Vampyr

My path to falling in love with this game was quite rocky to say the least-- I was introduced to Vampyr all the way back in 2018, around 8 years ago when it released (I swear I thought it was older than that!) and-- I've changed so much since then I only now finally understand the influence it could have had on me back then had I been more patient, my tastes more mature and my understanding of the world more vast.

I am very glad I gave it another shot, I had a great time with it this time and by the end felt very emotional, on the verge of tears. I am deeply fascinated by dr. Johnathan Reid-- his manners, his way of speaking and carrying himself are captivating. It's hard to not get charmed by a person of such high standing like dr. Reid. And as I'm writing this I'm learning that his voice actor is the same person who gave Morgott of Elden ring his voice, which actually explains a lot now. What a magnificent actor.

There is a slight possibility that I might oversell Vampyr if I don't bring up it's negatives, but I-- I feel like DONTNOD doesn't exist anymore in the same state it did 10 years ago after all its layoffs and lost projects therefore my complaints will die in vain. I guess I could tell _you_ not to buy it if you have a history of getting annoyed at endless, often pointless conversations. It also doesn't have fast travel, so you are advised to plan your route ahead of the departure or you'll end up walking in circles far too often.

Despite the popular opinion I don't think the game was designed around you killing people as you wish, but it _is_ more fun to play god and decide who deserves death and who doesn't. I'm actually proud of myself for not killing anyone-- considering the game gets slightly more difficult then-- all those little quests give you enough experience to not feel too weak, you just have to actually put effort into doing them. Which can get boring.

People who do have some knowledge of British history and folklore will probably understand lore references in the game more than I did, but I still appreciate that developers at least tried to explain it to someone like me (clueless) (at least on a surface level).


♫ Olivier Deriviere -- What We Could Have Become
♫ Olivier Deriviere -- A Night at Home

You wake up, you're thirsty, and you want blood. But you don't understand why.
That's the start of Vampyr.
Yes :
_ Really good atmosphere and music.
_ That era of London is... perfect for a vampire story.
_ The game is really complete: you can level up, make your character stronger, improve your weapons, etc.
There are so many things to do, npcs to talk to, crafting, side quests, etc.
_ The combat system and abilities are really satisfying and stylish.
_ The vilains respawn again and again. More fights, more blood.
_ Good story, interesting plot, and overall purpose. I was so curious to uncover everything.
_ The voice acting is great and very convincing. I loooove Jonathan's accent. He has a constant restraint, even when he threatens someone, he almost sounds sorry to bother them.
_ Three difficulty modes: story, normal, and hard.
_ Multiple endings, choices and paths make the game replayable (I don't know if I'll play it again tho. Being a bad guy once was already cool. Edit: I definitely will.).
_ We're talking about real vampires here, with a strong Bram Stoker vibe. Vampires' history and nature are a huge part of the game. Love it.
No :
_ You can't increase the font size, and it's quite small.
_ The map is quite messy, and I got lost very easily a few times (maybe that's just me being stupid... although I highly doubt it - maybe). There is no fast travel.
_ Autolock is drunk.
_ A few tiny bugs here and there. (Like in every game, I'm told. Yes.)
---------
➥ I really enjoy playing Vampyr, despite its few flaws.
Just know that it's not a nervous action game. It's slow, heavy and atmospheric, and that's exactly why it works so well. The dialogues deserve to be savored.
I definitely recommend it if you like dark vampire stories set in the creepy old foggy London we all love. It's immersive. Like reading a book, but with real fights and the taste of blood on your lips. Take your time, it's not a race.
I've been looking for a good vampire game for a long time.
And yeah, this one is nice.

Who's here because they have the sudden urge to drink blood and want to figure out wtf is wrong with themselves?
If only Buffy was here to stop me!
Still a better vampire story than Twilight.
Vampyr is in my opinion, a great game with some major missteps that make it less accessible and overall bring the experience down lower than it could have been. The main issue is the way the game handles player commitment to choice, the way the gameplay incentivizes you to behave and the way the story wants you to have played are very different. At the end of the day they didn’t properly balance the intriguing dilemma of consume people for more experience or spare them at your own potential. It’s a repeat of Bioshock’s little sisters, except even worse, imagine using pretty much any ‘plasmids’ voided the good ending, so the player is forced to choose between engaging with the games interesting systems or a good ending… They made the consequences too black and white. 
Although this may sound strange, I’ve always felt the problem with Vampyr is that they didn’t commit enough somewhere… they tried to make a game entirely accessible but also wanted to make you make tough choices, unfortunately they didn’t balance the stakes, and most players came away frustrated from the choices either unexpectedly mattering too much or not at all. The gameplay was like or it leave it, I found exploration great, I enjoyed the world and was just satisfying. Story is flawed in that the outcome is dependent on making a few counterintuitive choices… for instance, even one innocent consumed locks out the good ending, but they go out of their way to make many ‘innocents’ nasty characters. I understand this decision, but to many it felt like being punished for choices or that outcomes felt arbitrary. I and many others were blindsided by the outcome of one story choice 1/3 of the way through… My first playthrough I reloaded story missions like that and still ended up with the bad ending due to my gameplay decisions. Subsequent play through you really just decide, good or evil? 
Once I understood it I thought the combat was the most satisfying part of the game and relies on mobility, not necessarily higher levels, therefore skill is a large factor in successful battles. The combat frustrated me at first, but the fact that the difficulty/frustration is tied to the morality system of the game redeems it in my eyes. Being a moral vampire, who refuses to kill innocents, is not supposed to be easy. If you're eating sh*t during the combat sequences, that's the morality system at work. Sometimes I wonder if people have even tried an 'evil' playthrough. The combat is a breeze. You get insanely overpowered almost immediately. That's also the morality system at work.
For anyone who wants to have a relatively easy 'good' playthrough, here's my advice: use the Hacksaw and Liston Knife throughout the entire game (unless you get Dragonbane). People make their own lives harder by complicating the combat. Guns, 2h weapons, and the Stun mechanics aren't necessary. The most important things are: your attack animations need to be fast (so you can dodge immediately), recovering blood with the liston knife, and saving XP for max health and healing abilities. Having cool powers is for the murderous vampire run. A morally constrained vamp has to focus on staying alive.
I get the feeling that it's the same people who complained about Witcher 3's combat that b*tched so much about the combat here. Like yeah, I get that the game isn't Dark Souls or Warband but the combat is still satisfying. It looks f**king cool and it helps with the power fantasy and even character development. This is why I always play story based games that have combat mechanics on the easiest difficulty. Unless the harder difficulties mean something else than giving the enemies insane amounts of health. Like in Stalker. The hardest difficulty actually makes the fights go much faster.
Maybe I’m in the minority in that despite all these flaws I actually adored Vampyr enough to complete a good three play through s and never at any point felt did I feel bored. I did get frustrated when I didn't understand why I had to run around the map a lot (until I realized I should open doors/gates that were nearby even if I didn't need to go that way). But whatever frustrations I had were overshadowed by an enjoyable overall game. I also completely understand the frustrations others have with it. I’m not holding my breath at all for a sequel after all these years but I feel there’s still a lot of potential in this series if the developers can just zero in on a more focused identity. I don't think it does anything amazingly, but it does do a lot of story/narrative things well. As I said at the start, overall I really liked it, but it's not without flaws. I recommend specifically when it goes for sale for super cheap.
7/10

Vampyr embraced a very ambitious concept – a story-rich game with dark atmosphere, souls-like combat and moral dilemmas, where you can choose to kill every civillian or no one at all - …and then the game stumbled a few times upon delivering its heavy scope. It’s not a perfect game, with a lot of flaws and missed potential, but still I think it’s one of the best vampire stories in any medium, with an intriguing idea of a doctor-turned-vampire embedded in every layer of the gameplay.
Two things you should know before you play:
1) Your choices affect game’s difficulty - fights become harder if you choose to play more like a protector than a predator. That’s because a blood of civillian NPCs gives a huge boost and by refusing to kill them you become a famished vampire, encountering enemies sometimes even 10 levels above you. If you want both a less dark ending and easier fights, you can choose Story Mode, but you have to do that AT THE START of the game – it’s impossible to change it later.
2) Be careful about your choices – some of them may heavily and irreversibly affect the state of the world. Vampyr has a quite complex system of consequences, but gives players only subtle hints how it works. Learning it by doing mistakes, you might cause an entire district - or even the entire city - to collapse, which is still a valid way to play this game. If you are a player aiming to always achieve the best possible outcome, you might want to check a guide for the most important choices, just to make sure you understand what they lead to (for some hints, see below).
The city is divided into four districts and their status shifts every time you go to sleep, according to your actions (or the lack of them - you can doom London by simply staying in your bed for a few nights in a row ;) ).
A district’s status is affected by:
- RPG choices, especially the ones concerning community pillars of each disctrict.
- Dishonored-like chaos, which rises every time you kill civillians or people keeping them save (including vampire hunters, who are hostile towards you). More chaos attracts more monsters, who will slowly take over the streets if not taken care of.
- Pandemium-like spreading of illness, which as a doctor you can keep at bay by distributing medicines. High chaos and doing any harm to people vital to a public health (like nurses, other doctors, philantrophists etc.) will results in more outbreaks.
When it comes to killing for blood, there is an interesting rule here – the more people trust you, the more you learn about their secrets, the more their blood is worth to you (killing anonymous people gives only a small amount of EXP). As ‘a leech doctor’, you can play anything between two extremums:
1) Kill every civillian NPCs – like a wolf in a shephard’s clothes, ensuring your ‘flock’ is trusting and healthy. Get to know more about your victims and their role in the world, then bide your time for the optimal moment to maximize your gains while keeping the downsides to a minimum. Some people might notice their missing friends and become suspicious, some others might die because you killed a person they depended on.
2) Don’t kill any civillians – staying true to your Hippocratic Oath as a good doctor would, sustaining yourself on rats. Fights would be much harder, but overall there would be less encounters if you manage to keep low chaos. Most vampire hunters can be avoided by Shadow Veil skill / alternative routes, but some fights are necessary to progress the main plot and side quests.
Overall, I really enjoyed this game in Story Mode. Jonathan Reid was an interesting protagonist – a man of science and rational thinking dragged by a neck into a world of a supernatural, that defied his beliefs. The dark and gritty atmosphere of post-WW1 London ravaged by an epidemic of a spanish flu was just amazing, enhanced by brilliant music by Olivier Derivirere.

Okay honestly, this game was way better than I expected. I bought it during a 90% sale thinking even if it sucks it is not a big loss and in the end I enjoyed pretty much every second of it.
Sadly I could not finish it cause my save file got completely messed up. The game randomly froze and died on me, and since there is only one save slot for the entire playthrough my progress was basically gone. And cause I am lazy asf, I just uninstalled the game and watched the ending I would probably get on YouTube. I was doing a pacifist run anyway.
That being said, the game itself is great. I will probably reinstall it someday and do another run, except this time I might go the complete opposite route and be absolutely ruthless with everyone.
If you are curious about it, grab it on sale and give it a try. Just hope your save file stays safe unlike mine.

A Gothic Masterpiece That Bleeds Atmosphere
Vampyr is, without exaggeration, the best game Dontnod has ever created, and likely ever will. They crafted something truly special: a dark, brutal, and deeply atmospheric vampire RPG that still stands as one of the finest games about vampires ever made.
From the moment you step into the disease-ridden, fog-choked streets of post-World War I London, Vampyr grabs you by the throat and never lets go. The game's gothic presentation is flawless: every cobblestone, every flickering gas lamp, every desperate cough from a dying citizen oozes a dark, oppressive tone that few games have ever achieved . The soundtrack, composed by Olivier Derivière (who also worked on A Plague Tale), is hauntingly beautiful, a cello-driven symphony of despair that perfectly complements the somber, melancholic world . It's always night in Vampyr, and that singular choice gives every playthrough a heavier, more tragic feel .
The voice acting is impeccable, and the writing, while occasionally stumbling, grounds the supernatural in a painfully real historical setting - the Spanish Flu epidemic, the trauma of war, the collapse of social order . This isn't a glamorous vampire fantasy; it's a story about trying to retain your humanity when the world around you has already lost its own.
Where Vampyr truly shines is in its interconnected systems and meaningful player choice. Every named citizen in London has their own life, backstory, relationships, and secrets. You can talk to them, investigate their lives, heal them with your medical knowledge, or... feed on them .
This is the game's genius: to level up and gain powerful new abilities, you need experience points. And the single fastest way to get XP is to embrace (kill) a citizen . Not only that - the more you learn about their life and secrets, the more XP they're worth. The game tempts you constantly, whispering that just one more death could make you strong enough to save everyone else .
But actions have consequences. Kill too many people, and their district will fall into chaos - shops close, more citizens get sick, and eventually the entire area is overrun by deadly enemies, lost forever . Your choices directly affect which ending you receive, with multiple outcomes based on how many innocent lives you've taken . This moral ecosystem is brilliant, forcing you to constantly weigh power against compassion.
The Combat: Functional, Not Fantastic and it's engaging enough to keep you playing, but it lacks the polish of AAA titles . You have a selection of vampire abilities—blood spears, shadow teleports, claws, and more—that you can mix and match to create your own playstyle . Enemies have different resistances and weaknesses, so you'll need to adapt your approach. The boss fights, while not spectacular, have some interesting design elements. Many bosses have specific vulnerabilities.
Vampyr is a flawed, ambitious, and unforgettable gem. Its atmosphere is among the best in gaming. Its moral systems and meaningful choices put most AAA RPGs to shame. Its soundtrack and voice acting are phenomenal. And if you can forgive the occasionally stiff combat and the weak final act romance subplot , you'll discover one of the most compelling vampire stories ever told. This is Dontnod at their absolute peak. A must-play for any fan of gothic horror or thoughtful RPGs.

after checking out bloodlines 2, Vampyr is probably the closest thing you will get to a vampire the masquerade type of game. its not perfect but its a lot better then bloodlines 2