The Blood of Dawnwalker Review — A Vampire RPG Where Your Greatest Enemy Is Time

I'm standing tied to a tree, my back against the trunk, my face to the sun. The people who brought me here are the same ones I had just helped: I freed them from captivity and saved them from the guards, and I thought we were allies. Turns out it was a setup: they found out they were dealing with a vampire and decided to simply wait for dawn instead of fighting. The sun starts to burn, and in front of the whole crowd I turn back into a human for a moment. The reaction is instant, something along the lines of "what kind of demon is this". A minute later everything gets cleared up and they let me go, but the day has already been wasted, and I still don't know whether it would have gone differently if I had shown up as an ordinary human instead of a vampire.

That's pretty much how people treated me for the whole game. Coen has thirty days to reach the vampire lord Brencis and save his family: the timer is strict, specific, and always hanging over your head. And yet over those thirty days I managed to stir up someone else's feud involving poisoned blood, help a prostitute oust her boss, run into a living skeleton with mismatched eyes, quarrel with the mother superior of a monastery that had turned into a graveyard of nuns buried alive, and spend an entire evening hunting for a blanket someone had stolen from a prison cell. It's hard to call any of this saving your family, but these are exactly the pieces the game is made of: it drags you anywhere except where you originally meant to go.

At the start, the game let me run around as Coen for a bit and showed off some vampire tricks, including teleportation. I tried it, got used to pressing the right button, and got ready to play that way. Then the abilities were taken away, and for the next several hours I had to make do without what I had just been taught. When I could finally use my vampire skills again, it was more of a "well, finally". A strange feeling after a tutorial.

The first events also didn't quite match what I expected from vampires. At mass, people talk about the blood sacrifice as if they were being led to something terrible. Then someone gets a small cut on the arm and a bit of blood is taken. I watched it and tried to understand what all the horror was about. Maybe for the locals the very fact of coercion is creepy enough. But the scene puzzled me at first: I was expecting a very different spectacle.

Things are much worse at home. Coen's mother is sick, and I go to Anca for help. She used to be a nun, but then took up dark magic and was expelled from the monastery for it. Now she lives her life as a herbalist and, judging by later events, will become something more to Coen than just a healer on call. Anca gives me herbs and a recipe for the medicine, which says how many bundles to take and what kind of water to use. By the time I got back to my father and was asked how exactly to brew the potion, the details had already slipped my mind. I couldn't open the journal at that moment. I had to answer at random, and it later turned out that we had brewed the medicine wrong. I still don't know whether the right mixture would have changed my mother's fate. I wanted to replay it and find out.

Then the villagers head into the mines to fight the vampires, and it all ends in a massacre. Coen survives and turns into a creature that looks human by day and becomes a bloodsucker by night. Some of the people from his village were killed, and the rest were taken away. Anca helps find out where they were taken. Coen has thirty days to reach Brencis and save his family: once the deadline runs out, the vampire lord intends to drink the prisoners' blood. From here on, I'll talk about my quests and decisions without story spoilers.

At first the countdown doesn't run. And rightly so: before the disaster, Coen doesn't yet know who he has to save or from what. Day and night already alternate, and the game lets you settle in, but the number isn't hanging over your head yet. Once it appears, I start counting even during an ordinary walk. If a quest eats up several time segments, will I manage to do something important before morning? Maybe I should have dropped it and focused on my family? At the same time, I couldn't bring myself to follow only the main goal either.

One of the first houses I looked into was abandoned. There were sounds coming from inside. I found a note from a woman who had buried her plague-stricken relatives and was left to die at home herself: there was no one left to bury her. Before she died, she had stolen a figurine from the church and decided the disease was punishment for the theft. You can take the figurine and return it. I didn't notice any time limit on this quest. I took it. Then I went off to do other things and forgot to bring it back. I still think about that note, and the figurine is still sitting somewhere among my unfinished business. That's a pretty accurate description of the whole playthrough. The game keeps throwing small stories at you that you want to see through, but there's already another one lying right next to it, and over both of them the days until your family's rescue keep ticking away.

Sometimes you linger and regret it. Quests where you had to help someone on the road had their own icon. I saved one person from danger, spent a time segment on it, listened to his thanks, and, as far as I could tell, got nothing else. After that I started to dislike those icons. Maybe the help will pay off somewhere later, but at that point I had too little free time for it. After all, at the same time I was wondering whether I should even learn another talent.

There are cases that go the other way. I freed people who were being escorted to have their blood drained. One of the rescued invited me into the woods and turned out to be a fencing teacher. I went to him thinking that, in return for saving him, he would at least teach me something. We fought, after which he opened up a book shop. You have to buy the books. He didn't offer me a free one for having just pulled him out of that convoy. It stung a little, even though he never promised to train me for free.

Along the way you often come across shrines. I used them to learn talents and travel between points I had already unlocked, but when I saw a new shrine, the menu wasn't the first thing I looked at. Near one of them I noticed an abandoned house and a trail I could investigate. While I was looking around, a blind old man who had known Coen's father came out to meet me. After that encounter, I started paying closer attention to the family's story. There's always a risk of getting stuck in conversations like that for a long time, but this time I wanted to stay.

And even when you're heading somewhere with purpose, the road still stretches out. I needed to get to Anca on the other side of the map. On the way, I ran into merchants selling weapons, healing items, and witchcraft supplies. I also stumbled upon an underground silver dealer, but he refused to do business with me right away. I didn't find out why at the time. I moved on, then noticed another place I could explore. I reached Anca much later than I had planned. If you also love constantly straying from the beaten path, take a look at our selection of the best open world games.

I approached the outpost where the prisoner I needed was being held during the day, without a fight. I told the guard I had come to see the prisoner, and he let me through. I had already tried to sneak in at night and got hit over the head. That was convincing enough to try again in broad daylight. If you're interested in different takes on playing as a bloodsucker, we have a separate piece on the best vampire games.

On the way to the cell, a woman complained that she had given her husband a blanket and then saw the same blanket for sale at the prison. The seller, of course, brushed her off: there are plenty of blankets like that, what makes her think it's hers? I talked to him, went to the commander, and reported that the prisoners' belongings were being stolen. Later, one of the people involved was sitting there with a busted face. I liked that there was no separate grand scene between the complaint and what I saw afterwards. You just go about your business and notice the result.

The prisoner turned out to be Mirt the miller. I could have left him there. But I came back, ran into the guards, took the key, and let him out. After that I had to help a man Mirt told me about. That's how one trip to the outpost grew a pile of other people's problems. Every new conversation cost time, but by that point it was hard to tell myself: fine, he's been sitting there, let him keep sitting.

After freeing Mirt, I made my way to Sara and asked her to take me to Nightingale, the leader of the freedmen. I came at night, in vampire form. I was right to be wary when she agreed too quickly: near the camp I was grabbed and tied to a tree on the sunny side. Dawn began to break, the sun burned Coen, and then he turned human right in front of them. I watched the faces of people who had just been sure they had caught a vampire. By then I had forgotten all about the clock.

At some point Nightingale suggested waiting until morning, and the game skipped the rest of the night. I had arrived almost right after dark. Had I known in advance how the conversation would end, I would have spent the night on other things first and shown up later. For a second I wanted to reload, but I left it as it was. I still had plenty of time.

Caution doesn't always pay off. During the day it's convenient to talk and go to places where a vampire would be met with weapons at night. On the other hand, some towers I could only climb at night, when Shadowstep is available. You approach a wall, teleport higher, grab onto the next section. While climbing mountains and jumping around with this ability, a couple of times I wanted to just spread a cloak and glide down, like in Crimson Desert. There was no such option here, and I had to find a way back down.

I liked the towers themselves. You get to the top, the camera zooms in on the surroundings, and you look for points of interest and inspect them. Through them I discovered new places and quests tied to Brencis's servants. Sometimes the small ledges on the way up turned out to be more awkward than the whole rest of the wall; maybe I was picking a bad route. Once all the points have been found, the game still leaves you in inspection mode. You wait for control to come back, and then you remember that you have to exit yourself. A small thing that annoyed me every single time.

Some things are only available at a certain time of day. In town, I climbed into a locked building at night, spent time searching it, and found out that the freedmen had been hiding there. At first I couldn't even tell whether I had gotten anything else. When exploration costs you time segments, you notice things like that: I climbed in because I could, and then spent a long time wondering whether it had been worth it. But once outside, I still looked for somewhere else to climb. The town looks much more interesting from the rooftops.

To get closer to Brencis's people, I disrupted their operations: I attacked convoys, cleared camps, and destroyed supplies. On the map, this is easy to mistake for routine marker-chasing. That's what I thought at one of the camps, until I reached the barrels of blood. First I had to deal with the guards. In the swamp camp, besides them, there were peasants collecting leeches. The barrels were part of the operation I had come to wreck. I walked up to them, and the peasants asked me not to touch anything. Brencis's people paid them for the work, and without that money they'd have nothing to eat. I didn't like the explanation, but destroying the supplies in front of them became harder too.

That time I listened to them and left the barrels alone. In another camp, I hit a peasant during a fight, he lunged at me, the others followed, and it all ended in killings. After something like that, I couldn't stick to any preconceived image of a "good Coen". Sometimes I regretted a decision before I even reached the next camp. We have a separate piece on dilemmas like these, The Toughest Decisions in Popular Games, and some of them will make you second-guess your choice for even longer.

During one of the raids, I open a barrel and out climbs Klaus. He calls himself the Brave and curses at me: he had been hiding in the supplies to get inside and find something out for the freedmen, and I ruined his plan. At that moment I was busy destroying barrels and wasn't expecting to find a living person in there at all. Klaus probably should have been prepared for someone to open a barrel in enemy territory sooner or later. He was still angry at me.

As the raids went on, I started noticing notes on the bodies. At first they ordered Coen to be found and killed. Then they warned that he was dangerous, especially at night. Later a man came after me for the promised bounty. I had grown used to the camps and was acting almost on autopilot, but these scraps of paper showed that people over there were talking about me. By then there were more armed men on the roads and in the settlements. If a commander recognized Coen, it could come to a fight.

The camps also have a more boring side. Several times I killed the guards, destroyed whatever needed destroying, and left. Nothing else interesting happened there. I went into each of these raids hoping to meet people like the swamp peasants or Klaus again, and ended up looting bodies instead. With a thirty-day deadline, routine clearing gets tiring faster: I see the time I've spent right away.

One town story began with a vampire named Vicho. His home was hung with icons, and his body was covered in wounds from his own claws. He said he was trying not to drink human blood. I was asked to help figure out how his friends had died, and at first I wasn't even sure how much of the story he himself remembered. In this questline I wanted to talk to everyone I could find.

Things got much rougher in the bar: a horned girl jumped me, we fought, her friend ran in and demanded we stop. Some time later, I was already helping both of them deal with a man they wanted to get rid of. They talked about one outcome, while during the quest I grew less and less sure I understood their plan.

I reloaded several times there. First I took an item that seemed right, even though the game was hinting at another one. Later I decided not to intervene at a dangerous moment and watched the person I wanted to help get killed. I restarted. Then I went back even further and tried a different item. Enough changed that I wanted to check what I was actually responsible for. After a conversation by the river, I trusted my new acquaintance no more than before. At the same time, being angry only at her would have been convenient: I was the one making the choices, after all. If this kind of branching is exactly why you love the genre, check out our list of the best RPGs of all time as well.

I also liked how some tasks were left without a neat "completed" mark where I expected one. Mirt told me where to look for the key, but I didn't see a separate quest to free him. At first it would have been easy to write that off as an oversight and walk away. I went back for the key because I remembered the conversation. In other places the same vagueness was annoying, especially when I didn't understand where to go next and whether it was worth spending a day searching. The difference is subtle: sometimes I'm glad the game trusts my memory, sometimes I don't trust it at all.

What mattered most to me weren't even the big branching points, but small human reactions. The woman at the prison recognized her blanket on the counter. The peasants asked me to leave the barrels of blood because they'd get paid. The freed fencing teacher opened a shop instead of handing me a gift. You can argue with each of them. Then you still move on with what you chose, or reload and admit that you wanted a different outcome.

I went with Anca to the monastery where she used to live. She had been expelled from it for practicing dark magic. Outside, there was fog; Anca was looking for books there that could help against Brencis. I followed her and along the way found out what had happened to the people who had stayed in the monastery. The longer we wandered around, the less I wanted to talk about the trip as just another fetch quest.

One of the chimneys was smoking, and that gave away Brencis's men: they had locked themselves inside, frightened of whatever was roaming the monastery. Through a window, you could negotiate passage to the library in exchange for a relic. I started looking for it, then came across a bell. I ring it, but there are only more questions in my head. A note nearby sends me to a dormitory, where it explains how to change the chime and where the nuns will go after it. I tried one way, then another, and at some point sent them to where Brencis's men were hiding. When I later reached that room, they were no longer alive.

I hadn't planned to get rid of them that way. On the contrary, at first I tried to get the relic and go through with the deal. After the bell, I got curious enough to go through the rooms again. Later I came back for an item I had been looking for earlier, and only then calmly examined the place where the nuns had been getting in the way. I remember this monastery by my route: I came in here, didn't leave right away, went back to that corner because I had left it unexplored.

After this trip, I started talking to Anca more often, chose my lines carefully, and once missed a chance to flirt because I took her reply for a joke (just to be clear, the protagonist is male — editor's note).

I caught myself only after pressing the button. I wanted the chance to come up again. With her, it's often hard to guess what will follow what you've said: Anca can talk openly about her life and then stop right where I'm already waiting for an answer. At times this annoyed me more than any of her quests.

Outside the monastery there were simpler places. In a cave I found a skeleton boss. Following the sound of bells, I reached some ruins and a large stone with a symbol, and spent time studying it. Explorations like these yielded items, abilities, or talent manuals. I wasn't always sure I'd gotten exactly what I came for. Sometimes I wanted to finish reading the note I'd found first and check the reward later.

Another time, I heard a story in a tavern about people who had fled with treasure and fell into a gorge after a bridge collapsed. I went to check it out. I had to fight at the bottom, but I found a good weapon that I carried for a long time afterwards. In moments like these, the map rewards plain curiosity.

You can fight with both a sword and claws, and at first I was sure the claws were stronger, just judging by how the damage felt. By the end of the game I had gone back to them: I put together gear for claw damage, poured talents into that branch, and the vampire style became my main one again. Somewhere in the middle I honestly tried playing with the sword. It has its own mechanic, a chance to cut off a head, maybe ten percent, no more, and it looks spectacular, but not enough to always reach for the sword.

Voracious Bite only works properly one-on-one. You hold the button and drain the enemy's health, and you can put them to sleep or drink them dry. As soon as a second enemy approaches, the ability gets interrupted, goes on cooldown, and all that's left is to wait.

Enemies are surprisingly polite. Once you start fighting one, the others may stand nearby and patiently wait their turn; they rarely all pile on at once. On the one hand, it's convenient: you fight one at a time and don't have to worry about getting hit from all sides. Logically, though, it's pretty silly, because a crowd of enemies should be pressing you, not standing on the sidelines. Precisely because of this quirk, even locations marked with a red skull difficulty icon, with five or six enemies around, can realistically be cleared without dying: just hit them one by one, watch your parries, and stay patient.

Bosses fight differently: it essentially comes down to spamming one button. You pin them against a wall and keep hitting until the health bar is empty. Some boss fights come in waves: you kill one group of mobs, another comes out right away, and it all counts toward one shared health bar at the top of the screen. The final fight with Brencis has two phases, and in the second one the arena changes and he turns into something far creepier, but the battle turned out to be even easier than some of the regular groups on the way to the castle.

Healing items often ran out before the fight did. Some restored health slowly, while the enemy took it away quickly. I picked herbs, looted everything from the dead, and brewed new medicine. I never figured out where I kept getting water for them: I searched everyone and used whatever ended up in my bag. Parrying saved me: a successful block sometimes trickles a bit of health back, and that can carry you through a fight where you're frankly short on damage.

Running away comes with its own problem. If your stamina runs out while sprinting near enemies, the character enters combat and stops jumping entirely. Because of this I got stuck in the foundation of a ruined house: the wolves were furious, and I couldn't climb out over the half-collapsed wall. Another time I was running from a bear boss and only escaped because there were no obstacles in my way and I didn't have to fight. But you can't escape with the press of a single button here; you have to physically leave the area in which it's willing to chase you.

Weapons with special attacks are a nice touch: you charge up the ability, and when you activate it, the character does something noticeably different from a regular strike, and different weapon types have different animations. The vampire claws didn't get this treatment: the attack is always the same. I thought it was because I was missing bracers, but no, the animation simply doesn't change regardless of your gear.

At the shrines, a talent tree with sword, witchcraft, and vampire skills awaited me. Separately, there were abilities that required finding manuals to learn. I would open yet another page, see how much had piled up, close it, and move on. It felt like a waste to spend time segments on it. In a regular game you can put off fiddling with your build until the next stop. Here, even in a safe place, I kept thinking about my family.

Of everything I learned, the speed boost came in especially handy. At night, after a short delay, Coen turns into a wolf and runs fast, using up stamina. When it runs out, the form disappears, then your strength recovers and you can do it again. During the day, I took a similar skill for the human form. If you need to cover a long distance, you immediately feel why you spent points on it. A route that used to seem long goes by much faster. Along the way, though, I still kept stopping at houses and unfamiliar merchants.

There are separate outfits for day and night. For a while I looked at these sets, trying to figure out whether I'd need to change before each new task, then stopped thinking about it. In my playthrough I managed without constantly switching. Once I got used to the quick-access buttons, healing items started disappearing by the stack. Not all of the interface shown at the start turned out to be equally useful to me.

The more I interfered with Brencis's servants, the more visible Coen became to the guards. That made trips between quests more cautious. At the same time, even among my allies I didn't feel like I'd done enough. Some thought too few people had been freed, others wanted attacks on camps and convoys, and still others came with their own requests while I was busy with the previous ones. Sometimes I wanted to tell them all to get lost and go to my family. Then I'd remember that I still had to somehow get to Brencis, and went back to those same tasks.

The story with one of his servants showed well why I kept going. At first you simply wreck someone's operations: a camp, a convoy, another raid. You find notes with threats against Coen. One day you walk into a village, see a crucified man, and the villagers scatter at the sight of you. A woman approaches and delivers an offer to talk from the very camp you've been at war with for a long time. After several raids, I was expecting another fight. Instead I got a conversation that made me seriously think about whether to agree to someone else's plan. That choice kept echoing in how I had to play for a long time afterwards.

I liked that the consequences didn't always fit into a reward window. Sometimes I heard a line from someone I had saved; sometimes people recognized me on the street; sometimes I carried the unpleasant effects of my own decision with me and looked for a way to survive the next fight. Not every such case was a pleasant one.

I explored the world eagerly. At night I climbed walls and rooftops; during the day I returned to places where I wouldn't have been left in peace before. By the road there might be a corpse with a note, and next to a tower, an entrance I hadn't noticed from the ground. Not everything is equally interesting. There were long stretches where I just ran to the objective and checked the map. On the other hand, I remember several houses I found along the way better than the destinations themselves.

Hair looks uneven in cutscenes. In one scene I looked at the characters and didn't think about it; in another it was so eye-catching that it got in the way of following the conversation. The frame rate drops were far more distracting. I started playing at 2K on ultra settings: the counter showed around 80–90 frames per second, but when running and turning the camera, the picture noticeably stuttered. I lowered the settings to high, and the frame rate barely changed, but running felt smoother.

Cutscenes fared worse. Some in-engine ones dropped to around 20 frames per second in places. The characters are talking about something important, and I'm sitting there waiting for the image to stop stuttering. It's especially frustrating after a quest where I did a lot of talking and picked my own answers. You want to look at the person you're talking to, but the frame hitches steal your attention.

There was also a case where I came to the blacksmith before I had gathered what she needed for her work. Only a regular line was available; the dialogue option that would move things forward hadn't appeared yet. When I finished talking, I couldn't find a way to exit the dialogue and had to restart the game. Later I came back with what she had asked for, and the right dialogue option was there. I never figured out what happened, but I didn't want to visit her again before gathering everything she needed.

Little things like these add up to fatigue. After yet another tower inspection, I steer the camera back out myself. Before a fight near a low wall, I check whether I can back off without jumping. In a cutscene, I wait for the picture to run smoothly again. I did all of this while still looking for new quests. If every house I entered had only loot in it, I would have long since stopped peeking into every doorway. But all too often there was a person with a request, a note, or a trail that led somewhere else.

The Blood of Dawnwalker is a big RPG in which, over 60 hours, I managed to get tired of the same attacks, get angry at the stutters in cutscenes, and still happily keep coming back to the game. Thirty days to save your family make you watch the clock, but along the way there are always other people's problems that are hard to walk past. The side stories stuck with me the most. Not every decision changes as much as I expected, and by the finale I just wanted the fights to be over. But after the credits rolled, I went back to see other versions of the ending. If a sequel comes out, I'll play it. And I recommend you do the same.