Big Bad Wolf·Released May 19, 2022·Single player
Based on the cult role-playing world and developed by specialists in the genre, Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong is a narrative RPG in which your every choice determines the fate of the three main characters and of the Boston Camarilla.
Vampire The Masquerade: Swansong is a dialogue-driven RPG that stakes everything on writing that isn't up to the task.
Courtly intrigue, but with fangs (and a decent number of bugs)
Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong offers an impressively flexible story, but that can't save it from its mediocre writing and scattershot game design.
Player choice is propped up in fun and challenging ways within conversations and crime scene investigations.
The latest Review,,,reviews, breaking news, comment, reviews and features from the experts at GamesRadar+
Swansong's biggest problem is that at times it's perhaps not as clear as it could be about what you're actually meant to be doing or how to bypass certain problems, and you'll find that it's trial and error that gets you through. There's also a couple of technical issues, including one in which we spent ages wandering around trying to solve a puzzle only to reset the game and discover that the solution to the problem hadn't loaded the first time around. Not cool.
Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong is certainly a super-stylish narrative RPG, and it's one that gets off to a strong start, offering up a truly intriguing premise, before falling victim to tedious investigative gameplay, undercooked conversational aspects and a host of bugs that make progress frustrating at points. There's just too much jank here, levels are too rigid, there's not enough freedom in how you go about your investigations or use your vampiric powers to really make things sing and, as a result, we're left with a game that fails to fully live up to its early promise. It's not a bad effort, but with a little more care and polish, it could have been so much more.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong falls short of its ambitions as a story-focused detective RPG due to a dense but uninteresting plot, bland characters, and unintuitive puzzles.
Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong has intrigue at vampire court, good puzzles and interesting conversation battles - with a lot of walking in between
