The revered Parisian outfit behind Remember Me and Life Is Strange has made a dark-alley detour for its upcoming (and potentially fang-tastic) horror-RPG Vampyr.
Set in a London gripped by the Spanish Flu of 1918 (which killed more people than four years of the Black Plague), you play medical surgeon Jonathan E Reid, returning from the front lines of WW1 to find a city lost in grief and despair. Also – surprise! – he’s suddenly a vampire.
This unwilling monster can at least make the most of a bad situation, using the confusion to creep around snacking on the diseased. The reality is they’re dying anyway, but boy DontNod makes you feel bad about dining al fresco. “We very quickly realised that what was really cool was to put the player in the situation of taking a life or not,” says narrative director Stéphane Beauverger. “Choices or consequences: everything in the game must be about that.”
During one section set within a free roam White chapel, our anti-hero approaches a dishevelled man fishing for bin scraps. Dialogue options present three ways of handling the situation – positive on the left, negative on the right,and sweet-talk, which has potential to fail,on top. We plump for the latter option. After mentioning his service in the Great War, the man replies, “So you survived the slaughter house?”. Having successfully manipulated his prey, Reid places his hands on his shoulders, leads him down a dark alley, and sinks two fangs into his neck as a grimacing face fills the frame. “I’m not afraid anymore,” says a ghostly voice from the grave. “I died in a field in France a long time ago.”
No mindless Hammer Horror in which you rack up body counts, kills are meaningful in Vampyr. Each dead person leaves a void; make that void too big and it’s possible for all of White chapel to burn down. You could play the good guy and abstain from slurping a single drop of blood, but that will have consequences too – like preventing access to useful powers such as teleportation and telekinesis.
These powers are a major element of Vampyr’s flimsiest mechanic: combat. Weak-looking last-gen scraps using wooden bone saws and rusty pistols, which you can upgrade with loot, seem more like a Bloodborne hangover, and don’t fit alongside deliberately-paced social interactions with London’s great unwashed. The once-significant act of killing is reduced to a series of trivial scraps that the world manages to ignore.
Why is no other character mentioning the magical mass brawl that just went down 20 yards away? It’s such a sharp turn from dialogue-driven encounters that Vampyr almost feels like two games in one. DontNod is a talented studio, but historically it’s not great at combat: unsatisfying fighting sections in the otherwise superb Remember Me made players perform samey sequences against punch-eating policemen, while Life Is Strange smartly avoided it altogether.
Yet a trip to DontNod’s French HQ suggests it’s a major focus, with concept art for various weapons adorning walls, alongside visualizations of kill moves (one involves stabbing a knife-adorned revolver into an abdomen and pulling the trigger), and various bigger bads, like a 6ft 5 bald guy with porridge skin and crazed eyes. Weapon crafting and upgrade trees suggest a touch of promise, but they won’t matter if battles lack meat and meaning – and, worse, don’t gel convincingly with the game’s already excellent-looking social sections. But for Beauverger, those fights are a natural extension of allowing players true agency.
“When we started to think about Vampyr we realised RPG for us meant freedom of choice. In RPGs you are freely roaming around the world and making whatever decision you want and you are facing the consequences or not, but RPG also means freedom of action, freedom of creating your own templates, freedom of destiny,” says Beauverger. No morality meter means only you, rather than someone else’s definition of right and wrong, can judge what you should do. The fighting sections look to take away from that, though, temporarily turning your thoughtful former man-of-science into an angry Van Helsing.
In fairness, we’ve only experienced a short walkthrough, with all other areas coming together tidily. Recent successes lend faith that DontNod will reconcile Vampyr’s clashing styles into an engaging adventure with brains and bite before next year’s launch.