Being a vampire is a pretty raw deal… or so the vamps inform us when they are not having freaky gothic sex, shapeshifting into wolves, enjoying the slimming effects of a uniquely low-carb diet, or enduring through marvellous future epochs we foolish cattle can only dream of.
I find most stories about vampirism tend to do a poor job of convincing me that vampirism is to be avoided. “Immortality is no gift, but a curse,” breathe the bloodsuckers, like parents telling kids that staying up late only makes you tired in the morning, and I think: OK, so you’re definitely going to outlive everybody you’ve ever loved, but also, 1) you’ve got marble hard abs, and 2) you’re going to be knocking around when generations to come finally put a stake through capitalism and roll out UBI.
Within videogames, especially, the downsides tend to skulk on the other side of the old ludonarrative portcullis. In the opening act of beWitchering RPG The Blood of Dawnwalker, for example, main character Coen becomes a vampire and is very cross about this. He spends several dialogue sequences carping and moaning. I nodded sympathetically throughout, then switched to the skills menu and browsed a few ability preview clips. Coen can teleport now. He can walk up walls. Given a few unlock points, Coen can slow time and make people who annoy him boil from the inside.
Coen doesn’t even have to worry about half the traditional vampire debuff menu, including death by sunlight. He’s a Hovis Best Of Both knock-off, not a true vampire, so he gets to spend the day as a regular Jon Harker, without any grotty fingernail extensions to spoil his attempts at mingling. I listened to Coen whine about his inner corruption for another couple of minutes, and then I made him go jump in the river. Screw you, Coen. I’ve got plenty of inner corruption, myself, just not the kind that gives me a sultry pallor while letting me turn attacking knights into thralls.
I’m sure the downsides of vampirism grow more pressing over the course of the game (here’s Mark’s review). For one thing, Coen has to keep his vampire health bar topped up with fresh haemo to avoid losing control in conversation. Even so, the opening hours have made me realise that what I really want, right now, isn’t a vampire power fantasy but a true vampire survival sim, in which all the legendary drawbacks of the neck-biter lifestyle are permitted to spread and swell like toadstools on burial mounds.
I want to play a vampire game in which I am a fearful, feral cadaver, living on the periphery and in the gutter, alone and at a decided disadvantage in a universe of paranoid smallfolk. Witness me quiver, caught between the prongs of my gnawing appetite and the hateful, hateful sun. I want to be a miserable gangrel creature – weird and nasty enough to overpower a single alerted villager, possibly, but helpless before a torch-wielding mob.
I want solutions to the challenges of vampirism that don’t involve outright conflict, because there are so many things that can harm, thwart or dispel me: garlic, crucifixes, silver, running water, holy water, scripture, church bells, thresholds I’m not invited to cross. Have you ever looked up a halfway comprehensive list of the plants that damage or deter vampires, according to folklore and superstition from across the globe? Apparently, vampires are vulnerable to juniper berries. Walking through any remotely verdant area must feel like tapdancing on landmines.
Supernatural force alone cannot help me navigate this sandbox. Nor can straightforward real-time combat mechanics. If I am to become powerful, raising my keep on the mountainside or spreading my miasma through the catacombs, it must be through bitter effort and canny misdirection, not a cycle of moderately guilt-ridden clawing, draining and levelling up. I must become a being of strategy, above all.
I’m not sure such a vampire game exists – if you’ve heard of such a thing, I want to know about it – but the obvious go-to here is 2004’s Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, an RPG that challenges you to keep up the titular veil of illusion between the realms of bloodsucker and bloodhaver, lest ye be rousted by vampire hunters. I confess, my memories of Bloodlines are 90% failing to get the game to operate, but there are many points of interest to this inquiry.
You can make life harder for yourself by rolling a Nosferatu character, for example, with facial anatomy that renders it impossible to walk safely amongst regular townies. Still, Bloodlines isn’t quite the woefully ground-down and alienated experience I’m yearning for, because there’s a whole world of vampire clans to embroil yourself in. You might have to keep a distance from humankind, but you’re never short of company.
The game I want isn’t Don’t Nod’s Vampyr, either. That game casts you as an unaccountably toothy doctor in plague-ridden London. Again, it pressures you to hide your habit of champing on arteries, while challenging you to serve as a pillar of the very community you’re taking tactical bites out of. I appreciate Vampyr’s dim and degraded London, but it’s not what I’m after, both because the game is a familiar third-person brawler for long stretches, and because as Alec (RPS in peace) noted in our review, it’s fundamentally plot-shackled.
You could say similar things of The Necromancer’s Tale, which is kind of a vampire sim, even if you aren’t yourself a vampire. It has you living in a town while cultivating your mastery of the dark arts, obtaining recipes and ingredients for increasingly noxious spells. As with Vampyr, there are different routes through the game, and obtaining the necessaries for your rituals while keeping the locals quiescent is an entertaining ordeal. Still, you’re obliged to jump through the hoops of a core chapter-based storyline. The vampire survival sim I want to play is much more systems-dependent. I want to be forced to make sense of my capabilities and weaknesses without any kind of plotline to cling onto.
The closest inspiration I can find isn’t a character-led game at all, in fact. I’d also rather you don’t play it, for the moment, because there’s a chance it’s teeming with malware. The game is Fairysite, a turn-based colony builder that puts you in charge of fairies living in the woods alongside human villages, under threat of goblin invasion. Sadly, my PC’s security klaxons go off when I download the demo. It’s likely a false positive – nobody beside me has mentioned malware reports on the Steam forums, and I can see minimal evidence of foul intent in the developer’s previous works – but even so, I’m going to avoid installing and confine my discussion to the concept, until I get clarity.
The key thrill of Fairysite is that it sounds genuinely parasitic: as the Steam page sums up, “you need them, they don’t need you.” The fairies feast upon the dreams of the humans, and rely on them for defence against the marauding goblins. But they are also threatened by the humans: if the clumsy peasants expand too far, they’ll trample your groves and meadows. So you must keep them in check, by hexing their fields and quarries to slow production, while maintaining them as a food source and a bulwark against the greenskins. You can also contrive to make the humans build and worship fairy idols, which generate the spirit energy you need to identify mystic portals and ultimately, escape the map. It seems delightfully insidious.
It reminds me of the venerable Ghost Master, in which you plant spooks around a Sims-style household, targeting the phobias of individual residents in order to harvest their fear. The challenge, in harder levels, is to jostle every last fluid ounce of cortisol from the neurones of your victims and achieve your story objectives before they start phoning any exorcists. As with Fairysite, the thrill of the game is partly that you are kind of powerless. You can sabotage, but you can’t actively confront. Now, let’s see somebody play that cringing predation out in a game of Dawnwalker’s grandeur. I guess what I’m really asking for here is: Vampire Pathologic. Draculogic? There you go, game developers – all you need to do now is make the rest of it.
