Vampire: The Masquerade – Swanson Review
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need to know
What is it? A narrative adventure about vampires.
expect to pay $50/£35
release date May 19, 2022
developer Big Bad Wolf Interactive
Publisher Nakon
audit date AMD Ryzen 5 3600, Nvidia RTX 2080 Super, 32 GB RAM
multiplayer game? Do not
association Official website
Vampire’s Virtual Legacy: Masquerade is fragmented to say the least, but the tabletop RPG really inspired one of the best video games of all time. 2004’s Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines is a sultry, humorous and delightfully twisted depiction of the underbelly of the undead in Los Angeles, filled with quirky and wonderful characters. Giggling motorcyclists, deranged nightclub waitresses, sullen late-night radio hosts, and even murderous prosthetics experts. It may stink more than a rotting corpse, but it’s good at making vampires look sexy, scary, and above all weird.
Vampire: The Masquerade: Swanson is the exact opposite. Its backstabbing vampire group is boring, often goofy, and exhibits all the charm of a Nosferatu living in a dumpster. Big Bad Wolf’s narrative RPG has grand ambitions and potential, but it all falls apart amid a pile of half-baked ideas and a script that lacks character.
(Image credit: Nacon)
Set in Boston for its vampire tales, Swansong puts you in the role of three different vampires, all high-ranking members of the Camarilla (a cross between the governing body and the Mafia). Emem is a politically ambitious vampire who struggles with authority, while Galeb is a suave and loyal Camarilla follower. Finally there is Leysha, who recently woke up from three years of hibernation due to the often debilitating mental illness of her Malkavian clan.
The decision to focus on three characters resulted in a confusing opening statement. Swansong provides a quick overview of the three perspectives, while introducing the rest of Camarilla’s courtroom and outlining the off-screen events that kick off the plot. Gradually, it became apparent that a party organized by Camarilla allied with a local group of thaumaturges (vampire warlocks) had been attacked by unknown assailants, and Hazel Iversen, the head of the Boston Camarilla, sent three people on different missions to investigate the situation. disaster.
Structurally, Swanson’s closest relative is Life is Strange, combining carefully crafted dialogue sequences with third-person exploration and puzzle solving. The systems behind both are more complex than Life is Strange, which I’ll get to later. But in the end none of that matters, because the most critical element of Swanson’s design—writing—is extremely bland.
(Image credit: Nacon)
First, the script is almost completely devoid of humor. Almost every character is very serious, expounded in thick, tasteless spoons like cod liver oil. That’s not to say that everyone should be as joking as they are in a Marvel movie, but compared to Bloodlines’ scripted fireworks display, Swanson’s dialogue is more bland than a hedgehog on the highway.
The tedious writing ruins the rest of the game.
The bigger question, however, is how understated each character’s personality is. Caleb is a vampire agent 47, and his character is slightly deeper than his suit. In fact, 47 is arguably the more expressive of the two, since at least he’ll crack weird puns while entangled with some trust fund ghouls. At the same time, Emem’s rebellious tendencies are manifested primarily in wayward whining, which she finds hard to fathom. Leysha is the strongest character, and her polite, slightly anxious demeanor belies a deep psychological instability. Unfortunately, she is accompanied by a very annoying child vampire named Halsey, and her character revolves primarily around her fondness for the pesky goblin she calls “Sugar Tooth.”
It’s a shame that the tedious writing spoils the rest of the game, as some ambition is on display. Narrative choices are both broad and really affect the trajectory of the plot. In one early instance, Emem traveled to Warlock’s base to try to reconcile, but ended up being thrown into their subterranean dungeon. She eventually escaped and was able to confront the warlock leader directly. But a little exploration revealed a new character, and a potentially very different outcome to the scene and the story as a whole.
(Image credit: Nacon)
The story itself also explores some nice ideas. The central mystery surrounding who is behind the attack is intriguing, and the clash of characters produces some exciting drama. The most intense of these is Reza’s bad relationship with her vampire healer. The concept of a vampire healer might be closest to Swanson’s joke, but his disturbingly overbearing demeanor to Leysha transcends the idea’s inherent absurdity, and their storyline offers the best twist in the game.
toothless
Sadly, these are isolated highlights, scattered dim sum, in an otherwise lukewarm idea buffet. Outside of writing, Swanson’s biggest problem is that it’s not much fun to inhabit its vampires. Each character has a carefully crafted skill tree that includes environmental skills like dialogue, reasoning, and lockpicking, as well as clan-specific vampire powers. The intention is to let you customize each character in a highly specific way. But the XP required to level up these abilities depends on how well you perform in each scenario. Given that each character has only a handful of characters in the game’s 15-hour length, that means a poorly handled scene can seriously hinder that character’s progression. Imagine if every wrong choice in Telltale’s The Walking Dead made the next one more difficult, and you got a sense of what could go wrong in Swan Song.
(Image credit: Nacon)
While good luck avoids this problem, the harder flaw is how trite some of the game’s dialogue sequences are. The key exchange in Ode to the Swan is called a confrontation, in which you need to verbally defeat your opponent in a protracted argument over multiple stages. But instead of saving the system for the most important story beats, Swanson often applies it to trivial scuffles. A “confrontation” sees Galeb, a century-old vampire whose entire clan uses people like puppets, in an effort to convince a parking attendant to open some electronically locked bins. Said parking attendant is undoubtedly a “thin” vampire, but that’s not an exciting premise for Battle of Wills.
Imagine if every wrong choice in Telltale’s The Walking Dead made the next one more difficult.
The overall quality of each scene also varies considerably. When he’s not yelling at people in the parking lot, Galeb’s chapter is by far the best in the game. The first saw him trawling in a luxury penthouse trying to solve the murder of a decapitated businessman. It’s a well-crafted detective puzzle with a clever final twist. The second (somewhat aptly) reminiscent of Hitman’s Hokkaido level, Galeb explores a large underground facility where there are multiple solutions to the puzzles presented to you.
Not all chapters are that meaningful. Emem’s two main scenes are also the weakest. Warlock Dungeon looks cool, but the action mostly revolves around some weird platforming and annoying pattern-matching puzzles. Her second act has you snooping on a dirty exterior to try and get some biker vampires to join your team. There’s a decent hacking-themed puzzle in here, but I’m not sure that hacking puzzles are the reason players flock to Swanson.
(Image credit: Nacon)
Indeed, as you may have noticed at this point, Swanson isn’t very… vampire. You’ll occasionally feast on humans to boost one of your ability bars, but the way this is achieved in the game’s limited space leaves the mechanics feeling tethered. Additionally, your vampire abilities often play a secondary role in puzzles themed around cell phones, laptops, and other electronic devices. There are also some really weird one-off puzzles that seem to have been lifted from the adventure games of the mid-nineties.
release steam
The worst example of this comes in Leysha’s second chapter, where she needs to escape heavily armed mercenaries in the basement of a vampire bar. Notably, Leysha’s Malkavian abilities allow her to become invisible and mimic other people’s appearances, which means she’s not only capable of stealth and trickery. But instead of building an escape route around those abilities, Swanson made an excuse to cancel them, and then designed the dumbest puzzle since Gabriel Knight 3’s cat hair mustache.
are you ready? This is an idiot. The guard standing in your way happens to be under a pipe that emits hot steam. Despite scalding his large bald head multiple times, the guard refused to move from the door, and refused to put on the bulletproof helmets that all the mercenaries had issued, placing them on some crates instead. To escape this area, you need to find a way to increase the steam pressure until it steals his head like an egg and kills him. Remember, this is a very serious vampire RPG, not a rejected Monkey Island game.
At least Swanson looks good. sometimes. Areas like the Red Salon bar allow the environment designers to have some fun, though most of the game takes place in the humble rich man’s apartment, or the grey concrete interior of things like sewers or ventilation systems. Also, aside from a few skyline panoramas, Swanson doesn’t do much to represent Boston as a place. You won’t learn about the city’s unique history and architecture like you did in Fallout 4. It can be set in New York or Los Angeles, you won’t think much about it.
Ultimately, Swansong doesn’t seem to know what kind of game he wants to be. It’s a variety of talk simulators, detective games, classic-style adventure puzzles, and diet killer sandboxes. There’s even a late-game stealth section that’s mechanically completely separate from the rest of the experience. As the stealth part is suddenly introduced in non-stealth games, it’s not terrible. But I’d happily trade that and other stuff for a stripped-down, Telltale-esque story preloaded with Swanson’s narrative choices, or a dedicated paranormal detective game. Or just a game without the drudgery that makes vampires feel like this. Between this and Missing Bloodlines 2, the heyday of Vampire: The Masquerade feels more distant than ever.
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