does not automaticallymean that this is where Swansea is being held.

Reid will not stop telling us about his ancientvampire lineage facts but the game couldn't spare a single line for Reid saying: “Hm, McCullum mentioned the theatre, could they be holding Swansea there?” As it stands, Reid's just tapping into hisclairvoyant abilities again without telling us and it's not ok.

When Reid reaches the theatre he even mentionsthat the Priwen Guard made this place their new headquarters after they invaded whichvery much sounded like a surprise to him too.

Within the theatre we find out that this gamedoesn't have any rules concerning their infection rate but I guess at this point that's almostexpected.

We find Swansea tied to the ceiling, severely beaten.

He tells us he was tortured for informationand false confessions, he's very much on the brink of death but thankfully he still hasthe time to dump a wild amount of exposition on us about William Marshal.

Likewise, we dump a bunch of exposition onhim too, about Harriet Jones and Doris Fletcher whose name is actually Doris Jones.

After our wild flailing the good Doctor Swanseaadmits to having experimented with vampire blood in an effort to cure Harriet Jones.

He used Lady Ashbury's blood, no less, whichmeans that the source of the infection is, yes, Lady Ashbury.

Now we get to make a final pillar choice forDoctor Swansea.

You can let him die which means he eh, dies.

You can help him die faster which means thathe eh, dies.

Or you can save him by turning him into avampire which means he lives on, happily experimenting in his hospital, sniffing necks and occasionallyfantasizing about taking over as leader of the Brotherhood of Saint Paul's Stole.

You know, the usual.

After Edgar sucks most of our blood supplystraight out of our veins, we go back to tell Lady Ashbury that hey, your blood is the sourceof the plague.

She gets pretty upset about it and tells usto leave her alone as she poofs straight out of the window.

So if you're wondering, this is what our relationshiplooks like so far.

Jonathan, I as a high society vampire who has seen much of the world now declare that we are in a committed relationship.

For plot reasons.

We basically just met and have barely talked but I also love you.

Jonathan, I'm breaking up with you.

For plot reasons.

Yeah that's fair.

With Ashbury gone, Jonathan goes off to create a plague antidote of the kind William Marshalhad once made.

One of the ingredients is the blood of William Marshal himself which we can only get at the Ascalon club.

Now you might be wondering how on earth we're going to get him to give us any of his very, very special blood.

After all, we were kicked out of the clubnot too long ago and everyone's been trying to kill us ever since.

I guess we'll have to fight him for it, we'llhave to destroy the club and abscond with the blood posthaste! I'll show you the actual timeline of the clubto save you the time.

Join our cult I will join your cult.

Fulfill this horrible request.

No.

We hate you now.

That's alright with me I will now proceedto kill all of your members.

Never show your face again.

((2 hours later))Hello I'm back because I need a very valuable relic that you possess.

But we hate you.

That's ok this is important to me.

Fair point here you go.

Thanks bye.

I super wish I was exaggerating right nowbut I'm really not.

We take the blood so graciously given to usand hopskip to the graveyard where we find McCullum who we ask for even more blood, thistime we need the blood of King Arthur which the Priwen Guards hold.

We're friends now I guess so he gives us theblood without issue too.

Our final ingredient is some insulin fromthe old morgue we'd gone to near the start of the game.

Yeah that one isn't very fanciful I'll admit.

With the antidote crafted we leave for thesewers to find Harriet Jones but she's gone and the sewerskal hideout has been trashed, the skals slaughtered.

By following the blood we eventually get tothe lower level where we are confronted by our maker once again.

He tells us his name is Myrddin Wyllt andthat he isn't made of blood no he IS blood.

He made us a vampire because we could offera modern answer to the ancient threat which I suppose means an antidote.

What is this ancient threat you ask? Apparently there's a red queen who wakes upfrom naptime every so often and she's super not a morning person so she spends her timescrewing with everybody's lives.

Myrddin also calls her the Morrigan, the Celticgoddess of war but that's not her only name.

What I'm trying to say is that Myrrdin overhere is just a giant exposition sponge who likes to talk in riddles because I guess thegame thinks that makes everyone sound smart.

It's mostly a little annoying, don't worry, he'll be back.

As it is, we find Harriet just a little bitahead looking properly disgusting so we set about killing her.

She isn't the final boss however, no, theRed Queen's Avatar is.

By the way, Harriet is three levels higherthan the Red Queen's Avatar, I'm not sure why.

When she dies it becomes, clear, sort of, that she just likes to make people suffer for fun.

Myrddin talks her back to sleep and Old Bridgetshows up again to tell us that she's showed up and throw optional exposition your way.

We still don't know what happened to Ashburythough so we travel our butts to her Scotland rubble, I mean mansion and run into bloodyMyrddin again.

He's here to dump yet more exposition on youbut what I really mean is, he's trying to open up possible DLC options.

So how did Harriet become the first carrier? You're the doctor you tell me.

Did the queen do it or did the sicknessmake the queen wake up? Ah who knows.

What about the Brotherhood? Ah that sounds like a possible DLC material.

What about the Guard of Priwen? They might hunt you in a DLC.

What about Ascalon? Oh I don't know but I do wonder how they got their hands on Marshall's blood, haha, DLC material methinks.

You mentioned I'm not your only “son”, so who else is a son? Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Alfred the Great, Francis Drake, Thomas More, Guy Fawkes? I have no reason to believe any of these people are actually also your sons, I'm just throwing out random names, but are they? Yes, somehow ONE of the people on that list is indeed a vampire! Find out who in the DLC.

King Arthur? Yep, a son.

Don't ask me how he survived in the sun Ican't answer that.

I thought you knew and saw everything? Ah bittersweet wroth, my far removed child.

What? Muh queeeeeeen! And here's the strange thing, remember howthe game told us that drinking a vampire's blood will turn them into a vampire too? Well it turns out that King Arthus was a vampiretoo and since McCullum drank a serum created with his blood, he drank his blood so whyisn't he a vampire? Or are we going to let that one slide butMary totally drank Reid's blood and became a vampire.

Ashbury's castle, by the way, is just a collection of “look at all of these famous artists andthe like that Lady Ashbury knew, isn't it cool!” In the cellar we find a book, nay, an AncientTome.

The Tome was written by William Marshal anddescribes his entire journey through vampirehood.

Myrddin came to him pretending to be the archangelMichael and turned him into a vampire.

He visits him again later and tells him tocure the plague, a bit like what he did to Jonathan this time around.

And yes, they're implying that the black deathwas just this Red Queen nonsense again.

So the guy keeps fighting the good fight untilhe eventually finds Elisabeth Ashbury except she's still called Elisabeth Englewood here.

He turns her into a vampire and when she'sdone learning vampire things from him she changes her name to Elisabeth Blackwood andsaunters off into the wide world.

He too changed his name to William Thorneand starts running an inn but oh no the plague returns so he's off to fight more good fights.

Unfortunately, during his fighting times hegets infected by the plague and has to burn down most of London to get rid of the plaguecarrier this time.

Yes, they are in fact attributing The GreatFire of London in 1666 to vampire shenanigans.

But it's too late for William because he'sbeen tainted by the Red Queen's rage and he's just very angry all the time now.

He locks himself away until Elisabeth comesback for him and in his blind rage he bit her and infected her too.

He finally controlled his bloodlust but nowshe goes around slaughtering people all the same, she even made a new progeny to do theslaughtering with her.

Eventually, he asks for the help of The Brotherhoodof the Saint Paul's Stole and they propose the use of the Tear of Angels.

An artifact that could heal anything.

He manages to create the artifact and chainedhimself down to wait for Elisabeth.

She was now the mistress of the dark who likedto murder at will in France, but she came over anyway and he gave her the Tear of Angelsso she could be free of the hate.

He only asked that she take care of him.

Later, she returned to him again, now cured.

She bought a castle in Scotland, the one we'restanding in right now, reading this book, and they'd be moving in there together.

That's the full story.

It is extremely obvious from this story thatthe Lady Elisabeth here is our Lady Ashbury.

Especially as she told us her old name before.

But Jonathan, after having read this book, doesn't have a single voiceline to offer.

We close the book and he just stands there.

No: “Oh Elisabeth, why didn't you tell me.

“or: “So she's the daughter of William Marshal.

Incredible.

” No, nothing at all.

But it gets worse.

We walk on and find Lady Ashbury and her fatherWilliam and Jonathan is surprised to learn that she calls him father.

After he had just read a book confirming this very thing.

Not to mention that Jonathan brings upa very valid point, why didn't they just try to cure William as well as they did her? She says she tried but clearly she didn'ttry very hard because she didn't use any of the ingredients I used and she, as a progenyof William Marshal, would be powerful enough to just grab whatever it was she needed anyway.

But no, we're going to kill him for emotionalimpact I guess even though we've only just met the guy so the player doesn't really givea damn.

And I guess neither does Elisabeth given herlack of attempts.

And even without her, why didn't William just make two doses, I hardly think they would've stopped him.

I got so annoyed after hearing Elisabeth just tell me all the things I just read in thebook that when “How did you meet William Marshal” and “Who are you really” popped up as dialogueoptions I said fuck it and just skipped ahead.

We already have the answers to these questionsand so does Jonathan, the game just doesn't want to accept that.

And hey, if you put these options here tomake sure players who didn't read the book would still get the information then for thelove of all that is holy just don't have the book sit there right in front of the entrance.

It's just a slap in the face at that point.

Here's a whole book full of all the informationyou need, your dialogue options with Elisabeth are now null and void but Jonathan will acceptnone of that and be surprised by everything! Anyway, Elisabeth chooses this moment to kill William and she also wants to throw herselfinto the flames but depending on your choices that can go a few ways.

The best possible ending, achieved by killingabsolutely no regular, none-pillar NPCs, has the pair set off to travel the world in searchfor a cure.

The second best ending, the one I achievedby only killing one or two regular NPCs, sees them stay in the castle with Old Bridget takingcare of them as Jonathan tries to find a cure.

The bad endings have Elisabeth die, if youkilled a lot of people then Jonathan just gets very upset and sits there sipping bloodall melancholy like, if you killed every single damn person, collapsing all the districtsin the process, then Jonathan also starts murdering a bunch and he honestly doesn'tseem to care too much when Elisabeth dies.

And that is the end of the game.

By now you've probably figured out that thegame tries to link practically every single important person and every single importanthappening in history to vampires somehow.

Vampires destroyed everything and also savedeverything.

Is that a cop out? Yes I believe so.

The story was convoluted at best and whenit comes to the normal NPCs, uninteresting at worst.

The combat was stale and repetitive and everyone'sfaces looked like stone.

But the worst part is, they got so close.

I was truly invested each time we were askedto make a pillar choice.

Is this person worth saving? I've gotten to know them.

Sean has good intentions but I don't thinkhe sees the danger in his method.

Dorothy believes she only has one way to helpbut it's hurting others.

Edgar is on a quest to help the entire worldbut makes some very unethical decisions on the way there.

Aloysius Dawson can go and absolutely fuckhimself.

And you can see some of their more detailedapproach shine through constantly.

I mentioned the music and overall tone ofthe city already but you might've noticed too that they took the time to make each noteyou pick up look specifically like that note.

The scribbles on the paper actually spellout the title of the note.

That's amazing attention to detail.

If only they'd taken the time to cut someNPCs and instead focussed on giving each and every one of them an intriguing questlinewith a satisfying end.

If only they'd had proper facial animations, even just a few furrows of the eyebrows or narrowing eyes would've been just fine.

If only they'd stopped to realize that Jonathanwas repeating things he'd already heard over and over and over again.

If only they hadn't tried to write a thousandplot threads at the same time while concluding only a few.

All of them were nearly there, they were nearlygood but they didn't go the distance and it shows.

This game could have been one of the greatestand you know what, to some people it is.

I'm sure that's what the comment section tothis video will be all about.

How wrong I am and how stupid I am and howI “just don't get it”.

And that I definitely don't have a good senseof humour because my skits were super cringe.

But I say to you, Vampyr fans, keep enjoyingthis game, I'm very glad that you did, but I for one, most decidedly did not.

And I hope that if DONTNOD ever decides tomake a part two that they'll take the time to polish it.

Have a wonderful rest of your day.

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