Vampyr

Vampyr drops you into post-WWI London as Dr. Jonathan Reid, a respected physician who wakes up as a freshly turned vampire with a head full of medical ethics and a body full of new, inconvenient cravings. DONTNOD built something genuinely unusual here: an action-RPG where the fastest route to powerful abilities runs directly through murdering the people you just spent twenty minutes interviewing. The Spanish flu is tearing through the city, your patients need you, and the same blood in their veins is also your best source of experience points. That tension is the whole game, and it mostly works. The NPC system is the standout feature and the thing most worth understanding before you buy. London is divided into districts, each with a health meter tied to the survival of its residents. Every named NPC has a web of relationships with other characters, a personal questline, and a "quality" rating that tells you roughly how many XP you would gain from killing them. You can choose never to feed on a single citizen and finish the game under-leveled and white-knuckling every fight, or you can eat a few sympathetically rotten characters and stay comfortable, or you can go full monster and watch districts collapse into hostile vampire-infested warzones. The choices feel real enough that you will hesitate before pulling the trigger, which is exactly what a game like this should make you feel. Combat is the weakest link. Reid wields a mix of melee weapons, a stake pistol, and vampiric abilities unlocked through the skill tree, and fights are serviceable without ever being exciting. Enemy variety is thin, hitboxes are occasionally frustrating, and boss encounters rely more on patience than build creativity. The build variety itself is decent on paper - you can lean into shadow mist crowd control, aggressive mesmerize-and-drain combos, or a tankier stake-blocking style - but past hour 40 the system stops surprising you. If you came for deep mechanical expression, look elsewhere. The writing is where Vampyr earns its reputation. The dialogue is wordy and self-serious in a way that genre fans will enjoy and action players will bounce off hard. Reid is a compelling protagonist precisely because he is articulate about his own deterioration. The supporting cast includes a vampire hunter with a genuinely tragic backstory, a lady doctor running a clinic under impossible conditions, and a rogues gallery of London lowlifes whose fates end up mattering more than you expect. Some side quests are pure filler - fetch errands dressed up in period costume - but the main character arcs land. The 1918 setting does real atmospheric work, and the production quality on voice acting is notably high for a mid-budget release. Be honest with yourself about what you want from this. If you need polished third-person combat, Vampyr will frustrate you. If you want an RPG where moral weight comes from systems and not just dialogue options, where the question "should I kill this person" has mechanical teeth, this is one of the more interesting takes on that idea from the last decade. It is uneven, it is sometimes janky, and the final act rushes its own conclusions. But the core loop of learning who someone is before deciding whether to consume them is genuinely hard to shake.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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