I had the pleasure of playing four hours of The Blood of Dawnwalker last week—and while I can't say it'll knock my socks off just yet (RPGs that claim to have impactful choices just require more sitdown time to prove their worth) it has absolutely got its teeth into me, because I experienced something rare: I ignored a quest. On purpose. And I liked it.
You play as Coen, a humble yet hero-coded villager who, over the course of the prologue (and the game's first day, more on that later) is turned into a titular dawnwalker, thanks to your incidental siring within a silver mine. A human by day, a bloodthirsty monster by night.
Your moment-to-moment dispatchment of corrupt guards and obligatory wolves (plus the occasional bear) is very action-RPG standard, with the delightful inclusion of a For Honor-style directional block and attack system with timed parries and direction-based counter-hits, with some options to just auto-attack if you don't want to deal with all of that.
This system wobbles a bit in crowds of enemies, but that's likely just a result of not being able to gather enough skill points during my play session to get into the game's ability system, which is a little more standard RPG—flinging dust in your opponent's eye, vampiric teleports, bites, and so on.
I don't have much else to say about the combat, other than it's just pretty competent with some rough spots, shining in duels and being just serviceable elsewhere, at least in the early game. The part of The Blood of Dawnwalker that really intrigues me is its time management system—because Coen's got a deadline to meet.
Tick, tock
After the prologue, Coen has 30 days and 30 nights to save his family from the vampire lord Brancis, who has taken an entirety of Vale Sangora hostage—on the plus side, he doesn't charge taxes. Unfortunately, he does ask for blood, and will cull members of his cattle who he thinks are weak. This sucks, both literally and figuratively, for everyone involved.
This core system feeds into the rest of the game's mechanics, even the combat. Rather than keeping a stopwatch running, The Blood of Dawnwalker splits up your days and nights into time segments, a sort of pseudo-currency—in that you've only a limited amount of it—that you can spend on completing quests, scouting areas, and so on.
The proof of concept lies in the prologue, which had me making interesting roleplay choices that I wouldn't have otherwise made in a bog standard RPG. See, I'm a bit of a completionist. I want to go down every corridor, experience every dialogue option, and pick up every leaf and lamb offal I possibly can before moving on.
But I didn't do that during my preview, because I needed to get medicine for my mother and I only had a single day to do it. This led me not only to turn down a lovely witch's book club invitation, sadly spurning romance so my mum wouldn't, y'know, die. But I also let a villager hurling insults at me get away without a beating. Normally I would have gotten my revenge, but with the clock ticking down, it felt like a literal waste of time.
In a chat I had with game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, he said this is all very much on purpose: "The idea was to add this sense of urgency to the game … When you're playing, you are more aware of what's happening around you, and you're choosing the content, and you have more emotions connected when you play."
It's genuinely really interesting, because it forces you to weigh up your actual priorities. If all my little tasks are just waiting for me to come back for them, I'll obviously spend time with the cool witch lady. But if NPC lives are on the line? I'll sadly say no—and then immediately have my instincts verified as two steps from her door, a man's brother had gone missing, and I was directly able to save him because of my decision to not play hooky with the local potion peddler.
This impact on your roleplaying is by far the most interesting part of this time-based system, but there are some cool ways it impacts game mechanics, too: Vampires only drink blood, so you can't eat regular food to heal your injuries during the night—swapping up your playstyle from hoarding snacks to biting necks.
During the day, you don't have vampiric powers. Certain gear is only beneficial to your human or vampire forms, respectively, to the point where you get two different gear loadouts that auto-swap when the sun sets and rises. And the world shifts around a little, as well.
For instance, I made the tactical error of diving into an enemy camp to rescue a prisoner just in the nick of time—however, the moment I did so, dawn broke and the camp gained reinforcements, meaning I had to fight my way out of it, too.
The main point of this system, however, is to create a web of action and consequence that spans the entirety of the game. And in the prologue, at least, it holds up tremendously well.
Gosh darn these vampires
The Blood of Dawnwalker has a chance to pull off its core premise with flying colours—and if it does, it might be one of the most intriguing open world RPGs of the decade, one where you aren't just ticking off objectives on a world map checklist, but making deliberate, calculated choices to try and min-max your odds of saving your family.
To do that, the full version will need to keep giving interesting webs of choice and consequences to the player, keeping the pressure on while causing your decisions to have a meaningful, lasting impact on the game's story. Easier said than done, but I'm optimistic so far.
Even if it doesn't pull it off, though, The Blood of Dawnwalker is going to be very interesting, and in a sense, that's already enough to have me thirsty to play more. I'll vastly prefer a slightly wonky experience with unique ideas to a mediocre game that's just okay—and The Blood of Dawnwalker's already had me switching up my usual completionist instincts into something far more immersive.
