This is part of a continuing series of old rants/essays/snark/thoughts/etc/etc/etc from years back that I figured I might as well throw somewhere other than a decrepit and deleted Discord server. This one comes from a “video game book club” that I played with some fellow traveler nerds (though I believe I solo’d this one).

As Always, Assume Spoilers

Finished Vampyr the other night. The whole thing ended with a whimper and the writing is still weirdly disjointed. I was learning big terms and my character was using it like he knew what it meant and then ten minutes and two characters later I could finally ask what it was. I literally don’t understand what the main plot device WAS. Major thoughts as follows in order to get them out of my brain.

Literally half the plot wouldn’t exist if the big three characters actually talked to each other. Like, the big mysterious NPC who kicks off the plot had no reason not to go “yo, here’s the deets” in the first five minutes. He’s just vague and then yells at you that he’s being clear. Although the main character keeps telling him to shove off every time he appears, despite asking everyone else incessantly who he is. There’s another big NPC who knows the other half of the plot, but keeps refusing to talk about it for bullshit reasons.

The worldbuilding is drunk. Example: In the beginning, vampires called Skals are trash enemies and you’re told they’re crazy mindless predators. Later you meet a bunch of Skals who are sane and it’s a big reveal. After that, you learn that the mindless Skals are NEW and that a bunch of morons already knew about healthy Skals who have been around for hundreds of years. They put you in the weird position of having a reveal that literally everybody else in the world knows and has no reason to hide from you. So I spent half the game acting under a completely wrong assumption about the state of the world (as thus what the plot was).

The core plot feels like someone bashed together two different plots and left some duct tape on. There’s this whole thing about an ethically dubious doctor who transfuses vampire blood into a patient which causes them to go full Typhoid Mary and infect people. There’s also some BS about a nature goddess who feeds on hate deciding to randomly possess certain specific people with a magic kind of blood and try to eat the world. So she possesses the Typhoid Mary but not any of the other infected with the same blood. It’s just weird and feels off, like she only shows up when it’s final boss time.

Every chapter ends in a choice that effectively determines the fate of a district. Usually there’s three choices - kill/eat (sometime together, sometimes separate), turn them into a vamp, or let them live (with some weird twist on letting them live). Eating someone damages the district slightly, and one of the other two either fucks the district or is the golden correct choice. Problem - in a bunch of cases you have no clue which is which. Sometimes there are hints, but based on my experience the hints are literally red herrings 50% of the time and you get screwed by a side effect that wasn’t foreshadowed at all.

The game has . . . REALLY odd views on morality, probably driven more by hacky programming than intent, though some are in the writing. They’re very committed to “eating people is bad” which I get. After like halfway through the game I went on an eating rampage and the game condemned me as a monster. Here’s the list of people I ate on purpose:

  • One street thug who only ever enjoyed murder and ran a violent street gang.
  • His estranged wife, who was more sociopathic, and ran a harsher gang when he got hospitalized.
  • Her new lover, a violent extortionist working for the game
  • A sexual extortionist landlord
  • A street preacher who was literally planning to go on a holy crusade and set fire to the “wicked” (heavily implied to be literally everyone)
  • An old rich bastard who was dying already and was planning Social Darwinism and mass murder and violent colonialism
  • One guy whose entire characterization is “steals money from ladies with dementia” (this is the closest I got to an unjustified kill)
  • In short, I killed just a bunch of evil bastards whose deaths literally improved everyone else’s lives. I didn’t kill any of the ambiguous folk at all.
  • Also, the game treats the ethically dubious doctor as the worst because he . . . Injected vampire blood into a lady who was about to die of influenza as a last ditch cure attempt. Yeah, his actions kicked off the plot and nearly caused London to get eaten, and it’s a bit ethically sketchy, but he literally didn’t know any of the plot details. The whole thing is a tragic accident and the game just goes “you bastard” at him. I mean, he has some bastard tendencies later in the game, but not related to this at all and only after you’re forced to call him out.
  • I think the game also blamed me for the collapse of a district because I chose to let a guy live who was ambiguous. (Basically a Lawful good guy who got the crazy plague, and thought he could use faith/meditation to stave it off - a thing that the game implied, I think by accident, was possibly ten minutes earlier). Then he goes and murders a bunch of people, and the district goes to hell. I ate two more people in that district (the violent gang criminals) and the district collapsed.

You can get various endings, but they’re all linear from good to bad (I got the second worst). However, the goodness of the ending you get seem tied to surviving NPCs based on numbers. Which is fucking weird, because the badness of the endings don’t actually relate to those citizens. Like, your lover commits suicide which (kinda) makes sense in the context of the plot in my ending, but if less people die she doesn’t? Her given reason for suicide is pretty weak either way, but it has nothing to do with the number of citizens left in London. Then it told me I became a people eating monster in the epilogue - didn’t match my playstyle at all, which was more about murdering demonstrably evil people (and I showed a lot of damn mercy to folk who were even remotely grey).

There are a couple of clever ideas in the story, honest, but it’s all revealed so slowly and in the wrong order that I just get confused.

  • I kinda loved the “Jesus will keep me from going nuts” dude. Great dialogue and characterization, creepy scene before the choice, and it felt like you were literally making a real choice based on guessing and the game knew that. Made the choice interesting.
  • The infection theming is on point. Shows up in many variations
  • There’s a weird undercurrent in the plot about Arthurian knights which is fun, though also jarring against the infection theming.

It uses fucking LEVEL SCALING and level based damage reduction, I’m pretty sure! Which is the cheapest fucking design tactic. I had suspicions about it earlier on, and especially during the cross lady fight. Eat two people and suddenly an un-upgraded power does double or triple damage to a boss. It’s just a cheap way to manage difficulty if they used it. When you show up, it locks the level of the guys and if you’re lower level than them you deal less damage and take more damage. Thus forcing you to either level up to or slog through a slow fight while never being hit once (and the game doesn’t have good enough controls to let you have the skill for a perfect fight)