And also, vampires. Spoiler alert.
Enter Doctor Jonathan Reid, a recent army medic who has returned from the front and gets the oh-so-exquisite joy of becoming a vampire rather unceremoniously. I can relate. And yes, in a fit of frenzy after waking up from the sleep of death (and in perfect, Gothic irony), Johnathan's first act is to drain his sister Mary dry. Horrified at what he has become, and finding himself being pursued by a rather bothersome group of vampire hunters, he eventually gets himself into the first of several safehouses that are in the game (which I'll cover in a bit) and then does the only logical thing he can do by shooting himself in the heart!
...then when he realizes that was really kind of pointless, he decides to get on with the plot.
Eventually, he makes the acquaintance of Doctor Edgar Swansea and Lady Ashbury, a doctor/vampire watcher and a vampire, respectively. Swansea is a member of the super ancient secret order of the Blah Blah Yadda Yadda, and Lady Ashbury is a vampire who has some relationship to that group...who are not vampire hunters so much as people who exist to keep the balance between humans and vampires. So they're vampire hunters with a stern tolerance, I guess?
While Ashbury (following some quests) relates to Jonathan what he is and helps him develop his vampiric abilities while investigating his origins, Swansea offers him a position at the hospital he oversees as a doctor...on the night shift. Whacky hijinks to ensue with a vampire working at the hospital, only not really, because "whacky hijinks" are not the term to be used in this game.
Vampyr stays closely rooted in Gothic horror, and takes itself very seriously, which I absolutely commend Dontnod Entertainment on being able to do. Often, vampire games and other media can fall too far into its dark and broody atmosphere, but Vampyr manages to straddle the line between not going far enough and going too far very well. This is a tragic tale about a man...a doctor, nonetheless...who becomes a monster and must wrestle between the oaths he took and his hunger.
...or not, as the morality mechanic reveals.
As far as mechanics goes - leveling up in this game is hard. At first it doesn't seem so. You run around London completing quests and fighting various humans and monsters (including bosses every so often) and getting the experience to level up (which is done by sleeping in one of your safehouses). Seems simple enough. The problem is, unless you're willing to go around to every corner of the game world to hunt down each and every random encounter to spend literal hours grinding, you're not going to level up fast...until you kill off a few NPCs.
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| "Swallow this!" |
Yes, Jonathan can embrace (that is "kill", not "turn" - as players of Vampire: The Masquerade will no doubt find confusing) others provided that he has progressed far enough in the storyline to do so. NPCs basically exist to be walking experience factories, more so if you find out all their little secrets and do their quests for them. By maxing all of that out, you make a far, far tastier snack and a larger amount of points. Of course, this must be balanced with the fact that people tend to take notice of the death of a prominent figure within a section of London. Some of them, pillars of the community, can even outright destroy some neighborhoods.
However, doing so will not only get you some unique dialogue you wouldn't her otherwise and potentially details about other people connected to that person, but occasionally a unique item.
So it becomes a balance, a conflict between the mane who Jonathan Reid was and the monster that he has become, as is fitting with our theme for this year's Horror Month. And speaking of our theme, the question is simple: is Johnathan Reid a monster or a man? That, as with all things in good games, is up to the actions and decisions of the player. Will he succumb to the darkness of his Beast or shall he rise above it?
Also, pro tip: if you don't want to eat up a few people, do the side quests. Yes, all of them. And some of them are tied, so I wouldn't go stacking them up like you're playing Skyrim and telling yourself you'll get back to it later. Trust me, you won't.
But returning to the mechanics, the game also has some crafting, which I'm more inclined to be nice to in this game than in some others I've covered. Johnathan is a doctor and has no small amount of knowledge in chemistry, which the player can use to research blood samples they find (a major part of the game) and brew solutions of their own that can be useful to them in combat and/or a determent to their enemies. So the application of a crafting mechanic makes more sense than, say...a soldier or a lawyer who woke up out of cryosleep and had to take orders from a workshite asshole who insists that they are totally the leader.
...yeah, I really hate Fallout 4's settlement building. What of it?
Where the game falls very flat, unfortunately, is the combat. It isn't at all smooth or intuitive. This makes sense to some extent what with Johnathan being a British army doctor and not a proper soldier, but by the end of the game he ought to have fought enough to be raining some serious death down on people...and he's not. This would be a problem, though, if it weren't for the AI being somewhere on the same intelligence level as a box of frozen waffles.
Very rarely, at least in my game, did I ever have more than maybe two enemies attack me at a time at close range. Even when I did, Johnathan's feeding attack (possible after an enemy has been sufficiently stunned), makes every other enemy around you freeze until the animation is completed. With enough Stamina, it is entirely possible to stun-lock an opponent and simply feed on them until they die.
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| "Someone call the doctor!...oh...wait...bollocks..." |
Why Johnathan can't just drain someone dry in one shot when that's literally the first thing he does upon becoming a vampire is a question that is skillfully avoided. I'd assume for game balance, but that seems rather silly to use that excuse in-universe.
Basically, just avoid any enemies that are higher level than you (if you can, the game occasionally throws a random boss enemy in your way just to screw with you) and think twice before using any targeted attacks, and you should be fine...for the most part. It really just becomes a bit of a grind, which honestly is very jarring when compared to what the vampire abilities should be in your mind, all about being fast-pace and one-hit killing puny mortals no matter how many torches and pitchforks they have.
Yeah, yeah, I know. Balance.
One thing I will give praise to is the detail to the setting. I don't know how much of it is accurate to the actual 1918 London, but Dontnod apparently did do quite a bit of work in researching London, by visiting there and reading several sources about the period in order to give it their best shot. I think they did very well, though being a Cheeseburger-inhaling Yank, I suppose I'm not really qualified to say. What the game does to very well is atmosphere. It's always night (for obvious reasons), and London in Vampyr really does feel like a very dark, empty place. The Spanish Flu runs rampant through the streets, people are weary, frightened. No one is safe.
So, kudos there. They did very well.
As for the plot, you have your typical "a Beast I am, lest a Beast I become" story with Johnathan wrestling between giving into his hunger and upholding his Hippocratic Oath as I said before. There's a twist at about two-thirds of the way through that really comes out of nowhere and is kind of...stupid, really and doesn't amount to much.
There's also, a twist about the Spanish Flu which...kind of undercuts the horror a wee bit. Not so much that it stops the game dead, but it was honestly really just unnecessary and I really wish they had kept the epidemic completely separate from the supernatural goings on.
On the whole, Vampyr is a good game. It's not a great one. There are a few things that keep this game from being truly great, namely the combat being hilariously unpolished and not quite enough integration between story and gameplay. Balance aside, that is. What it does well, it does fantastically, namely creating a dark, oppressive atmosphere that would be right at home alongside other Gothic works like Stoker's Dracula and giving us a protagonist in Jonathan Reid that we can get invested in. For a horror story that forces us to contemplate the difference between monster and man, you can't really ask for much better.
Vampyr is brought to us by Dontnod Entertainment and Focus Home Interactive and is available on Microsoft Windows, Playstation 4, and Xbox One.
For the latest from the MadCapMunchkin, be sure to follow him on Twitter @MadCapMunchkin.
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