Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong

I reckon video games utilizing the Vampire: The Masquerade and other long-name World of Darkness RPG licenses shouldn't emphasize the franchise title on the cover art as much as they do. It keeps confusing a lot of people, causing them think it's one continuous video game series. Making the VTM logo smaller might help the uninformed gamers to skip to the last part of the title where the actual name of the game in question is. It annoys me quite a bit when people unnecessarily keep repeating the whole litany or in written text give up on typing the whole thing out and call the game Vampire: The Masquerade (or just Vampire) regardless of which particular video game adaptation they're talking about.

Budget-hampered investigation RPG

Vampire: Masquerade - Swansong is the second game by the French studio Big Bad Wolf. It was yet another chance for people to mistakenly think a sequel to VTM Bloodlines had arrived. Well, it's obviously not that -- the debatable sequel happened later -- but it is a roleplaying game. In that regard it is a bit unusual, though, because you keep taking turns in controlling three different preset player characters in their individual narratives. Gameplay is very much like the studio's first game The Council: third person investigation by finding clues, solving puzzles, and doing dialogue confrontations. There is no real-time action except for one potential Scene (as the game calls them in the style of the tabletop RPG) that involves basic stealth gameplay. Few confrontations and Scenes do also have timers.

Swansong takes place in 2019 in Boston, Massachusetts. The city's Camarilla (the vampire faction whose priority is to uphold the Masquerade: to keep their existence hidden from mortals) has issued Code Red: everyone needs to take shelter, namely to come to the Prince's haven.

One part of VTM's meta narrative in the recent(-ish) years has been that different human organizations have in an increasing manner become aware of the vampires, the Kindred. The Nosferatu clan's ShreckNET was compromised in the early 2000s. And London, for instance, was purged of nearly all vampires between the setting's years of 2012 and 2013. And now, it seems, the Second Inquisition has come to Boston: the Camarilla's and a Tremere chantry's unification party has been attacked.

Boston's Prince, Hazel Iversen, sends three Kindred, the player characters, on separate paths to first investigate and later to strike back. The trio is Emem Louis of clan Toreador; Leysha, a Child of Malkav; and Galeb Bazory of the Blue Bloods, i.e. Ventrue.

A diva, a lunatic, and a king walk into a bar...

Having three separate player narratives was certainly a choice. I'm guessing that they wanted to feature more than one playable clan but designing one story that could be played through as a vampire with different Discipline sets and other variations would've required too much work. Or they wanted a specific narrative and structure.

Even like this, not all attributes and Disciplines are equal. There's a spoiler-free post on Reddit, suggesting what to pick and warning about the common mistakes one can make when spending experience points. I restarted the game after having done the first mission when I read that post because I had been increasing Presence on Galeb and Emem as is about my first instinct to do on vampires of the charismatic clans. Turned out that Presence is pretty much useless. Galeb also finishes his first Scene with 0 experience gained if you didn't spend his points on specific Skills.

One could consider Emem's cover girl appearance to be somewhat of a bait. While it is how she looks like in the Prince's haven at the start, that is all you're gonna get of it. You won't be running in Boston's streets and crawling in ventilation shafts wearing a cloth-physics enabled cocktail dress and golden body paint on, looking like some queen of the damned who just stepped off the catwalk of a Black Tape Project show. Instead she will wear a more inconspicuous outfit after the first Scene. She even gets a different hairstyle.

When you're first introduced to Leysha, you also see that she has a young daughter Halsey, who's likewise a Malkavian vampire. That caused my eyebrows to rise but that was mostly because I misremembered the child vampire ban being in this setting when it's actually in Anne Rice's novels. In VTM, Embracing a kid is not prohibited, although one needs a Prince's approval like any Embrace. It's still a bit unusual, though.

The game has a continuously updating codex and I immediately checked if it said anything of interest about Embracing children -- it didn't. However, the character entries list a vampire's generation as well as their Sire and possible Childer if known, and I noted that Halsey was 11th gen while Leysha was 12th -- the implication there being that Halsey had drained her mother and then had somehow understood to give her own blood to Leysha to make her a vampire as well. Then a bit later -- or maybe it was right away, not sure -- I read the entry for Leysha's Malkavian psychiatrist Dr. Richard Dunham who had Halsey listed as his Childe. The picture was complete, although halfway through the game there are additional details given. Before that I simply assumed the usual Malkavian shenanigans and, really, that was more or less the case.

In my opinion, the codex revealed a bit too much at that point -- it could have filled in the generation entries and such later. However, even without the codex -- or maybe because I was reading it and thinking about stuff -- I realized that 'Halsey' is an anagram of 'Leysha'. Then, just before Emem and Galeb entered the room Leysha was waiting in to talk to the Prince at the beginning, Halsey used Obfuscate to hide. A Malkavian Discipline, sure, but my Malkavian madness alarm bells were ringing pretty hard at that point -- how convenient for her to be out of sight when there are others in the room. Soon after, Leysha goes to the Prince, who mentions Halsey but never looks at her even though she's supposedly present without the Obfuscate aura around her. At that point I already knew that Halsey was a hallucination and that Halsey was probably not her real name and that something had happened to the real one. Additional details to that were revealed later likewise but I sure wasn't surprised like Leysha was.

Requires effort to figure out

Big Bad Wolf seemed to have learned from their previous game: Swansong felt a lot more difficult than The Council, which became a cakewalk somewhere around its midpoint. Resources-restoring consumables are much rarer in this one and the details for many solutions need to be dug up from quite a pile of available information. I wasn't a huge fan of the latter, especially because the game most of the time doesn't note if you're looking at something actually important. I feel the Auspex Discipline should do that -- instead its function is mainly conjuring up premonitions and other, often rather-useless fluff visions. Hunger points accrue awfully fast if you keep clicking on every available Auspex vision point in a Scene -- one of the possible pitfalls, I feel.

The clans Malkavian and Toreador both having Auspex is rather convenient for an investigation game like this, I must say. The Ventrue don't have it but Galeb has See the Unseen, a bonus mini version of the Discipline. That is not outside the realm of the tabletop rules as the Kindred are able to pick up other clans' Disciplines throughout their unlife via various means. Galeb also happens to be the oldest of the Camarilla vampires in Boston for being over 300 years old. Plenty of time in that to accomplish things.

Galeb is by far the most likeable and convincing of the player and non-player characters in the whole game. He carries himself with such unshakeable composure and poise. At the start of the final location, there's a soldier on whom Dominate doesn't work. That might surprise a vampire who hasn't had a mortal resist him in for who knows how long but Galeb manages to recover from it with only the slightest reaction. Galeb's voice actor is also easily the best one in the game.

Swansong's dialogue writing is not exactly brilliant; the game would've needed top tier actors with the lacking material to give the characters at least some of the charisma they so sorely lack. But the cast is definitely below A-tier. The difference is stark when you compare the characters of Swansong and Bloodlines. The game ends in a speech by Hazel (at least in the endings I saw) and it sounded so damn hollow. I found her having been able to rise to a Prince's position to be implausible due to the performance.

The tabletop game kind of there

Swansong doesn't implement the VTM rules fully nor accurately. The limited implementation is probably enough for a game like this, though. You don't roll Skills checks in Swansong provided your skill rank is higher than your opponent's, which I think is nice. But if they're equal, there's a roll to solve the tie, with a die animation even. And the possibility of your opponent using Focus to boost their skill rank is based on chance as well. I think Swansong could have been a nicer experience without the randomness.

The game doesn't have manual saves but you can back out to the main menu in the middle of most dialogues to restart them with Continue. In confrontations, you can use the trick to figure out which of the non-skill dialogue options doesn't get you a miss if you can't or don't want to pick a Skill or Discipline one.

Canon-compliance-wise, I think the game does go a bit too loose in various Scenes. And there was a handful of little errors I spotted. Some bugs and glitches are present as well.

Would've needed more post-release polishing

Big Bad Wolf was kind of forced to abandon Swansong before they had the chance to fully fix it; their parent company Nacon (since 2018) pushed them to work on their next game instead. For instance, on Steam, the game was left with a handful of broken achievements. Fortunately, the developers were able to at least remove the achievements so that one can 100% the game. (I wish Chronos: Before the Ashes would get the same treatment from Gunfire Games/THQ Nordic. Or even actually get the New Game+ update the unobtainable achievements are for.)

It's possible as Leysha to get locked inside one room in late game if you haven't gotten a new autosave before exiting after being in there. You load back into the room and the door won't open from the inside anymore. I had to restart the whole Scene thanks to that.

Sometimes point discounts on Attributes, Skills, and Disciplines aren't being applied correctly and you might spend more than intended. Buying a rank and then canceling it once can prevent you from getting scammed.

In the final location of the game, I noticed my Suspicion meter to be at an oddly high 64/100. And I had been pretty damn careful to remove all Masquerade-critical evidence and not kill anyone in a suspicious manner. One possibility I considered was that I had been using an artifact that increases Suspicion but the ones I had had equipped most of the time, didn't have any downsides.

After some googling, I discovered that the DLC artifacts (which I had for having bought the Primogen Edition) do in fact have a negative effect too even if the in-game description doesn't say so for whatever reason. If you look at the screenshots on the DLC's store page on Steam, the artifacts have a third effect: "In a Dialogue, Suspicion increases by 2 for every Focus point." I had Focused quite a lot at the start of the game. That made me wonder if I had bricked my playthrough but in the end I finished without issues.

The Suspicion meter is a pretty cool, soft-penalty mechanic for not observing the Masquerade. All the characters add to the same meter, and as it goes up, you'll start getting difficulty penalties to Skills and Disciplines. I don't know if the game actually ends upon reaching 100 or if it's just the maximum penalties will accrue for.

Few small detail errors

Swansong begins on the 4th of September and it's full moon. Because the setting does, as far as I know, match real life in non-supernatural stuff, I, for fun, checked if the moon had been full on that date. The answer was no: it had been a waxing crescent on Sep 4, 2019. Either the developers hadn't bothered to check or the in-game date was changed from something later in development and the art had remained unedited. One in-game computer also has log records dated with the year 2020.

One of Leysha's lines has 'kine' (the mortals) written and pronounced as "kines" with an s. Kine is the archaic plural form of cow so you don't put an s to the end. I'm guessing there was a typo and the voice director didn't know any better. I didn't notice the mistake anywhere else with the word.

A more ambiguous pronunciation debate comes from how Emem says the j in Brujah like "zh". If you've played Bloodlines, you might expect the word to be pronounced like a Spanish one. However, apparently the first edition of VTM specifically states that the former pronunciation is correct. That is apparently also how Brujah is pronounced in the video game VTM Redemption which predates Bloodlines. When did the clan originally even get their name? Did the Spanish language exist back then? 'Malkavian' is also pronounced throughout the game with "kahv" instead of "kayv" like I've gotten used to.

Another unexpected pronunciation happens when Leysha enters a room (in disguise) and the forensics guy inside exclaims: "finally the cavalry has arrived" except he says cavalry as "calvary". That is evidently a common mispronunciation. Funny how that made into the game.

Is this canonical?

The most interesting details were the ones that went against the rules canon -- or at least my perception of it. I consider Vampire: The Masquerade to be a highly intriguing setting with a whole lot of depth and for that reason even an arguably lacking game like Swansong offers a lot of food for thought. This post got so lengthy probably for that reason as well.

Leysha can potentially encounter Richard after learning the truth about Halsey and herself. You get to choose if she can control her anger or if she lets it out on Richard. If you choose the latter, Leysha rather easily smashes Richard's head to the floor and delivers him his Final Death. In my limited VTM tabletop experience, destroying another Kindred is not that effortless, especially when you're of clan without physical Disciplines and the other Kindred is two generations lower than you (thus being more powerful due to being closer to the original vampire Caine and his cursed legacy). I kept Richard (un)alive because I wanted the Camarilla to remain as strong as possible. I suppose that's another reason I liked the extremely loyal Galeb so much.

A more puzzling event of vampire-on-vampire violence optionally happens when Emem meets again a 7th gen Nosferatu, Kurt Densch, whom she can set free from Tremere imprisonment earlier in the game. Auspex counters Obfuscate, and Celerity makes the Toreador quicker. The Nosferatu do have Potence, which makes them physically much stronger and then there's the fact that a five-generation difference is kind of massive. Kurt wiping out the whole Tremere chantry after Emem frees him suggests that he is in fact quite powerful. Even the strongest 12th gen have the Blood Potency of only the weakest 7th generation vampires. Kurt is merely 150 years old, however, and only 38 years older than Emem. That would mean he has a modest one-die bonus on Discipline use over Emem -- and probably higher ranks on average.

The Scene allows leeway against the numbers on paper, though. Emem pick ups a revolver from the corpse of an S.A.D soldier (Special Affairs Department), forcing Kurt to hide initially -- guns, the universal equalizer (especially with Celerity). When he reappears, Emem simply shoots a bullet (probably some anti-vampire kind) through Kurt's head to disable him. And then proceeds to mutilate the head so that he won't be coming back.

With an educated guess I figured out Kurt's generation before the game gave me his codex entry -- funny that he turned out to be only 150, though. White Wolf Fandom wiki also has more information on Kurt. I don't know where that, like his character sheet, was pulled from. Evidently he was originally 8th gen but lowered it to 7th via Diablerie (which is to slurp on another Kindred to the point of Final Death). Considering that, his 8/10 Humanity score seems rather high. Meanwhile, Emem, who's of the famously high-Humanity Toreador, has apparently her Humanity at 7/10.

One additional Scene I'd like to draw attention to, is the optional stealth one. As Galeb, you can choose to free a werewolf in an S.A.D prison. It makes getting out of there easier for Galeb if Emem didn't rope in the Anarchs (a vampire faction who rejects the status quo of the Camarilla), or just allows you to avoid the complications of the subterfuge-requiring escape method. Galeb manages to negotiate an honorable deal with the werewolf so it's not his problem what the Garou does after he's let out. Instead, it's Leysha who has to dodge the rage of the Lupine.

I wonder if Big Bad Wolf (hehe) included the Scene as a throwback to Bloodlines. It is of dubious quality, though. Leysha can hide behind racks in the warehouse the Scene takes place and the werewolf is unable to follow her into those safe spots. But the werewolf model is not that large in the game; I'd say he could've fit in the gap without issue (as seen in one of my screenshots). Hell, the Crinos form should be able to break through the racks, no matter how heavily they're shelved -- in Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood, I was leveling whole rooms. After few attempts to get in, the Garou loses interest and starts pacing around the room again. As if that makes sense. Leysha is not instantly killed if the werewolf does catch her. Instead she's given 6 points of Hunger. It is possible to permanently die, too: the game won't restart the Scene on its own but continues on with the other characters.

It's so stupid that Obfuscate is unexplainedly not available for use in the Scene. The Discipline does work against the Garou like it does against the Kindred -- Dominate, too, probably, though I'm not sure if you would have the time to start giving orders. A better solution would've been to make the Scene actually require up to certain rank of Obfuscate (or some alternative method). The Scene could've instead been one or more cutscenes where the werewolf senses something is wrong but enough ranks in Obfuscate allows Leysha to slip past him. A real-time stealth section was so out of place.

Meanwhile Emem does potentially require a certain rank of Celerity to survive a cutscene. If you decide to not side with her Sire in the epilogue, she will try to kill Emem. Celerity is a supernatural ability but it sure is an amusing sight for an overweight woman to move at a blinding speed (though the game goes slow motion for you to actually see something.)

Mirror, mirror, on the wall

Speaking of appearances: it is faux-ironic that, of all games, this vampire one has functional mirrors everywhere when so many games do not. The irony is not truly there because the majority of the Kindred do cast reflections normally in VTM. Only the Lasombra (as far as I know) have a Clan Curse -- or I guess Bane is what they're now called -- that distorts their reflections and recordings, and even then they still have them. The mirror images in Swansong are slightly distorted for everyone, though: I assume the game uses the method of rendering the scene a second time at a lower resolution from another angle for the mirrors.

Instead of Cyanide's engine used in The Council, Big Bad Wolf got Unreal Engine 4 for Swansong. I guess it was not entirely the engine that made the characters of The Council look so horrid: this one has the same unnaturalness and stiffness going on, although the models are definitely better. The vitiligo jump scare at the start maybe wasn't necessary. The Toreador who Embraced April Bosley sure had hell of a Bane of Aesthetic Fixation. But even he got tired of looking at his Childe eventually.

Come to think of it, Swansong has a whole lot of Sire-Childe drama going on. It's not exactly uncommon in vampire fiction (of any setting) but here it's like every Kindred has friction with whom they made or whom made them. I suppose Bloodlines was from the other end, though: I can't, at the top of my head, name any Sire-Childe relationship except for the protagonist whose unnamed Sire gets beheaded in the prologue for Embracing without the Prince's permission. Man, if only The Chinese Room's Bloodlines 2 had been a worthy successor. I guess the wait for a great VTM video game adaptation continues.

Big Bad Wolf's next game coincidentally came out during this playthrough. This time they went for a Lovecraftian title: Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss. I don't feel like playing another puzzle-investigation title any time soon but I have it wishlisted because I might buy it at some point in the future. It's also first person, which is a nice change.

It's unfortunate that Nacon had to file for insolvency a month ago or so. (Them losing a patent lawsuit against Nintendo might have had something to do with that.) They have just had a handful of various games released in addition to the Cthulhu game (like GreedFall: The Dying World and Styx: Blades of Greed) that could potentially save them from bankruptcy. But because they can't pay their debts, they seem to be unable to spend money on marketing as well, which most likely has an effect on how many people see the games when it would matter the most for the publisher. I mostly see advertisements in the form of streamers being sponsored (and I guess trailers in showcases) and I have noticed the lack of that for all these three titles. Edge of Memories is supposed to be released later this year and Hunter: The Reckoning - Deathwish next year. If Nacon files for bankruptcy, the latter might not come out at all, or at least not under this publisher.