Vampyr

I'm actually really glad I played this game.

The elevator pitch is that it's vampire RPG kind of like Bloodlines with Souls-esque combat. It's an original IP so it has original lore which is pretty cool. You're a doctor turned into a vampire unexpectedly and thrust into London after WWI in the midst of the outbreak of Spanish Influenza which is destroying the city. It's got really cool vibes. The music with a bunch of cello, the dark tones, the period of post WWI are all very cool when combined with THERE BE VAMPIRES. The lore is pretty standard stuff. There's some ancient one, the progenitor of all vampires it seems, who's trying to destroy the world and you've been blessed/cursed with vampirism specifically to combat it. I liked reading about the hidden societies of vampires and the society of humans investigating vampires. The fact that your best vampire friend is the spawn of a knight from the 14th century who is a vampire and still alive. It's all quite cool.

The really original mechanic here is that it's an RPG with a vast skill tree and decent combat and in order to get the experience needed to level up on that skill tree you can either kill enemies (paltry experience), do quests (good experience), or feed on the limited number of named NPCs in the game (amazing experience). The tradeoff is 1) once you kill people you're forever marked as a non-clean playthrough and 2) London devolves into chaos as you murder off these NPCs. It's a wonderful system of tradeoffs. I ended up going the boring route of killing no one and it was SO hard as a result. Which, is very cool.

The combat is actually surprisingly fun. It's weighty, has a stamina system, different weapons have different feels and weights. And you have abilities which are substantial and fun to use. You can blink around and feed on enemies, stunlock, etc. The problem is the level scaling is quite brutal with enemies eventually becoming sponges to your damage unless you minmax your character. Since I didn't feed the game became unbeatable for me without the use of cheats. Lol cest la vie.

Why do I ding it? Well the big reason is the scaling in the combat being brutal. The fact that you get so little experience for killing enemies but you have to fight constantly. The fact that there's a ton of backtracking and NO fast travel which when combined with the incessant combat on the way is brutal. There's a lot of needless exposition. Yeah it's solid but not a stellar game. I hope they make another.

All in all I'm glad I played it. And I even have a hankering to go back in a do a playthrough where I feed on everyone.