In an age of overconsumption, The Blood of Dawnwalker shows the potential of limitation. You’re given 30 days to rescue your family from the fangs of a vampiric court. Growing stronger for the final fight, either by improving your skills or helping others to forge alliances, ticks the clock onwards. As uneven as this mechanic (and others) can be, it brings a breath of fresh air to an often excessive genre.
After an arresting prologue, the open-world RPG by Rebel Wolves gives you free rein to tame it however you see fit. The studio was formed by CD Projekt Red veterans, which shows; almost every element carries the fingerprint of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. If you’ve played Geralt of Rivia’s epic, the adventure of Coen of Laslea will feel overly familiar. The dialogue structure, the tone of the quests, conceptually novel combat that falls short in practice, and how you plunge into the myriad question mark icons on the map all make it impossible to avoid comparisons.
Thankfully, as much as the studio draws from the acclaimed formula previously established by its founders, it does make attempts to subvert it. The time mechanic is a big example. Rather than having an always-ticking clock, time is dictated by your actions. With Coen being a Dawnwalker – a human by day and vampire by night – you have access to both day and night slots. Digging a treasure buried underground can take one slot. Playing tag with your siblings or looking for missing scouts can take three slots. The promise of this mechanic at first feels limitless, as you must carefully consider how you approach each cycle and decide what is actually worth your time.
At first, it’s quite effective in conditioning your choices. During an early optional mission, I tracked down a grave robber who had desecrated a young man’s tomb in order to steal his silver necklace to make arrows, an effective weapon against vampires in this world. Sadly, I ran out of time before I could return it to the grieving mother. Later finding I still had the necklace in my inventory is surprisingly heartbreaking for what was technically a simple fetch quest.
Confronting the main vampire in The Blood of Dawnwalker is a tantalizing endeavor, as the quest is available from the jump. You can literally exit the prologue and attempt to fight him. This would prove absurdly difficult, which is why you have 30 in-game days to grow your character and find people who are willing to lend you a hand in the final showdown. You can also hunt down the other three members of the vampire court to further turn the tide in your favor. However, the time pressure progressively eroded the closer I got to the end of the 30-day period. For reference, I was warned about the point of no return if I accepted a character’s help with 13 days to spare.
Up until then, I was being overly cautious about how I spent my time. Obtaining skills and their respective upgrades requires points, but the action itself also uses time slots. Doing so made Coen stronger, but it was time that I could have spent aiding more people. The moment I saw the point of no return sign, the pressure wore off entirely. It doesn’t help that I unlocked three additional routes to tackle it shortly after the first, as if the story was urging me to put an end to it.
Coen’s own vampirism is similarly frictionless. Its concept has strong potential, as magic can only be used during the day, with the entire skill set replaced by vampiric abilities at night. Some activities and quests are specific to each cycle, and you get to mix-and-match two armor builds, as equipment often has bonuses for each Coen persona.
Of course, once the sun sets, you also need to satiate your blood craving by feeding from animals or humans. Fail to do so, and you run the risk of giving into hunger during conversations, potentially killing important characters. The prospect of killing outside of your control is terrifying, yet one that I never saw in action, as blood is tied to your health. I never ran low on healing items, and while you can feed during combat, there was never any shortage of targets to feed from outside of it either.
The standout features of The Blood of Dawnwalker never quite come together. The combat backbone also falters. It starts off with a similar promise, with blocking requiring you to follow directional cues to effectively riposte attacks. Yet, enemies tend to repeat movesets. Aside from the main boss fights, confrontations are repetitive Simon Says sequences. Nonetheless, I was enthralled by the gritty world on display, especially when learning more about the corrosive nature of the vampire court on the townsfolk. They are not only killing hundreds, but also corrupting aspects like faith and turning themselves into religious iconography in churches and running baptisms with blood instead of holy water.
Despite my mechanical gripes, I remained invested in Coen’s story to the end. The final confrontation encapsulated the many decisions and paths I took and had me face their ramifications one after the other. I may have been unfazed by the time mechanic’s pressure, but the limitation did shape my adventure. The Blood of Dawnwalker shows that curating a massive RPG rather than pursuing every single quest holds immense potential. The ending made me realize that having all the time in the world would have prevented inner ambitions to finally come to broad daylight.
