Vampyr Review

The Sun Never Sets

In Vampyr, Dontnod Entertainment return to creatively merging gaminess and narrative. Remember Me, Dontnod’s debut, flirted with triple-A production values and as a result nearly bankrupted the company, leading them to design the super low-budget Life is Strange as a Final Fantasy-like Hail Mary which focused primarily on the narrative, with the gameplay itself being built around the time travelling themes of the story. Remember Me, conversely, featured an imitation of the Batman Arkham series combat, with enough rhythmical finesse guiding its combos to transform it into a tactilely satisfying experience that was more than mere flattery—but it was the memory remixing sequences which were built upon in Life is Strange that broke the ground on which a plethora of adventure games have since been able to integrate their narrative themes with the gameplay itself by combining puzzle-solving in-game rendering of past events and memories or exposition.

Vampyr abandons this mechanic, focusing instead on cementing the player’s choices with an autosave system so that the player must live with the consequences of their actions. It’s a bold direction considering that the ambiguity afforded to player choice has defined most of Dontnod’s other games thus far.

Vampyr’s combat, however, is just as derivative and rhythmical as Remember Me’s; though more diverse in its influences: taking the simplicity and camera from Zelda, the combination of basic beat ‘em up gameplay mixed with special moves and spells from The Witcher, and the heaviness and stamina limitation of Soulsborne.

From these basic mechanics—as more skills are unlocked—the combat grows from bash and dodge bare-knuckle boxing to the dark arts of vampyric pugilism: magic tricks to launch Dr. Jonathon Reid across the streets of London as he euthanises his most difficult patients, anesthetises religious fanatics before lobotomising them, deflects violent accusations of malpractice, or all but incinerates contagious undead corpses with the expensive ultimate spells. These sleights of hand combined with the blood (mana) absorption mechanic encourage both experimentation in strategy as well as aggression in a combat system where rhythmical dodging of attacks otherwise leave the doctor all but invulnerable (like a mosquito, if Dr. Reid avoids getting hit by high level enemies, it’s possible to drain their blood drop by drop until they eventually succumb to blood loss—or malaria): by biting a rebellious patient or performing an incision with a scalpel upgraded to absorb blood, mana is restored, and thus aggression is rewarded with the currency used to cast yet more aggressive spells.

The conflicting interests of the cultists and vampyres can also be used to encourage them to fight one another, allowing the good doctor to stroll past them, or weaken the more powerful enemies before joining the fray.

While there are only several stock enemy types in each faction, the differences between each breed of livestock is strong enough that when they are shuffled together in a variety of combinations, the combat remains interesting over the length of the narrative. For instance, coming up against a cultist mage who can absorb one’s mana and stamina as well as swordsmen and shotgunners all at once presents a formidable challenge; requiring some decent planning and skill to confront on hard.

The intermittently punishing nature of the combat on hard adds much to the bleak setting of a twentieth-century London in disarray and encourages Dr. Reid to feed on his patients: the difficulty is affected by how many people Dr. Reid has eaten and, thus, how much exp the player has to spend on skills and passive improvements (such as more stamina). That the morality system is tied directly to the difficulty of the combat rather than good and bad skills which give both ethical and unethical players an equal chance greatly enriches the narrative and atmosphere. If one wishes to level up quickly and make use of the most powerful magic tricks Dr. Reid can learn, one simply must eat people, as no matter how many people one heals, no matter how much grinding one does (and grinding soon becomes useless, with one enemy killed giving 3-5 exp, and skills ending up costing upwards of 2,000-8,000 exp) and no matter how many side quests one completes, one will always be behind the difficulty curve.

But to eat someone and receive the biggest exp boost, Dr. Reid must also get to get to know them. Most of the characters are interesting and nice enough people that actually getting to know them doesn’t exactly whet one’s appetite for their blood. Still, there are some complete arseholes who if one wasn’t trying to be good one would eat in a second. But because Dr. John himself is so traumatised by vampslaughtering his sister and so desperately desires redemption that he is willing to go vampyre vegan, it really motivates one to take the punishment and be good. For his sake.

Though I never actually ate anyone, I did let someone die—a decision I very soon grew to regret as I had to admit to myself that, ultimately, my sense of blind justice was really more about revenge; which is testament to how interesting some of the choices are. A good many of them are, of course, far more predictable in their emotional and practical effects—but even just one, let alone a few, interesting moral predicaments is quite the achievement!

While the characters are mostly interesting, the dialogue ranges the gamut from great to terrible in classic dontnod style: “Cynicism is the polite way to express despair” is an insightful line coming from an anarchist (of the bomb throwing variety) alcoholic, and just as in Life is Strange, the terrible ends up being just as endearing—and, dare I say it, just as wise!—as the great: “My father is an idiot who makes idiot things. That’s all I have to say.”

Olivier Deriviere who also scored Remember Me’s tremendous soundtrack has composed for Vampyr a soundscape of coal-black instrumentation so filthy that at times the live instruments can sound synthesized, with stabbing tetanus-infected percussion, and piano-wire strings that drive some of the songs as powerfully as the percussion, or suddenly cut through the drony ambience like a knife through a mildewed shower curtain. It’s just a pity that the drony ambience is given so much emphasis as while this allows for the chatter and coughs of the citizens brave enough to venture outside during lockdown—or the absence of the sound of human life in a city like London to drive home the calamity that has befallen the city!—the music is so good that it would have been nice to hear it more often.

The visual and dramatic representation of London complements well the sound design and music, without quite reaching the latter’s heights; streets left empty due to the epidemic (notwithstanding roaming vampyres and vampye-hunters) are rendered damp and dismal enough that being inside with fellow citizens is a comfort—and the weird, somnambulist manner in which computerised humans wander about on their predetermined routes has the surreal affect of a populace that sleepwalked into war returning shell-shocked to a waking nightmare where death has followed them home in the form of a contagious disease, the lifelong suffering of mutilated bodies, the alienation of veterans, and the trauma of violence.

The funniest—yet still effective—example of the surreal contributing to the horrific is in is in the upper class West End where the only people on the streets are there not out of necessity, but luxury: a suffragette advocating for the voting rights of women on an empty street corner across the road from an advocate for vampyre awareness, each crying into an empty void while everyone else is at home enjoying the solitude of social distancing in their opulent apartments and mansions—in the poorer areas the streets are more populated: many must still work, in spite of the dangers!

Bizarrely, although there are plenty of empty flats for our vampyre doctor to squat in, he can’t fast travel between them; meaning there is a lot of needless traipsing from one side of the city to the other. Worse still, you cannot skip individual lines of dialogue (only sentences, which are often multiple-lines long), meaning that you must listen to every conversation in full if you don’t want to miss a sentence here or there.

And the loading times are inexplicably inconsistent, ranging from a few seconds, to a few minutes long.

Ultimately, this is a Dontnod game—and an RPG at that—so what about the story itself? The pacing is bizarre, condensing otherwise complicated romantic entanglements into revelatory flirtations and complex character development into single conversations—and the main plot interaction between characters is more stilted and awkward than the dynamic interaction of random citizens who know one another; but what the main plot lacks for in pacing and fluency, it more than makes up for in narrative and lore.

The lore, awkwardly, is dumped in a few expositional scenes; mostly towards the end. But it is a fascinating combination of British history and mythology, linking vampyrism with historical figures like William Marshall and mythical ones like Merlin. This is a particularly interesting foundation for a story set during the First World War, the war in which Great Britain was fighting to try and maintain its crumbling world hegemony and cultural identity as the empire which ruled the world—a position it believed it inherited from its ancestors—but it was a war which they ultimately lost, and as their empire violently disintegrated, Great Britain herself began the process of slowly transforming herself into a version of this same vision of nationalism that had conquered her!

Indeed, the descendants of Merlin and Arthur, Elizabeth and Victoria voted to leave the EU in the belief that the UK’s wealth and power was built as a nation state, not an empire—as if Albion’s glory could be restored if only it had the sovereignty it used to have in the halcyon days of its nation-statehood which it had lost by becoming a member state of the empire-like EU!

In a narrative so densely populated with historical references to the progressive political and social struggles of the era, as well as the multicultural nature of the war effort and the class dynamics of the pandemic, this nationalistic, original—and even a little patriarchal—lore makes for a fascinating contrast. The epidemic being of vampyric origin is the uncontrollable chaos with which human agency is demonstrated to be futile without the tradition of benevolent patriarchs to protect the little people and ladies, and this chaos is personified by the Celtic Goddess of war, Morrigan [sic], who can be defeated only by the purple-blooded masculine descendants of Merlin.

Yet it is even more complex than that! Morrigan, while being a goddess of war, is also a goddess of sovereignty and fertility, traditionally depicted not only as a crow or a raven, but also a wolf and a cow. And Dr. Reid’s daddy, Merlin, is actually Morrigan’s son, and produces offspring not to defeat her but merely to dilute her power in some sort of weird, half-hearted rebellion.

Are we to understand this as the vindication of patriarchal hierarchy in admonishing women so that their excesses do not lead to the degeneration of civilisation, or that the radical upheavals of femininity are what allows the progressive ideas of the era depicted to proliferate—or that the two work in a dysfunctional harmony, like an old couple who fight but will never leave one another? (Their relationship does read a bit like this, thus Merlin’s rebellious response to his mummy’s menstrual plagues is very much like Oedipal sublimation—so it is that the nationalism which destroyed the empire was also that which allowed its cultural traditions to continue?) Or are we to conceive of it as the vindication of nationalist mythologies as a positive agent of progress, in response to the tradition of empire which can only project its own guilt onto the very peoples it claims to protect?

It’s such an original, timely and complex use of mythology that it gives us questions interesting enough to ask which we ourselves must answer, rather than an answer that we may only interpret.