Year in Review 2018 Letter Series: Vampyr-How This Weird, Rough Game Sunk Its Teeth Into Me

The word that comes to mind when I think of Dontnod’s Vampyr is potential. While it can be messy, goofy, and somewhat hard to control, this game has so many cool ideas that not only make it worth playing, but should also be pursued across gaming.

Now, before I get into the gushing, I do have to preface this with a bit of a caveat. Like I said, this game is pretty messy, and part of that messiness entails the treatment of one of the women featured. Without getting into real spoilers, there’s a woman who is fridged by Jonathan (the player character) not once, but twice. These choices are absolute garbage and did cast a shadow over my experience with Vampyr.

But that’s where potential starts to come in again. While this repeated fridging is gross, it’s tempered by the multiple other women who are present in the game, and the hint system that allows you to get to know them individually. Each neighborhood in the game has citizens you can interact with, all of whom have their own lives, secrets, and interests that you can discover by doing side missions for them or other people in the community. Their desires and relationships are independent from Jonathan’s and if he doesn’t take the time to get to know these people, they’re less inclined to trust or help him.

Through this agency, the hint system and neighborhoods demonstrate the game’s understanding of how communities operate. People know each other, have conflicts, and work together. Even if they don’t like each other, they pay attention to gossip and keep an eye on their neighbors. If anyone in these communities disappears, or something impacts a leader in the community, people take notice and the district is disrupted.

This is relevant because of how the leveling system and pseudo-morality system works. To level up, you have to either get experience from doing side activities, or from feeding on citizens. Feeding on citizens gets you a ton more experience, but you can get even more if you know all of your prey’s hints. The catch is, the more citizens you feed on, and the more a community is disrupted, the more dangerous it becomes. If you’re leveling up a ton, the added difficulty doesn’t really matter since you can become extremely OP, but, at least in my opinion, the monsters who begin to wander the streets are very scary and stressful to be around.

These aren’t the only monsters you have to deal with, either. The spectre of your own monstrous nature is always looming over your behavior. Vampyr’s morality system isn’t a binary “good” or “bad” choice wheel, but instead a continuous question you’re forced to ask yourself: am I okay with killing these people, knowing they’ll be missed and life will get worse for everyone here? Every time I’m tempted to embrace (read: feed on) someone, this question comes to mind, and I have to deal with my conscience. These choices are ultimately fairly micro in scale, aside from making traversal and environmental combat more difficult, but they feel more impactful since they’re constantly making me pause before committing to ending an NPC’s life.

That isn’t to say there aren’t character choices tied to the game’s outcome. Each “pillar” character, the leaders of their given communities, have storylines you have to pursue to progress the overall story. At the end of their arcs, you’re given a choice on what to do with them: embrace (kill), spare, or, if you have all of their hints, charm. Despite what other RPGs have trained us to think in these kinds of situations, there is no one good option. Charming one pillar can cause them to lose their mind and become a powerful monster, while doing the same for another is the only way to keep their neighborhood from falling into ruin. This subversion of the usual good vs. bad choices has kept me on my toes the whole time I’ve been playing, never sure what the consequences of my actions will end up being.

Sounds like a lot of tricky things to balance, right? Well, there’s more. On top of understanding communities and making NPCs into unique people with their own interests that you care about, Vampyr is also interested in keeping Jonathan true to his characterization. First and foremost, he’s a doctor, and the game makes that more than just set dressing and a convenient way to cover up Jonathan’s vampirism. The Spanish Flu is spreading through London at an alarming rate, and that’s one of Jonathan’s main concerns. On top of managing your power levels, you also have to manage the symptoms of illness that citizens begin to manifest. If left untreated, these symptoms will worsen, and contribute to the deterioration of a district in the same way feeding on someone will.

These cures have to be crafted, and the resources to make them tend to ebb and flow in their abundance, which can be incredibly frustrating if you’re like me and have one district that’s constantly on the edge of collapse. But that too is part of this game’s astounding potential. By forcing you to constantly worry about the health status of your citizens, it allows you to feel a bit of the stress that the other doctors and nurses you’re working with are feeling in the face of the plague. With so many factors to contend with, both Jonathan and the player have a constant sense of urgency and anxiety about holding things together while trying to figure out what’s really going on. Vampyr’s London always feels like it’s staring down the barrel of a gun, and one wrong move could send everything spiraling into hell.

There aren’t many games that have managed to communicate such a sense of tension and instability through mechanics in the way that this one has, and I find it so, so exciting. If other games dip into this kind of play with genre and subversion of expectations, I think we’ll get a lot more special stuff in the future, and I desperately hope we do. Vampyr is a perfect argument for why there need to be more games in the space between blockbuster AAA and tiny indie dev. Without the expectations and risks that come with trying to be the next Red Dead, I think the devs behind this game were really able to play with mechanics and ideas in a way that felt new, and while it’s still pretty rough around the edges, Vampyr is honestly more exciting and innovative than anything else that came out in its genre and weight class in 2018.

I joke a lot about having bad taste and mostly liking things that are just as bad and ridiculous as they are good, and those things are true, but I’ve decided to lean into it. In a world where any game that’s huge and photorealistic sets the standard for a “masterpiece”, I think I’d rather be chasing the experiences that do something new, even if they come with choices that leave me scratching my head, wondering who okayed them. There’s a lot of fertile ground to be found in the space between nonsense and polish, and I think the medium gets better if more people are willing to mess around in there.