With Halloween just a week away, it’s high time you delve into as much horror media as you can. One of the best ways to do that is by embracing all the fantastic stories about vampires out there. Movies offer no shortage of incredible bloodsuckers to enjoy, but video games aren’t to be left out. If you’d rather play than watch something vampiric, and maybe even be the monster yourself, then you should buy 2018’s Vampyr while it’s down to the low price of $7.99 on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation.
Developed by Don’t Nod, the team behind supernatural narrative series Life Is Strange, Vampyr embraces the choice-based gameplay the studio is known for and applies it to the ethical quandaries of the titular monster. You play as Jonathan Reid, a doctor and newly turned vampire struggling to reconcile his bloodlust with his morality. As a role-playing game, Vampyr leans into this quandary by emphasizing player choice in combat and story moments. Too often the vampire in gaming is seen as just another monster to defeat (the earliest Castelvania games come to mind) but in Vampyr, Don’t Nod tries to capture the more complex taboos the vampire has always represented, exploring the fear of what happens when you let your impulses run free.
To fully realize its aim of testing your ability to navigate the powers, challenges, and temptations that come with life as a vampire, Don’t Nod fills its early 20th century London with a fascinating web of interactions. Every character has their own motivations, connections, goals, and feelings towards you. Befriending, killing, or even turning an NPC can have a host of unknowable consequences. Perhaps you choose to get to know a local in order to get invited into their home so you can complete an objective, but maybe it would just be easier to kill them. That’s up to you.
To level up, a necessity for better survival odds in combat, you must also feed. To preserve your humanity, you can choose to only suck the blood of rats and the like, but this will keep your level incredibly low throughout. It’s a wonderful bit of game design that gives you a real motivation to embrace your vampiric nature as Dr. Reid. The fact that your decisions have real stakes is what makes Vampyr one of the best vampire games you can play.
.