Finding a lost animal for a worried owner is Quest Design 101 for fantasy RPGs, and so it’s unsurprising to find that The Blood of Dawnwalker’s prologue features its own wandering farmyard resident. Tasked with finding a prized pig, protagonist Coen searches high and low (and beats up a castaway man) in his attempt to bring the sow back to her owner… who, when reunited with his muddy love, promptly asks if Coen would like to butcher the animal himself. This dark twist is perhaps the earliest indication that The Blood of Dawnwalker is absolutely a game created by the former director of The Witcher 3 and a studio staffed by numerous ex-CD Projekt Red talent. Even the smallest quests have grisly repercussions.
During a recent trip to developer Rebel Wolves’ studio in Warsaw, Poland, I was able to watch a developer play through The Blood of Dawnwalker’s prologue – an 80-minute segment that took us from the opening CGI cinematic to the catalyst event that truly kicks off this RPG’s story. As far as preview content goes, this is less interesting than what we’ve been shown previously; at Gamescom last year, we were able to see a mid-game quest tackled during both day and night to demonstrate Coen’s human and vampire abilities, and talk at length with creative director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz about the complex time and hunger systems that form the bedrock of this blood-sucking story.
Few of those ideas are present in the prologue, which deliberately starts simple in order to both provide tutorials and set up the story – although it does soon leap into a series of dramatic beats I won’t spoil in this preview. But while this introduction sequence is light on the things that make Dawnwalker notably ambitious and exciting, it does show how Rebel Wolves has tried to build complexity into what initially seems to be the pretty typical “day in the life of an unremarkable peasant” that many medieval RPGs open on. Well, as unremarkable a day for a man who’s about to become a superpowered bloodsucker can be. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, though.
The first day of what will become Coen’s cursed existence begins with a request from his father: find medicinal herbs for his mother, who has become so sick she refuses to eat and is barely lucid. It’s a request that the developer playing the demo completely ignores; while this would be perhaps the only mandatory quest in a more typical RPG prologue, The Blood of Dawnwalker’s “narrative sandbox” design means there’s no main story quest to follow. Instead, you’re simply given a deadline of sundown, when you’ll need to attend church for the ominous-sounding Blood Mass. Between now and then you can complete whatever tasks you wish, each of which costs a fragment of your eight-part time bar to complete. When you’re out of time, the Blood Mass begins, regardless of whether you gathered those herbs or not. And so the prologue is a miniaturised version of Dawnwalker’s complete campaign, in which you have 30 days and 30 nights to save your family from vampires, and what stories and quests you follow within that time is entirely up to you.
Rather than forage for herbs, our developer guide had Coen explore his village in search of other opportunities. Struck down by a plague and thus poorly maintained, Coen’s home turf is painted in the same shades as The Witcher 3’s wretched Velen. Its surviving population is all in need of help – we ignore a begging woman named Gremla in favor of speaking with the farmer and agreeing to find his aforementioned pig. Before we leave, we also promise to stop by the local peat bogs to seek out someone’s missing brother. By the end of the day, the pig and brother have both been found and sent home (although we take a risk and send the brother off alone on a route prowled by wolves, another example of how Dawnwalker weaves thorny choice and consequence into these familiar quests). For Gremla and our own mother, though, things are not so rosy – you’ll find no details here, but ignoring these quests has significant repercussions and dramatic resolutions. The promise of this prologue, then, is that all actions taken across Dawnwalker’s 50-70 hour journey – even inaction – have consequences.
For some people, this is going to be deeply stressful. Dawnwalker’s design means you simply don’t have time to help everyone and achieve positive outcomes in every story thread, especially when not getting involved can prove to be as impactful as getting your hands dirty. But for me, and I expect many others looking for a more complex RPG, I really like the kind of game this design promises; a deep evolution of Persona’s time-keeping calendar system, and a set of connected mechanics which create a desperate, reactive world in need of change that perhaps only you can deliver.
It’s good to see Rebel Wolves’ approach so well established in Dawnwalker’s opening hour. Not just good, but vital: without the dramatic consequences to your choices, the studio’s choice to begin Coen’s journey in an otherwise very typical fashion could have felt incredibly rote. I do see what the studio is doing here, challenging RPG conventions by taking cliche tutorial quests and putting a quite frankly CD Projekt Red-coded spin on them, but even with this reactivity on show, finding a pig or rescuing a man from a cave isn’t the most enthralling activity to take on out of the gate. Thankfully, even if the twists that unravel from these simple stories don’t capture your imagination, the wider narrative of this opening hour is much more engaging. By sundown, Coen finds himself at a church ceremony that revels in a similar cross-section of Catholic and vampire mythology as Mike Flannigan’s Netflix masterpiece, Midnight Mass. And from here on, I expect (or at least hope) the aims of each quest will be much more engaging.
By the prologue’s final sequence, Coen has been transformed into a vampire and has access to a suite of blood-fuelled abilities. Most of the conversation around Dawnwalker has been focused on its storytelling and time mechanics, and while I do think that’s where the vast majority of its appeal lies, I do think its more physical side shows promise, too. Everything showcased in the demo has been seen before, but the action reaffirmed that Coen is a hybrid of The Witcher’s Geralt and Dishonored’s Corvo – something distinctly apparent in the Shadow Step ability that lets you teleport across short distances, unlocking unconventional routes through the environment. Planeshift complements that, allowing you to walk up walls and along ceilings. Clawride, which sees you sort of vertically surf down sheer surfaces, feels a little more catered to just being a quick dose of cinematic cool, but its inclusion perhaps points to some interesting vertical level geography to come later in the campaign.
Combat, meanwhile, also feels like The Witcher 3 spliced with another game – this time the directional-based swordplay of Kingdom Come: Deliverance or For Honor, in which you must manually adjust the angle of your blade in order to block, counter, and land attacks. For those who find this a little too fiddly, an omnidirectional guard and strike can simplify things at the cost of extra stamina consumption, while active abilities like throwing dirt into an adversary’s eyes in order to stun them feel akin to the comfortable mainstream combat systems seen in Assassin’s Creed and Ghost of Yotei.
After watching Rebel Wolves’ developer fight against an early boss and a few regular swordhands, I’ll admit that combat is the thing I’m most unsure of, despite its clear push beyond just being a repeat of what many of the studio’s staff achieved on The Witcher. However, I often find that this kind of combat can look dull and stilted as an observer, but feel very absorbing and deliberate as a participant, so I’ll chalk my lack of enthusiasm up to that until I can go hands-on with Coen’s blades and claws myself.
After seeing Rebel Wolves’ ambition on full display at Gamescom last year, my anticipation for The Blood of Dawnwalker was very high. I’m not sure I’d have felt quite the same if my first introduction to its world was this prologue – even with their smart twists, its RPG staple introductory quests are by far the least interesting part of Dawnwalker that I’ve seen. But despite toying with the rote, this demonstration has done nothing to shake my confidence. It feels like Rebel Wolves has created a prologue that effectively establishes a dark medieval world and lays the initial tracks for Coen’s interesting dual-lane journey in which you must master both the man and the vampire. It’s knowing what comes after all this, though – the depth of its day/night “narrative sandbox” and the multitude of opportunities for both sides of Coen that I was shown previously – that places The Blood of Dawnwalker among the small handful of games that I’m impatiently waiting for this year. The opening may not be the sharpest fang in its potentially deadly grin, then, but it’s a pointed tooth all the same.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s Executive Editor of Features.
