Preamble

Vampires are cool again! Maybe that was always the case, but the ouroboros that is the video game industry is only now coming back to the famous fanged night-time creatures. Redfall seems to have impressed many people during E3 2021, and Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong appears to be a thing that exists as well. The same could be said about Bloodhunt, a battle royale game set in the World Of Darkness. Lost in the mix is Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, which has reinserted itself into the zeitgeist as more details of its problematic development emerge. For those of you unaware, the previous development studio behind Bloodlines 2, Hardsuit Labs, was removed from the project earlier this year after working on it since 2019. As a Vampire and Mage tabletop player, all of this news was a MASSIVE disappointment but unfortunately expected.

Even before the studio was formally stripped of its contract, problems manifested less than a year after development started. First, designer Chris Avellone was initially the game's lead writer, but when multiple people accused him of sexual assault throughout his career, he was terminated post-haste. The game's two main leads, Ka'ai Cluney and Brian Mitsoda, left the project after its second delay was announced. The game also had Cara Ellison attached to the writing team, but she quit when an exodus of designers and editors abandoned the project in 2020. To call Bloodlines 2's development "problematic" is an understatement. This game is cursed, and all signs point that it wasn't entirely Hardsuit Labs' fault. They inherited a hornet's nest without knowing it, and do not worry, my sweet summer child; I will explain what I mean by that in the next section.

What is especially tragic is that Vampire: The Masquerade has had three quality made video games to coincide with the release of Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition, Paradox's soft-reboot of the Vampire tabletop game. These games are Vampire: The Masquerade – Coteries of New York, Vampire: The Masquerade – Shadows of New York, and Choice of Games' interactive fiction series (i.e., Night Road, Out for Blood, and Parliament of Knives). Each of these games has different merits and flaws worth detailing separately. Still, overall, they are worth checking out, especially if you have even a fraction of interest in the Vampire tabletop series or visual novels in general. In Coteries of New York, the game has become the de facto on-ramp for newcomers to the tabletop game. It does a fantastic job of front-loading vocabulary and introducing the predominant backdrop of the "World of Darkness." Furthermore, these games give you a clear sense of the various factions in Vampire: The Masquerade and the current state of its worldbuilding. Before we talk more about the pros and cons of each game, there is the elephant in the room.

We Need To Talk About Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition!

HA HA! I TRICKED ALL OF YOU FUCKERS INTO READING A BLOG ABOUT VAMPIRE THE MASQUERADE 5TH EDITION! GET FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKED! All joking aside, there's a reason why we need to discuss Vampire 5E before exploring the Vampire: The Masquerade visual novels, and especially if we want to talk about Bloodlines 2. In 2015, Paradox Interactive, the studio behind Hearts of Iron, Europa Universalis, and Crusader Kings, bought White Wolf Publishing. With this purchase, Paradox became the owner of White Wolf's "World of Darkness" IP, which includes Vampire the Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, and Mage: The Ascension. To everyone's surprise, Paradox did not immediately shutter White Wolf and instead professed a desire to get into the tabletop market. However, their directive to White Wolf upon its purchase was rather blunt: wrap up the previous editions of the World of Darkness tabletop campaigns and reboot Vampire and Werewolf in three to four years.

In 2018 White Wolf made good on the literal meaning of that directive by releasing Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition. Unfortunately, there is a considerable emphasis on the word "literal" in that previous statement. You see, when the 5th Edition of Vampire launched, it included crass jokes about the real-world ethnic cleansings of LGBTQIA+ communities in Chechnya. Furthermore, that was not the only example of "problematic content" in Vampire 5E. A named character sucked blood exclusively from children and, despite being framed as a pedophile, was written as being culturally acceptable in vampire society. To top it all off, the sub-faction list for the Anarch Player's Handbook established a sub-faction within Clan Brujah that were neo-Nazis. Speaking of which, White Wolf was doing a shit job addressing the toxicity of its tabletop community. Vampire, in particular, developed a reputation for tolerating white supremacists and White Wolf, with this neo-Nazi sub-faction essentially presented an open door and welcomed them with open arms. In other words, Vampire 5th Edition was goddamn problematic as fuck.

To Paradox's credit, when word got out about White Wolf's constant fucking up, they did everything you would want a publisher to do in their situation. They admitted complete and total fault, fired everyone responsible for the situation, and shuttered White Wolf entirely. All of White Wolf's remaining writers and producers became employees of Paradox and were placed under a massive amount of internal review. If I was a guessing man, this transition is what I suspect "doomed" Bloodlines 2. That game appears to have been approved by White Wolf executives fired in the shakeup surrounding 5E. My guess is the Paradox producer now in charge of the project was not impressed by Harsuit's progress or direction and wanted something different. With the visual novel games, the impact is a bit more nuanced. Both Coteries of New York AND Shadows of New York rely on a White Wolf published sourcebook dating back to 2001. These games needed to do this because, given the circumstances, 5E content came out at a trickle rather than a steady stream. Nevertheless, there is some "baggage" with them using this sourcebook, and hopefully, you now have a better understanding of what that may entail. In particular, one of your antagonists belligerently uses racial slurs and sexist terminology because the game wants you to know he's evil.

Vampire: The Masquerade – Coteries of New York Is A Better On-Ramp To Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition Than The Starter Set

Of the visual novels we will discuss today, Coteries of New York is the most difficult to contextualize. It is on-paper the most free-form, and right off the bat, it presents you with three different starting clans. You can be "embraced" and start as a member of the Brujah, Toreador, or Ventrue families, but the significance of this choice is largely cosmetic. Regardless of your selected starting point, the sheriff of the Camarilla apprehends you for being embraced in violation of vampiric traditions. After a hasty trial, you are sentenced to "Final Death" by the Prince of the New York Camarilla. Luckily for all involved, one of the Camarilla's high-ranking members, Sophie Langley, decides to take you under their wing and provides you with lodging. They direct you to explore the city of New York and add other vampires into your coterie so you can gain the respect of the rest of the Camarilla. But, again, the choices before you are set in stone regardless of your starting clan. Your possible allies are always the same, and the main story progresses linearly in tandem with your exploratory adventures.

The best way to describe how Coteries of New York plays is to imagine a Persona game, but only the social link portions. Each in-game day presents you with four possible primary social links and a handful of side quests along the way. There are, however, certain days that progress the overall story. As a result, completing all of the social links is not possible in a single playthrough. As hinted at earlier, the game also does a more than admirable job at front-loading vocabulary and providing resources when cluing you into the dark underbelly of vampires. There is a MASSIVE in-game codex that is better written than Vampire 5E's player handbook. Likewise, each of the characters you interact with offers clear tells of that vampire's clan as well as their distinct quirks. It also spends a significant amount of time introducing the customs of the Camarilla and encouraging its rule-set on the player. On top of pursuing your social network, you also need to quench your thirst for blood in a manner that does not violate the Traditions.

With any visual novel, a lot of your mileage comes from the quality of the game's writing. Of course, I am a bit biased as a player of the Vampire tabletop game, but I found the writing and overall story to be mostly good. The issue here is that not all of these social links are created equal. I was utterly enthralled with Hope, D'Angelo, and Kaiser. The absolute highlight being Hope, who at first asks you to moderate her live chat as she streams a vampiric cam girl session and culminates with you murdering the vampire equivalent of Elon Musk. D'Angelo provides some good old-fashioned neo-noir detective-based pulp, and Kaiser is an absolute shitbag in the best way possible. However, Agathon was a nothing burger, Tamika's story takes forever to go anywhere, and the main plotline, while initially showing a ton of promise, is flawed. I feel the need to itemize each of these storylines because you spend a LOT of time on them, and when the writing misses the mark, that can represent a whole quarter of a single playthrough. Worse, the game doesn't warn you that its ending values completion of social links instead of overall progress. That is to say, you only get credit for completed relationships when the game kicks its ending into high gear, and partially completed social links reward you with jack shit.

This leads us to the most pressing issue with Coteries of New York: its ending is bullshit. For whatever reason, Coteries of New York ends up committing the same cardinal sin as Telltale's The Walking Dead. The game presents a series of moral dilemmas and player choices, which it initially implies has some nebulous impact on the game's story when the opposite is true. The game has a fixed ending and essentially negates its earlier variability, and completely disregards all previously made player choices. To add insult to injury, the underlying mystery surrounding the main plotline is a complete ass-pull that the game foreshadows precisely once. It is a massive disappointment and one of the primary reasons it is tricky recommending Coteries of New York. However, at the end of the day, when I tell people I play Vampire: The Masquerade, and someone expresses interest in getting into it, I am still more than likely to recommend they check this game out and see if their interest is still intact when they are done. Ultimately, despite all of its flaws, the world of Coteries is a beautiful thing to behold. Its worldbuilding and mythos are top-notch, and if the reams of text in its codex have you wanting more, there may or may not be modified versions of the game as a homebrew campaign on the internet.

Vampire: The Masquerade – Shadows of New York Is A Very Good Story With Amazing Characters And "Meh" Gameplay

Amazingly, Coteries of New York got a stand-alone sequel of sorts in Vampire: The Masquerade – Shadows of New York. This expansion takes place one year after the events of Coteries, but rather than continue the adventures of your player-created protagonist; you control Julia Sowinski. Julia is a journalist toiling away at a failing news organization before she is fired from her job and eventually brought into the ranks of Clan Lasombra. The Lasombra are in a "bad way" upon the start of Shadows of New York and have switched their allegiances from the Sabbat, an underground terrorist network, to the Camarilla. Julia is tapped to become the clan's Lasombra representative in New York, as the clan's elders desire for her to be a sacrificial lamb of sorts. However, when the previous leader of the Anarchs, the sworn enemy of the Camarilla, is assassinated, Julia is assigned to investigate leads on the culprit.

As the premise might suggest, Shadows of New York is a far more "traditional" visual novel experience with the player following an incredibly scripted narrative. Some might find this frustrating, while visual novel veterans like myself view this as "par for the course." Look, I love Steins;Gate, but that game set the modern standard for the genre with player interactivity only interrupting hours of scripted cutscenes and dialogue sequences once or twice. If Shadows' traditional visual novel structure does not bother you, then I think you'll find it to be a far more consistent and compelling experience than Coteries. When comparing the two beat-by-beat, Shadows provides a far more engaging story with fewer lulls. The new characters show off even more vampiric clans, and when Shadows revisits characters from Coteries, it shows how the previous games' events had a long-term impact on their lives.

However, the real highlight has to be Julia Sowinski. Between her believable lesbian relationship or her struggles with her job, she is one of the best-written characters I have seen in a video game in a while. What I found especially thrilling is how the game depicts the same ethical and moral dilemmas tabletop players face. Unlike Dungeons & Dragons, Vampire: The Masquerade forces players not to treat their campaigns as playgrounds as you have strict rules to follow and clan flaws to consider. The same sentiment applies here where the game's moral dilemmas boil down to either a) responding to situations like a human with empathy while drawing the ire of the Camarilla, or b) transforming Julia into a "true" Lasombra at the cost of her humanity and personal relationships. That returns me to the topic of Julia's girlfriend. This relationship is handled tastefully with a few unexpected twists and turns. However, the game makes you choose between furthering this relationship and advancing Julia's social station within the Camarilla. This alone adds far more weight to your decisions than any threat of a fail state Coteries of New York employs.

Unfortunately, there are again a few shortcomings to Shadows I feel compelled to mention. First, for whatever reason, Shadows decided to have a go at depicting New York City amid the COVID-19 pandemic. There are points in which developer Draw Distance communicates well-worn criticisms of the United States' response to the pandemic. In one such case, you meet up with a stand-in for QAnon, and it is about as subtle as a sledgehammer. Likewise, the mechanics surrounding the game's ending repeat a handful of the same mistakes as Coteries of New York. In the case of Shadows, of the many choices you make, only FIVE have any connection to which of the game's two endings you will get. It is contrived as hell, but it did not bother me as much as Coteries' finale. At least in the case of Shadows, SOME of your choices have an actual connection to the ending, whereas nothing you do in Coteries matters even the slightest. Again, as a bit of a visual novel and Vampire: The Masquerade apologist, my opinion here might be suspect. Still, Julia's journey overcame whatever pitfalls there might have been, and the game's shorter length felt more like an attribute than a detriment.

Choice of Games' Vampire Text-Adventures Make Me So Fucking Happy

And now, let's briefly talk about some cool nerdy shit! Choice of Games is one of the most extraordinary developers you've never heard of before. They are a California-based developer that only makes interactive fiction and have won multiple awards for their portrayal of different genders, ethnic groups, and sexual orientations. Likewise, they are setting new gold standards on how to make interactive fiction accessible to the visually impaired. Finally, they have a platform on their website in which users can submit their homebrew interactive fiction works and get immediate and quality feedback from industry and genre veterans. If you have not heard of them until now, by all means, give them a look as I think they are doing the Lord's work!

When it comes to the world of Vampire: The Masquerade, Choice of Games is in the process of doing three works of interactive fiction set within the current world of Vampire 5E. Of these three products, one has come out, and the other two are releasing this year. Vampire: The Masquerade – Night Road is currently available on Steam for about $10, and I think I like it the most of all the games we have discussed thus far. First, Night Road is a whopping 650,000-words long, and it leaves no stone unturned. Second, the chapters are beefy with a massive cast and dozens of fully realized plot threads with plenty of choices to make along the way. There are several endings and fail states, and the NPCs genuinely change their regard for the player based on their in-game decision-making. Finally, while it might not be as visually compelling as the previous two games, it is by a country mile the best written.

Furthermore, while Coteries of New York is the best game to wrap your mind around the terminology of Vampire: The Masquerade, Night Road does the better job of giving you a sense of the overall tabletop experience. Each chapter progress similarly to a module in Vampire 5E, and many of the decisions you face utilize stats on a pared-down character sheet. The way Night Road presents skill checks is especially admirable as they underscore the mechanical difference between how Vampire approaches them to something like Dungeons & Dragons. Unlike Dungeons & Dragons, in Vampire: The Masquerade, you use skill points as if they are consumable resources to deal with specific scenarios. However, it is up to you to decide which scenarios warrant employing a "quick out," and there's undoubtedly a "press your luck" element to it. And while I'm far from being the oldest codger on this site, something about them making a Zork-clone set in the World of Darkness fills me with glee. So, to the dozen of you who remember Adventure, Zork, or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, this is an easy recommendation.

Wrap Up

Well, there you have it! While vampires return to the gaming zeitgeist and many people lament the death of Bloodlines 2, there are a handful of engaging fanged experiences to be had in the least likely of places. None of these games are "perfect" by any stretch of the word, but they each fill a specific niche. My final hope is that they bring "new blood" into the Vampire: The Masquerade tabletop community. There's a real good opportunity to revitalize the World of Darkness community with Paradox's direction after decades of mismanagement and neglect.