The moment I knew The Blood of Dawnwalker had it came when, not far in, one of the local peat diggers fell into a big hole. Tasked with finding him by his brother at the start of what seemed a fairly mundane early fetch quest, I rolled my eyes a bit as I slid in to try and locate the poor sod. He was, predictably, cowering in a corner of the cave complex. Right, now to get out of here and claim a lifetime supply of partially decayed vegetation.
Wait, what was that noise? I’ll not spoil the rest of the quest, but suffice it to say that it provided the first taste of Rebel Wolves’ vampire RPG offering the same sort of memorable adventure as the series many of its devs cut their teeth on – CD Projekt’s Witcher and Cyberpunk games.
The Blood of Dawnwalker’s Witcher DNA is obvious. It has a detective-style focus mode that highlights things in the world you should investigate or follow in yellow, just like Geralt’s witcher senses do. Its daytime combat mixes sword swipes that only do damage if an enemy isn’t blocking with parries, dodges, and recharging magical abilities that provide an extra edge in a similar fashion to a witcher’s signs. One of those magical abilities also allows Coen to briefly reanimate corpses in order to interrogate them, much like Yennefer does in that Witcher 3 quest about the cursed garden in Skellige. Dawnwalker also has vampires who rip and tear through foes with long claws and can zip around or climb unassailable structures as clouds of mist.
If you told someone watching you play it that it’s a CD Projekt spin-off called The Witcher: Blood of Dawnwalker, developed because someone there fancied making an entry in that series without a cat-eyed medieval fantasy pest controller as protagonist, you’d have no trouble convincing them. Aside from not being totally ancient, the game’s bright-eyed 14th century peasant hero, Coen, plays like you might expect Witcher 3 Blood and Wine vamps Regis and Detlaff to if they were the lead. He does have a chink in his armour compared to those two, though. In the daytime, Coen’s human, with his vampiric powers only kicking in once the sun goes down. Thus, the game splits itself into a day and night cycle, with each made up of six segments of time which tick away a certain amount on completing a quest or activity, some of which are only available while the sun or moon are out.
By night, you move like a supernatural force, warping and whipping around terrified foes in a frenzy of blood-fuelled power fantasy. So throbbing are you with crimson vigor that you face the peril of having your destructive craving for the red stuff overwhelm you mid-conversation either because you’ve chosen that option, or simply because you’ve let your health dip low enough that your body decides it needs a sanguine boost. That said, I’ve found it pretty easy to avoid having this result in accidental drainings of friendly NPCs – both by regularly snacking on animals in the wilderness whenever my segments of life force were close to empty, and by leaving a lot of the talking-heavy activities to daytime Coen. As such, aside from the few times guards have spotted me teleporting onto a rooftop and a chase through the streets has ensued, I’ve never felt much like Coen’s dark gift comes with much of a curse. Well, I say that, but sometimes the teleportation can lead to rather janky-looking climbs, especially while warping up jagged cliffs – though I’m not sure if there’s a way the devs could have filed this away without adding guardrails that blunted the fundamental fun of whooshing about.
Instead, the curse often feels like it kicks in whenever you have to fight large groups or tough foes in human form. Rather than the rapid darting in and out of claw strike range you can lean on in vampire form, human Coen’s fighting style is much more upright and rigid. He carries a single sword to swing at foes and in between has to either dodge their blows while looking for free hits, or do some directional parrying to evade damage and create openings in their blocking. To put it diplomatically, timed parrying has long been a weakness of mine, which proved to be a problem since it seems to be the route the game prefers you take. Coen’s dodge in vampire form is an energetic slink out of harm’s way, but his dodge in human form often feels like more of a shrug, sometimes barely moving him if the terrain underfoot has any jagged edges, or the manoeuvre risks brushing close to a wall.
I have largely gotten used to it as I’ve progressed and perked out Coen to better suit my strengths, though, so it’s certainly not as stark a dealbreaker for the parry-averse as it might be in a Souls game or something similarly unyielding. Earning a perk which granted passive health regeneration while in human form was also a godsend. If you are planning to get into big scraps during the daytime, you’ll want that perk and also likely to put plenty of points into Coen’s witchcraft abilities. While they often come with a sacrifice of some health, as is the case with some vampire abilities, being able to, for example, passively tick a foe’s health away via the Burning Blood ability is key in thinning out groups without getting overwhelmed. Keeping a stock of food and salves for healing is also key, and an important differentiator from the vampire form, which automatically regenerates health while relying on feeding on humans or animals for bigger boosts. You can have a mid-fight snack in the latter case, offering the satisfying double boon of weakening a foe while building you back up.
As with The Witcher and its nine million craftable oils aimed at making you marginally more effective against certain monsters, there’s plenty of finer detail and minmaxing you can get into if you wish, but I’d also say the combat’s accessible enough for those who don’t put together a spreadsheet spelling out their level-up point distribution plans in advance.
Outside of fights, I’ve been surprised just how much I’ve come to appreciate Coen as a character. Early on, he risks feeling a tad like a generic or milquetoast farmboy, but there’s some serious depth to his past and psychological makeup that Dawnwalker isn’t afraid to dig its claws into, once its narrative gets into full flow. There are believable reasons to play out his adventure choice-wise any way you see fit, without even the struggle to mesh with evil options that Geralt arguably suffers by the time the third Witcher game rolls around and the White Wolf feels like a natural good egg outside of very extreme circumstances. Coen’s moored to the world of Vale Sangora first and foremost by his family, kidnapped by the realm’s newly minted vampire ruler Brencis out of the gate and in need of saving from unspeakable horrors. But his relationship with them isn’t all sunshine and roses, so tearing away and embracing the freedom his new life offers him for good and ill doesn’t risk feeling incongruous.
For a game that largely leaves it up to you which, if any, allies you seek out and work with in your quest, Coen ends up with several he plays off of brilliantly. Anca, the healer from his home village of Laslea who harbours dark secrets, threads the line between teacher and lover. Their relationship evolves as they get further from their domestic cages and decide how they do and don’t want to move on with their lives, while confronting past trauma. On the other side of the day/night coin is Lacra, a headstrong vampiress with her own carefully-guarded motives for aiding Coen in his quest, and a wonderfully sharp tongue to mask the vulnerabilities of her past. Factions are also waiting to be found alongside these lone wolves, with the Manumits – a group of underground rebels fighting back against the vampires – being a possible source of help, but also boasting a deep distrust of Coen owing to his semi-fanged nature.
A familiar sort of Witcher-esque world-weary cynicism permeates most chats and relationships. Everyone’s out for themselves and won’t just bow before the hero, who more often than not is trying to choose a lesser evil. Though, that sentiment never overwhelms to the point that you begin to feel a lack of investment or ambivalence towards Dawnwalker’s world or the people in it. There are reasons to care and characters you’ll want to believe in or trust, even if that comes with a risk of a dagger in the back.
Outside of the plentiful missions, Coen’s 30-day-time-limited odyssey to save his family from Brencis adopts an open world design philosophy not too dissimilar to the likes of Ubisoft’s dictator-toppling Far Cry series, something I’m not just saying because it has climbable towers which reveal nearby landmarks. Brencis is holed up in the big castle in the city of Svartrau, and the other regions of Vale Sangora are ruled by his three underlings, vampiric Boyars named Ambrus, Xanthe, and Bakir. Dealing with each or messing with their endeavours makes your eventual task easier, but also angers Brencis, who issues decrees designed to make your life in the valley more difficult as your notoriety reaches certain levels. In order to trigger a quest offering an opportunity to get close to or gain an advantage on a Boyar, you’ve got to fill their own anger meters by taking care of open world objectives/activities like clearing training camps, sabotaging breweries, infiltrating blood storage cellars, and freeing prisoners from travelling transports.
You can also just murder a Boyar without bothering with any of that, if you happen to run into them in the open world, this being how Xanthe met her end in my playthrough. Each time you defeat one of these powerful underlings, you’re offered a choice of whether to simply kill them or drain all of their blood to add more fuel to your corruption rank, which dictates the vampiric abilities on offer to you at any point. I killed the first two, but then drained Bakir just to see what would happen. To my surprise, I was then confronted with a choice over leaving him to rot in the afterlife, or inviting him into Coen’s head. I did the latter, because why not, and soon regretted having been such a boring Boris earlier on. From that point, Bakir’s voice seemed to occasionally chime in with quips about missions or objectives I’d just completed. I first noticed this when, spoiler alert, I romanced Lacra and believe the vampiric Khan’s ghostly voice said something along the lines of “Finally, something nice to look at.”
Assuming this wasn’t just a symptom of my relentless onslaught through Dawnwalker for review getting to me a bit – can you end up with a full sitcom going on in Coen’s mind, if you let every rogue vamp you beat into it? I don’t know, but I’ll definitely find out during the second playthrough I’m already planning.
All in all, I’ve emerged from my first battle with Brencis with the belief that Dawnwalker’s thoroughly worthy of a seat at the table of elite modern RPGs alongside its CDPR-made cousins. It’s more open-ended narratively than The Witcher, and does trade off some of that series’ labyrinthine complexity in terms of political intrigue, factions, and sheer storytelling sprawl as a result. Whereas in The Witcher, one quest tends to lead to another, with choices happening mid-quest or at the climax, so often in Dawnwalker the initial choice in where you go and what you do when is also key in shaping how you uncover certain objectives or useful items and bits of knowledge. I can’t count the number of times I’ve thought things like ‘Oh, I could have gotten there by going that way or doing that, if I hadn’t gone the route I did’.
There’s always that sense that something important or unexpected could be lurking around the next corner, to pull you into a quest dripping with depth and intrigue. It works to ensure the more busywork-esque tasks attached to angering Brencis and his Boyars never make Vale Sangora feel home to a string of boring boxes to tick. It’s a vibrant, constantly changing place with a thousand different threads metaphorically criss-crossing just beneath its surface, just as ancient ruins literally criss-cross beneath its swamps, crags, and forests. And all it can take to start pulling one of them is to humour someone’s request as to why their peat digging sibling’s not turned up to help tend the fields.