Excited for Bloodlines 2? Play free adventure Santa Monica By Night

Bloodlines 2, thrillingly, is a real thing that is happening, a fact that no doubt has caused many of you to reinstall the buggy but brilliant original game. When you've had your fill of Troika's vampire RPG, you might want to give Santa Monica By Night a play. It's a short adventure game, made appropriately for the Vampire Jam, which begins with the premise that the events of Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines were based on fact.

Yep, vampires are real, and many of them in fact do their skulking, trenchcoat-swishing, and of course blood-drinking in LA's Santa Monica. As in the original Bloodlines, you wake up as a freshly minted vampire in Santa Monica By Night, before you're let loose on the coastal city of the title.

There are plenty of references to Bloodlines here, including the locations you'll point and click your way through. These were immediately recognisable to me, even through the heavy pixellation, and the fact that I haven't played Troika's game in several years. Don't go in expecting an RPG, however—this brief, story-focused adventure offers a small taste of Bloodlines' atmosphere, just enough to make you thirsty for the upcoming sequel.

For more great free experiences, check out our roundup of the best free PC games.

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.