#125: Vampyr (video game)
Dontnod’s narratively incoherent vampire adventure can’t quite pull all its ideas together
This review was originally posted to Twitter on June 30, 2019
Initial release: June 5, 2018
Platform: PC, PlayStation 4, XBox One, Nintendo Switch
Developer: Dontnod Entertainment
Bloodborne meets Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines, with consequentialist gameplay.
With a description like that, it’s probably no surprise that Life Is Strange developer Dontnod’s bloodsoaked horror RPG Vampyr is extremely schizophrenic about what it wants to be, and in fact is the worst case of ludonarrative dissonance I’ve ever seen.
Wikipedia describes ludonarrative dissonance as “the conflict between a video game’s narrative told through the story and the narrative told through the gameplay.” In other words, it’s when the gameplay doesn’t seem to match the point of the story. First coined in response to the original Bioshock’s conflicting narrative, ludonarrative dissonance is a frustratingly common occurrence in a medium that is sharply lacking in talented writers who can pull off meaningful stories.
Before we get into that, here’s Vampyr in a nutshell: you play Dr. Jonathan Reid, just returned from the recently-concluded Great War only to find himself turned into a vampire. He must balance his being a doctor with the vampire’s curse, all while trying to stop the Spanish Flu epidemic ravaging London.
Gameplay is split into combat and social modes. The combat plays like a stripped-down Bloodborne — you’ll be relying on dodging a lot, moving in for fast attacks then ducking out again. However, it’s not very robust: there’s little variety in movesets and enemies. As you kill enemies and perform quests, you’ll gain XP, which can be spent at a bed on new combat skills, at the cost of changes occurring in various areas of London based on your actions. However, you’ll often be outmatched by your enemies… which leads us to the social mode.
The single best way to gain a lot of XP at once is by feeding off the various named NPCs that populate the four districts of London you’ll be visiting. By talking to them, learning more about them and maintaining their health, you nurture a large XP bonus when you do eventually bite them. To this end, characters have “social circles,” relations with other characters that you can use to gather information about your targets. However, depending on your responses, you can sometimes miss out on critical information, limiting your total XP gain.
Dialogue is broken down into conversation trees, with topics split between “life in London” and “personal questions” plus whatever pertinent topic you want to discuss. It’s arbitrary and often inconsequential — you can usually exhaust every dialogue option and nothing will happen. Rarely, however, the game will offer you crucial conversation choices, marked by the iconic Y symbol (as taken from the game’s logo) in a two or three-way choice that will affect the outcome of the conversation. But a sense of arbitrariness is here, too, as often it’s difficult to judge how people will react. Dialogue choices you thought “safe” may piss someone off, closing you out of a hint. Or sometimes not pissing them off locks you out of a hint. It’s effectively trial-and-error… or it would be, but the game autosaves. While I understand that people in real life aren’t predictable and will react in ways you don’t expect, this kind of realism isn’t as fun in a game. It brings to mind the old LA Noire “doubt” problem where the protagonist sometimes comes off as a raving psycho. (Though he might be, I don’t know, it certainly seems implied.)
At certain key points in the game you’re given a more serious choice as to what to do with important characters. Your actions here will drastically affect the game. But even here, consequences aren’t always clear at the outset. For example, early in the game it’s revealed that one of the nurses at the hospital you work at has been stealing supplies and blackmailing people, including a major character who’s tasked you with stopping the problem. So you track the nurse down, and are thus faced with a choice: spare her and ask to leave your employer alone, kill her for the XP, or “charm” her with your vampyric powers into giving up her blackmail. The latter option seems like the best one, but here’s a hint: it’s not. If you take it, she loses her mind. This has devastating consequences for the district the nurse is a “pillar” of. You will never be able to top out the district’s “health” (maintained by giving medicines to people) because its pillar is gone, and it makes it harder to keep said district healthy.
The game emphasizes that you maintain district health by handing out medicine to the sick. The lower the health, the more monsters lurking in combat zones there are, and as health bottoms out, people start disappearing or turning up dead. You can see how this would be a problem.
The game offers no indication of this consequence with the nurse. While there are valid in-universe interpretations as to why a skill that works on everyone else later just doesn’t work on the nurse, it’s still an arbitrary, unexpected consequence the game forces you to accept.
Perhaps the single biggest disconnect between story and gameplay, however, is how the game handles killing. Here’s how it boils down: if you abstain from killing named NPCs for their XP, you get the best, most hopeful ending. Unnamed NPCs, though, are fair game. That’s right, you can slaughter a whole horde of vampires and vampire hunters every night and drink their blood constantly (blood being functionally equivalent to mana in gameplay terms) and still get the best ending. In fact, you’re encouraged to do so for the XP. This disconnect between combat and conversation is far-reaching. For example, the various papers and letters and stuff you can find and read have no bearing on conversations. Reid can read discover shocking information in a letter, then have no memory of it in a conversation. The game is plagued (pun not intended) with writing issues like this. Another one is the way the romance subplot not only feels tacked on, but also feels quite sudden, going from “wary acquaintances” to “I love you” at the drop of a hat.
I’ve spent a lot of time complaining about this game, but I must stress that it’s still a fun game. There’s lots to do and see and explore, lots of people to talk to, and some cool powers that you can level up and deploy on the enemy. The NPCs are varied and their relations and conflicts with one another are fun to exploit for more XP (even if you can talk behind a character’s back with them right next to you!) My favorites are the two existentialist twins straight out of a Waiting for Godot casting call. Vampyr also attempts an examination of the gender politics of 1918 London and how forward-thinking science can cure and condemn. On this point, at least, the writers managed to get the overall themes right, even if they were a bit ham-fisted in other aspects — such as the wealthy industrialist standing in for Trump by demanding a wall between the West End and the sicker, poorer communities.
Combat is difficult, especially if you haven’t been biting NPCs to level up, and even a simple one-on-one fight can turn lethal in a hurry. The bloodborne influence here is quite obvious. This however does further the divide between combat and story, and will likely turn off some people who came here from Life is Strange. And when the writing isn’t up to snuff, well…
This is a gorgeous game, though. It nails the aesthetic of early 20th century London in the midst of war and pestilence. Monsters and gangs of hunters lurk in the fog and even safe zones don’t feel completely safe. The atmosphere, the aesthetic, the soundtrack, the semi-open world (that you can’t fast-travel through, by the way) even some aspects of the combat, all are on point, despite an anemic core combat layer and a story that simply doesn’t live up to the hype.
Vampyr is frustrating, not just in combat, but in its whole execution. There is so much here that Dontnod got right, and yet it’s completely undercut by the fact that the writers simply couldn’t pull it off. And yet it’s still charming and compelling, at least for a while. It’s a big, ambitious game that promises many things and doesn’t deliver on most of them. But it’s still a gorgeously realized, overall entertaining game that I hope Dontnod learn from and improve on in their future games.
