Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong, we tried the Big Bad Wolf and Nacon game in Paris!
Vampire
Given the hunger for ideas inherent in the world of video games, it is almost paradoxical that in the last decade there have been very few valuable titles dedicated to the World of Darkness. The intellectual property born of Mark Rein Hagen and White Wolf in the 1990s is indeed an extraordinary melting pot of untapped possibilities and potential, which practically any talented developer could tap into to shape inspired settings and extraordinarily current stories.Yet, after the excellent Redemption and Bloodlines, the brand seems to be the victim of a curse when trying to convert it into a video game: the passage to Paradox of the world of darkness has produced no results - if you exclude the productive delirium behind the Long awaited sequel to Bloodlines - and it certainly cannot be said that any masterpieces related to it have recently come out.
Nacon does not want to give up, however; perhaps aware of the enormous possibilities of this dark universe, in fact, the publisher has decided to focus on a new baby called Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong. Developed by Big Bad Wolf Studios, however, the game is not a super production with galactic investments behind it, but a curious "narrative RPG", which focuses on the plot and on a complex network of events, to be faced in the role of three different vampires. of the Camarilla (for the uninitiated, an organization that tries to hide the existence of vampires from humans, and to carry on this coexistence in the most neutral way possible).
We flew to Paris to try Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong and it positively surprised us, even if it is still early to formulate a real judgment.
Three vampires, one gehenna
Vampire - Swansong: your stats are often essential to get through the dialogues unscathed At first glance, Swansong might seem like an emulator of the Quantic Dream titles; on the other hand, the adventure offers three different playable characters, and is structured in highly narrative chapters with multiple crossroads, whose developments can lead to truly significant transformations of the primary events. The developers have not defined everything as a random RPG, however: when you take control of one of the protagonists, in fact, you find yourself in front of a card not unlike that of the pen and paper version of Vampire: The Masquerade, with numerous points to be spent on specific skills and disciplines.The former are skills almost identical to those of classic role-playing games, and although mainly related to conversations - they regulate the options of intimidation, or your ability to convince the interlocutor, as usual - they can sometimes also allow you to bypass entire puzzles with the help of advanced technical knowledge. The latter are instead the inevitable vampiric powers of the various clans, fundamental in specific "hot" situations, and central to the management of the game's resources.
Vampire - Swansong: among the characters there is also a vampire from clan Toreador, but we could not try it The RPG element is in fact almost entirely related to the consumption of resources: blood for the disciplines and willpower for skills. During a chapter, each significant event will force you to spend a certain amount of one or the other, and we assure you that wasting them can lead to really unwanted effects (from the simple negative conclusion of a conversation, to much more unpredictable degenerations ...). Overall, it is an interesting system, which adds a pinch of spice to the simple choice of multiple options during the dialogues, even if it did not seem applied to us perfectly: during our test, we were faced with some forcing designed to forcibly consume resources of your alter ego, and at somewhat brutal "trial and error" moments that could in our opinion be made more flexible or underhanded. The stumbling blocks during advancement are pretty obvious after all, and we fear that most players will just constantly reload previous saves, rather than just letting things flow naturally. The need to use certain safe areas to replenish their blood supply by feeding on some unfortunate victims only amplifies this feeling, given that even then the errors of assessment are the order of the day.
Of course , it must be said that perhaps this impression arises from the chapter we experienced: the analysis of a crime scene in the role of a Ventrue named Caleb, unwilling to waste time and clearly already in the midst of a somewhat tense situation on the point to explode. Things are not unlikely to be less legible and more relaxed in other parts of the story.
Don't mess with blood
Vampire - Swansong: feeding and keeping blood supplies high is more important than you think Wanting to go into more detail of the part of the campaign we tested, we can only praise the attempt of the Big Bad Wolf to offer investigative phases fairly elaborate and with a fair number of approaches. The demo was still set in a large apartment, full of NPCs and clues to analyze, with three central puzzles linked to the most important information and a series of files to be recovered to complete each objective. According to what the developers said, it is possible to advance in the adventure even by coarsely collecting information and losing sight of most of the secrets of that phase, but the progression of the game - the experience points earned, to be exact - depends on how much you complete. in detail each event, and already the considerable number of secrets observed with Caleb's lifeless eyes made us smell a spider web of narrative developments, to say the least tantalizing. It won't be easy to keep things interesting even for those who don't have the patience to dig out every clue in Swansong, but overall the plot has managed to capture us very quickly.In Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong will not lack blood A lot of the work is certainly done by the care placed in the setting: it is clear how the developers know the World of Darkness, and want to carefully render that duality and violence that make it captivating for millions of people. Even the puzzles devised by the team surprised us: they were certainly not monstrously complex puzzles, but at least a couple of them were not at all trivial, and we believe it is therefore appropriate to expect a title where it will be necessary to sharpen the wits to reveal each single mystery all the way.
The technical sector is less good. We are not in front of a terrible-looking video game, for heaven's sake, yet Swansong is far from the levels of a super production, and given the general perception of the public towards mainly narrative titles with average graphics, the high launch price could discourage many. Overall we believe there is the potential for a beautiful interactive story in the world of darkness, but it will be the quality of the writing and the variety of events that make or break the game, and there is certainly a lot more to try.
Our first impression with Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong was genuinely above our initial expectations. The game undoubtedly has some structural lack linked to "trial and error" and some forcing, yet the chapter played showed a remarkable dedication to the setting treated by the development team, and the narrative managed to capture us almost immediately. Soon to say if the game will really surprise, but if nothing else it's nice to see a good story devoted to this intellectual property from time to time. All that remains is to wait, hoping that Big Bad Wolf's work lives up to its name.
