Vampyr

Vampyr is a third-person action role-playing game that excels in making its mechanics, systems, and presentation mirror its protagonist’s inner struggles. It associates vampirism with disease and corruption, immersing the player in a hostile and claustrophobic city, whose inhabitants are at the mercy of predators of every kind – including the protagonist.

The game starts with a discussion on mortality, with death being described as a relief and a blessing. This immediately frames the protagonist, Dr. Jonathan E. Reid, as a damned character: his vampire condition is not a superpower, but a curse. This notion is further reinforced by the tragic events of the opening: a young woman is relieved to discover that Reid is alive and tries to embrace him. However, since your vampire vision is active, you can only see her as a shadow housing a huge amount of vividly red blood. She sees Reid as a loved one, whereas he sees her as less than human: she’s food.

Dr. Reid soon finds himself lost, drifting amidst the chaos of his own anger and hunger. Another doctor, however, after finding Reid in front of a corpse, understands his condition and decides to lend a hand. Dr. Swansea gives Reid an anchor: the protagonist is to live and work in the Pembroke Hospital, helping its patients, which gives a shred of normality to his new life. In return, he must also help to discover a cure for the epidemic that is striking London. While in the hospital, Reid meets another vampire, Lady Ashbury, who will serve as his mentor while assisting in his search for the identity of his maker.

Vampyr takes place in London, which is depicted as a decadent, putrid city. The Spanish Flu is ravaging the land, and the people are becoming desperate. There’s a priest who only thinks about purging and cleansings by fire. There’s a boy, amidst all the madness, suffering from depression. There’s another one who won’t leave his house because he fears human beings more than monsters and the plague – and not without reason. There’s a mad woman who thinks she’s a vampire, and a man who lets her bite him because he’s alone and in need of company. There’s a gay couple who refuses to go to the nearby hospital, fearing reprisal for their love. After all, London is full of “greedy cockroaches who feed on despair.”  The city is on the verge of collapse. And you can clearly see that by the crumbling state of the buildings, by expecting death at every corner – which may hide bloodthirst vigilantes or feral vampires –, by not being surprised in seeing impaled corpses decorating rooms painted in blood.

You start the game in a part of the city that seems beyond salvation. The police have forsaken it. At night, criminals and vigilantes prowl the streets. There are buildings hiding hundreds of corpses. People are scared, defenseless, bewildered by all the violence. When Reid asks his mentor who was the man he had just hunted, lady Ashbury promptly answers: “Criminal, Victim, Hunter, Prey.” You know violence has become the norm in a city when these roles have become interchangeable and there is no difference anymore.

Vampirism is just another nail in London’s coffin, just another epidemic. In Vampyr, it is a moral disease, the consequence of a society that is already putrid, corrupted to the core, filled to the brim with rot. Here, contrary to what happens in classic vampire stories such as Dracula, the figure of the vampire is not tied to a foreign menace, but to a threat that comes from within. The story associates the creatures with some mythical figures of England’s past, such as certain renowned knights and kings, precisely to reinforce this theme. “People will always believe in monsters. It’s easier than accepting their own darkness. We can all be monsters,” a bartender says to Dr. Reid. Vampyr’s narrative puts enemies within one’s own family, within one’s own countrymen, within one’s own past.

The game’s story ties blood with hate, and puts vampires in the upper classes of society. Those of noble lineage can live well, drinking people’s blood, while the common vampire folk turn into Skals, a type of vampire that, after becoming a pariah, being relegated to the slums and the sewers, turns feral. Vampirism is depicted as a cycle: it will always strike when a society is at its worst; when the rich are preying on the poor, when two men must hide their love in public lest they become hunted, when the solution offered in dire times is not to help the other and try to reconnect, but to further separate people by walls.

While the people in the poor districts of London fear going out on the streets, while they fear for their lives, a sidequest in the wealthy district of West End has Reid finding an exquisite restaurant for a bored gentleman to visit. A woman preaches about women’s rights, but there’s no one on the streets to hear her speech. A man warns about the vampire menace in the same street and to the same audience. A few blocks away, vampires are prowling dark alleys, killing anyone who gets near them. You meet characters who are communists and it’s no coincidence that the worst outcome for their district is when they are put out of the game.

The tone of the narrative is dire. Reid’s workplace is described as a “giant morgue disguised as a hospital.” When he meets a secret society of vampires, there is no glamor to the situation, only harsh judgment. The Ascalon Club is a group of vampires who believes to be the elite of their kind. They are old, wealthy, and very white. They like to chase foreign vampires away from England, and talk about supremacy and pure blood. “What we need is a wall,” one of the wealthiest members of the club says to Reid. “As long as the right people are at the right side of the walls. That’s all that matters.”

Reid’s investigation on the identity of his maker quickly gives place to a more pressing matter: saving London. As the story progresses, the more dilapidated the city can become. London is divided into districts and each one has a single person as its pillar. During the game’s chapters, Reid will eventually face a choice regarding the fate of that person, which can impact the whole district. The wrong choice may invite chaos in, resulting in the deaths of various people in the district, decreasing its health status. And if it becomes too low, everyone there dies.

Every NPC in Vampyr has a name and a story. You can talk to all of them and discover their secrets. And you can drink them after that. As it usually reinforced in Gothic narratives, there are horrible consequences when secrets don’t remain secret: when Reid finds information about a person, the blood level of that person increases – and the higher that level the more attractive they become as food, giving more experience points to the player. And, in Vampyr, you can drink almost every NPC, depending only on your level.

Vampyr excels in tying gameplay and story together. The difficulty, for example, is directly linked to the decision to feed on human blood. Drinking the people of London makes Reid considerably stronger, which makes your life – as the player – considerably easier, reflecting Reid’s temptation to drink blood. Every citizen is a potential meal. Every conversation can be a prelude to slaughter. And people’s secrets usually are secrets for a good reason: they often cover up misdeeds that can tap into your morality, encouraging you to kill: “that woman beats her daughter all the time, maybe the daughter will be better off alone,” you may think, trying to justify killing her to get a huge amount of XP.

And the choice of killing someone is not just a moral one, having practical effects on the world. People will react to the death of others, and each death will also decrease that district’s health status. Mastering every skill available will mean the fall of London, making Reid the strongest person in a dead city. On the other hand, if you want to try a pacifist playthrough, you will have to care for the health of every citizen, as they often get sick, and Reid – being a doctor – must craft the right medicine to cure them.

A full pacifist playthrough can be quite difficult to achieve, though. Besides the fact that it makes combat a lot harder, the choices regarding the pillars of each district are not easy ones to make, since their outcomes are rarely obvious. Sparing a person may appear merciful at a first glance, but can actually lead to horrible consequences later. This makes each choice meaningful, carrying a lot of weight – and the game autosaves after each one, preventing the player from abusing the save system to circumvent a bad choice.

Vampyr, however, occasionally fails during some of these moments by not making it clear what each choice means. One example can help explain the problem. During a climactic moment, Reid discovers the identity of the person that was blackmailing Lady Ashbury, after they discovered she was a vampire, and confronts that person. Reid is faced with three options: to make that person quit their job (“I look away but you resign”), forget (“You will forget all about this”), or kill them (“I’m ending this right now”). The latter is very clear, but the first two choices are not: you can make the person forget, but forget what? Only that Ashbury was a vampire, since that is the root of the problem? No, it means that she will forget everything about her philanthropic activities that were banked by the blackmail money. And the first option – to make her quit her job – may seem harsh, but Reid will actually offer to finance her activities to compensate for the resignation – a vital piece of information that is not shown by the text that accompanies the choice. Therefore, the problem is not that the outcome of the choices can be out of your control, but that the choices themselves, because of how they are written, are not clear regarding what they actually are.

The level design is also far from stellar. You find locked gates blocking your progress around the city, for example, but some – like the one in Whitechapel – could have been easily bypassed if the protagonist could just jump over the small ledge at its right. He can’t jump over it, however, forcing the player to find a way around it – and let’s not forget that Reid can teleport with his vampire powers. This artificiality in the level design is all over London, making you frequently question why they can go to certain areas and not to others.

The combat, in turn, becomes as complex as you can make it. If you start to drink everyone, Reid will have a plethora of skills to use, being able to wipe the floor with most enemies, by summoning shadows from the floor to grab and pierce them, or by throwing blood spears at them. If you want to avoid confrontation, on the other hand, you can bypass some combat encounters with a stealth skill.

The combat itself is simple: each enemy has a health and a stamina bar, as does Reid. The action is slow-paced, as basic actions, like attacking or dodging, consume some of the protagonist’s stamina, making him unable to act for a while if he runs out of it. Depleting an enemy’s stamina stuns that enemy, making them vulnerable to be bitten – what increases Reid’s blood gauge, which is used for vampire skills. Some weapons are better at hitting the enemy’s health bar, while others fare better in depleting their stamina, and some directly increase your blood gauge. The player, then, will have to be able to read their enemy well so that they can dodge, attack, and use skills at the right time, while choosing carefully what type of attack is best for that moment.

Finally, the game could use some quality of life improvements, such as enabling fast travel between safe houses and showing discovered NPCs on the map, so you don’t have to wander around looking for them if you forget where they are.

Vampyr is one of the best vampire-themed games out there, succeeding in making all of its parts work together to reflect the protagonist’s curse, immersing the player in a harsh and violent setting. It may have some problems regarding the artificiality of its level design and how it makes some of the player choices vaguer than they should be, but it certainly compensates these flaws with a well-crafted story, tragic characters, and strong atmosphere.

December 09, 2019.