There’s a conceit within the World of Darkness universe that vampires are banned from using mobile phones. There’s something in the lore about how all the vampires were wiped out of London after hunters used mobiles to track them, but it feels like a convenience of sorts – because if any of the characters in Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 could use phones, the game would probably be about four hours long.
I say without exaggeration that 75% of the campaign is running from place to place to either ask someone something, tell someone something, or give someone something, occasionally punctuated with bursts of colourful but repetitive violence.
Full disclosure before I continue: I’m not a hardcore fan of the World of Darkness. There’s nothing wrong with it, and its legions of fans will stake me to a wall for saying otherwise; I just never got into it. My only experience of the universe was playing the god-awful Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood a few years ago. As for Vampire itself, what began life as a tabletop role-playing game has spun off over the decades into multiple different mediums, most notably of which to me are various visual novel-style games released in the whopping 21 years between the first Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines and this.
The sequel, while set in the same universe, has few direct ties to the original in terms of characters or narrative. Once again it centres around Gehenna, a kind of Vampire apocalypse, and the cult of the Sabbat who seek to bring it about. You play as the Nomad, a legendary Elder Vampire who has lain in a state of torpor for a century, only to awaken with a voice in your head. The Malkavian detective Fabien has been murdered while investigating a series of grisly killings in modern-day Seattle and his spirit has become fused to yours for reasons you’ll spend the next few nights trying to fathom. Taking the name Phyre, you choose a gender and Clan, and head off into the city to become embroiled in a power struggle among the Kindred.
The previous Prince of Seattle has been beheaded, and two factions vie for control: the Court, an upper class society led by Prince Ryong Chong and legendary vampire madam Lou Graham, and the Anarchs, a bunch of punks dressed like it’s 1996, who are led by the scarred vampire matriarch, Katsumi. Runtime is split between traversing the modern city as Phyre, and reliving Fabien’s memories of both recent events and the roaring 20s, as he attempts to solve a century-old serial killer case. The “Rebar Killer” has a penchant for beheading people and displaying their corpses on spikes of iron, and Fabien failed to stop them a century ago and won’t quit now, even if he’s dead himself.
Narrative is certainly the strongest element of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. The voice acting isn’t all up to snuff, and some of the writing comes off as a little bit hammy, but the actual plot is compelling enough that I pushed through some of the less interesting sections to see what would happen next. The characters are intriguing, and some, like Lou and Katsumi, are fairly nuanced. Phyre’s words and actions will have an impact on how people respond to you, which helps to shape the story – though perhaps not in the earth-shaking ways you might hope for. It feels more subtle, affecting some of the information they’ll give you, while much of the world feels unchanged by your choices.
Perhaps this is because Bloodlines 2 has a terrible fear of leaving anyone behind. As a result, everything is spelled out and signposted, even the supposed noir mystery that forms Fabien’s storyline. You can’t ever fail to interrogate someone fully, and even if you don’t have a clue what’s going on, Fabien will guide you to your next objective unbidden. It takes away a lot of real agency, and it can feel like you’re just running from place to place, talking to people, and moving on. Sometimes the game will delight in sending you fully across the city to find that the person you need to talk to isn’t there, and then sending you all the way back to talk to someone else instead. It does this a lot, and it always feels like filler.
That The Chinese Room cut their teeth on walking simulators is obvious at times. The city is good-looking but ultimately hollow, its alleys hiding the odd collectible but almost no life or personality. It’s never not night time and it’s never not snowing. The lighting is often beautiful, deliberately using tones to sell a very specific mood, but really that’s it. You’ll see the same faces doing the same things over and over again. You can get around faster by double-jumping and evoking Phyre’s otherworldly speed, but doing so threatens to break the Masquerade, the social illusion that the Kindred do not exist. Breaking it will result in first police and then other vampires or hunters coming for you until you’re dead. But with these restrictions and no fast travel, getting around is a slog.
As Phyre you will often find yourself in combat, which is where your vampiric skills come into play. You can choose from one of six Clans (not four, as was originally intended). The Brujah, for example, are brutal combatants, while the Toreador use seduction and illusion to overcome enemies. It takes no time to earn enough skill points to unlock all the abilities in your starting tree, but to unlock the skills of other Clans you’ll need to earn special currencies on the streets – and by Dracula’s pale-blue nutsack, is it a grind and a half.
There are three specific types of pedestrian you’ll need to feed from to unlock these currencies, and you need to get them alone to do so. Some are plain horny, and will follow you down the nearest alley then moan like porn stars as you drain them. Others will fly into a rage when you approach them and immediately attack, so you can kite them into the shadows. The third type are always either trying to steal a car, or spray paint a building, and will run screaming when you talk to them. You’ll have to herd them into alleys to do your business. There is no skill involved in these hunts, and they’re more of an inconvenience than anything else. And then when you do unlock the other skills, you can’t simply allocate them and mix and match them how you want.
The skills are presented in rows, which correspond to which button you press to activate them. All skills in one row, regardless of Clan, will be allocated to that button, so if you like one particular skill from your starting Clan, this is a pointless exercise. It’s indicative of a developer who really doesn’t feel like they click with this genre. Using a skill takes up a certain number of action points, which can only be restored by drinking a potion or drinking blood. With skills where you must spend five pips, that’s a lot of neck-biting during standard combat.
Playing as Fabien is, sadly, even less exciting. There’s no combat here (you can’t even jump) and his entire missions are based on running from person to person, and using mind tricks to make them tell him secrets. You can’t fail, and the only hardship is if you need to feed on someone to re-use a skill. Fabien has to find specific civilians around the city who will let him drink from them, you see, and so you’ll need to go do that to stay topped up. When he needs to mimic Phyre’s telekinesis, the game will just drop a potion-ex-machina on him that gives him the ability he needs.
One of his skills lets him interrogate inanimate objects or corpses, which is presented as the object talking to him but which is explained to be Fabien talking to his own subconscious. It’s never not a tonal throat-punch to suddenly be interrogating a pool table or a dead cat, especially given the dreary way Fabien is voiced. He’s a typical cliché private eye, and comes out with such gems as “it was cold enough to freeze the tits off a frog”. Whatever the hell that means.
If I sound like I’m down on Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 it’s because I kind of am. There’s massive potential here, with a really interesting world to explore, but the tone is all over the place, the dialogue is lofty but ultimately a bit silly, and there’s so, so much walking or running from one side of the map to the other and accomplishing very little. Combat is fast and brutal, but it’s also limited and repetitive, and I see no real benefit to not just picking one of the melee-focused Clans other than to make combat much tougher for yourself. There are some cool skills like a hundred-hand slap, a spell that makes enemies literally explode, or a charm that makes them pop themselves through the forehead with their own gun, but it doesn’t feel original or satisfying in its execution.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 will certainly appeal to the die-hard fans of its world. The intrigue and politics of that universe are presented here with care and dignity, and there’s plenty of lore to find if you want to look for it, while the characters are just about colourful and interesting enough to pull the story forward for those invested, even when the action is feeling stale. Unfortunately though, it commits the cardinal sin of simply not being fun enough to play, and that’s a difficult coffin to clamber back out of.
