Vampyr was underrated – it's the best vampire RPG we've got

While the world waits, and waits, for Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, a sequel that only ever seems further away – can you believe it was once scheduled for 2020? – I’m reminded of a vampire role-playing game that nearly passed me by. One of similar size and similar tone: thoughtful, brooding, dark. A game about drinking blood to sustain yourself and fighting demons, yes, but also about deciding what kind of vampire you want to be, and what kinds of morals you, as an undead being, want to have. Are you a monster, or are you a person still?

Vampyr is the game I’m talking about, released in 2018 by Focus Home Entertainment and Life is Strange studio Dontnod, so there was some fanfare around it. But middling reviews sank it and the game floated downriver, past most people, and it would have passed completely had it not been fished out by the – then – new wave of subscription services. They resuscitated it and gave it another chance (see also: Focus Home’s A Plague Tale: Requiem) and I’m so glad they did.

There’s something about rediscovering a game in solitude, away from all of the noise of release, that makes for a more sympathetic appraisal, I think. The pressure is off; and the pressure that was on Vampyr when it originally came out, to fill the vampire RPG void left by Bloodlines in 2004 (the sequel hadn’t yet been announced) was great. Lots of people wanted the game to be lots of different things, and it fell short for lots of understandable reasons. But rediscovered a couple of years later, a surprisingly considered and accomplished vampire tale is there to be found.

7 Reasons Being A Good Guy in Vampyr Really Sucks – Vampyr PS4 Gameplay Watch on YouTube

What I like most about it is the central conceit: in the game you are, or were, a doctor in life, so you took a Hippocratic Oath to behave in a certain, ethically upstanding way, and to not, say, tuck in to your patients. But now you’re dead and hungry for blood, this oath, which morally shaped you, serves as an obstacle. Will you take the lives of people you once swore to heal and help? It’s a duality you struggle with all through the game: whether or not to give-in to your more monstrous side or cling to the person you used to be.