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Vampyr presents a compelling, if flawed, post-WWI vampire story

by Amr (@siegarettes)

• Vampyr
  
• Developer- Dontnod
  
• Publisher- Focus Home Interactive
  
• PC, PS4, Xbox One 
  

I love being proven wrong. After doing this for a while you get a sense for how a game will generally turn out, and everything I’d seen of Vampyr didn’t give me much confidence. There was plenty of promises of meaningful choice and interlocking systems, big words that more often point to overambition than anything else. Vampyr definitely doesn’t escape that overambition. There are many rough edges–abrupt loading screens within open areas, dialogue playing over itself, oversights inside of main quests–these are only a few of the things that point to Dontnod reaching beyond their resources.

Despite that Vampyr has been surprisingly compelling. Its focus on conversation and investigation gives weight to the web of relationships within its cast. Character dialogue is limited, but the process of tracking down people, learning about them, and slowly coming to a greater understanding is deeply satisfying. Characters have tangible histories, and I often found listening to them tell their own stories as engaging as following my own. 

These stories also give Vampyr space to address various social issues within the post-World War 1 period it takes place in. Often vampire fiction can fall into the trap of creating fantastical worlds that feel ignorant of the loaded history their period aesthetics draw on–despite the vampire’s mythological origins as a reflection of social ills. Vampyr feels surprisingly cognizant in that regard. It brings together a diverse cast with their own concerns, and manages to address issues of race, class, and the period’s global politics in a way that enriches the fiction.

Less interesting is the combat, which uses a stamina based system alongside a suite of blood based powers. Melee weapons are the primary damage dealers and offhand weapons like guns or stakes can be used to inflict stun damage, opening them up to be drained of blood. Blood can be used to heal or power special attacks like your claws or shadowy vortexes that entrap enemies. Each of these weapons inflicts a certain type of damage, and you’ll need to apply them appropriately to efficiently take down enemies. It brings to mind The Surge, with its focus on weak points and building special resources, though Vampyr feels much stiffer. Combat is at its best when it gives you a mix of enemies that demand use of all those abilities. That’s rare, and outside of certain boss encounters you won’t be pushed far.

Vampyr never allows you to let loose, either. Combat is restricted to designated areas, and sucking a character’s blood has its own requirements and procedures. You can’t feed on them out in the open. No, that’s simply not polite. Instead you investigate them, learn their life story–which increases the XP they’ll award you, make sure that your Mesmerize level is high enough by doing story missions, then lead them off to some dark corner where you can do the deed unobserved. Your character wants to stay hidden and that means avoiding openly antagonizing the citizens of London.

It creates a harsh delineation between investigation and combat. Learning about these characters feeds into the growth of your vampiric abilities, but aside from story missions which increase your Mesmerize level, all of these abilities are for combat. Which is strange, since despite the huge skill tree, the combat is never more than a secondary concern. Most of the time enemies are only there to lend an area a sense of danger, forcing you to feed on citizens to even out the discrepancy in ability between you and the enemies. It’s effective enough, but the sheer amount of options focused on combat is strange since Vampyr clearly cares more about its web of relationships and narrative threads. So it ends up without the freedom to be openly predatory, which would make a combat focus make more sense, or alternative conversational skills to spend your XP on.

What ends up being the best argument for feeding on citizens are the epiphanies they bestow on you. Feeding on them will give you a flash of their memories, providing clues about related characters that open up new conversation options. Of course, this means you’ve also killed a connection, causing consequences to resonate throughout the social structure. It ended up putting me in a situation where I’d kill a certain character, then end up chasing down their connections to feed upon as well, who’d reward me with even more XP thanks to the new information I’d gained. The limits of this chain show themselves quickly, since I’d inevitably reach a character too strong of mind to mesmerize. It’s a clear choice to prevent you from derailing the entire narrative, but it is another limit on your agency.

Another problem on that front is the way Vampyr telegraphs, or fails to telegraph, the outcomes of your choices. Whereas Dontnod’s previous game, Life is Strange, allowed you to rewind and try options multiple times before picking your final response, Vampyr makes clear every choice is permanent. There are no alternative save slots, and each choice is immediately recorded. It’s admirable in a way, but it quickly made clear the problems with that choice within the opening hours. Choices can be misleading in what their effect will be on a character, leaving me with the feeling that my intent was not communicated. One early quest in particular ended up with me doing exactly the opposite of what I wanted, and everyone else I talked to about that moment walked away feeling the same way. 

Life is Strange avoided these problems by letting you immediately backtrack if the response was unexpected, which ironically made it easier to own the choices you made. Vampyr, by contrast, ends up in situations where I felt cheated, having to live with consequences not of my actions, but of a frustrating miscommunication from the game.

These frustrations have dampened my enthusiasm for the game a bit, but Vampyr remains compelling despite them. Time will tell how deeply those stumbles come back to bite me.