Reviews from

in the past


It was fine but It could have been soooo much better. Especially, since it is taking place in the world of Vampire the Masquerade.

A jankey but enjoyable game set in the World of Darkness. If you like Vampire then I think you'll enjoy this. Of the 3 characters only 1 has a real arc that they see through but the detective aspect is cool an the WOD is always great.

Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong lacked polish at release and had a number of mechanics that I couldn’t quite find enjoyment in, but it had its moments. Divided into chapters that jumped between three protagonists, it involved a warehouse number of notes, codes and keycards. At times I got into playing the part of investigator, but when it came down to it, it didn’t feel like I was playing a vampire, and I think that’s a problem in a vampire game.

Its issues went down to its core foundation. Consumables and gear, for example, could be ignored completely, which begged the question why they were there to begin with. Converting tabletop systems into video game format can lead to a convoluted mess, and Swansong was certainly an example of that.

If there's one thing I enjoy it's a strong story driven narrative game with RPG elements and Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong is a good one. A very good branching story with intriguing characters and a lot of different ways to go about it. This is a very good game and I'm happy I gave it a chance. You should too.

It's (or, rather, it could have been) a solid, narrative-driven adventure-RPG with quite a good story, three protagonists and multiple endings. However, it's so full of glitches, performance issues and game-breaking bugs, even now, months after its release, that it's quite difficult, or even impossible to focus on the game's few merits. Some scenes I had to restart from the beginning several times because I got stuck in a room or in the middle of a puzzle (but only after some heavy swearing and rage quitting). If you want something similar, you should just play The Council instead, trust me. Should you decide to give this one a try anyway, be very familiar with the lore, or be prepared for a lot of reading on the World of Darkness, otherwise, you might feel a bit lost, especially during the first few scenes.


This was a disappointing one for me. I enjoyed this studio's previous game, The Council, for bringing role-playing style stats into a TellTale style game. I wasn't blown away by the story, and the graphics and voice acting could've definitely been better, but I enjoyed it well enough paired with the gameplay mechanics that I had an overall positive experience with it. One of the things Swansong revealed to me about how I play games now, is that I'm just not willing to read through a bunch of superfluous text unless it's exceptionally well written. I used to be the type of player who would read every single codex entry in a BioWare game, and when I played The Council which also has tons of reading, I read through everything I found even if I found it boring sometimes. My playstyle has since changed however, and I'm no longer willing to give my time to something like that unless I view it as being worth my time, and in the case of this game I don't think that it was. My only prior experience with the Vampire: The Masquerade universe being Bloodlines, I've already had an experience with a very well done role-playing style story in this universe in video game form. The central conflict between the Camarilla and the Anarchs in that game is thematically rich and compelling. The conflict in this game just didn't grip me in the same way, and didn't compel me to scrounge through in-game books to try to learn more about it, especially when not everything you can read is crucial or even interesting. When a large amount of the game is about investigating, and I'm too bored to care to read up on the things I'm investigating, that's a bad sign.

I also think that Disco Elysium has just ruined this kind of game for me because it did stat-based storytelling too well. In Disco Elysium every possible way you could think to build your character is valid, and the game itself is more about playing it the way that you want, because there are options for every build imaginable. Swansong on the other hand, having only played through once, really feels like there are certain stats that you could min/max to simply get the "best" outcome. Investing points into your four core dialogue stats seems way too strong, and I never felt like I was choosing between these in an interesting way. It was more "sometimes this will come up and if you have points you'll win easier" and less "multiple of these will come up and you'll make an interesting character choice." I do hope that this studio can get a couple more shots at refining their formula because I do love the concept of RPG meets TellTale. Hopefully they look at how a game like Disco Elysium does this in a CRPG format and can apply it to the kind of game they make. But for this game, it just didn't really grab me.

Incredibly displeasing. One of the bigger fails of this year

A massive step down from The Council but still a somewhat enjoyable mess with a combination of decisions that clearly just didn't work out with the path the game took and decisions that should lead to whoever even considered implemented them to never be allowed to work on anything again. It doesn't help that it is also full of NPC movement related bugs that can cause you to need to restart chapters, and there were times when traits from accomplishing certain things wouldn't unlock.

Gameplay involves you building up character skills that allows for four different types of conversational skills (rhetoric, persuasion, intimidation, psychology), exploration skills with security and technology that can help you pick locks or hack computers, and knowledge skills like education and deduction that can give you more details when examining certain things and occasionally give you more conversation choices. Each character also has three vampire abilities and three attributes that govern different skills and powers that make them easier to use. In each chapter you have a certain amount of points you can spend to use your conversation and exploration abilities and an amount of hunger points to use your vampire abilities. Hunger can be refilled by drinking the blood of certain characters if you can find safe rooms to lure them to and your conversational/exploration points can be partially restored by succeeding in more important dialogue challenges. At the end of each chapter you get experience to spend based on the objectives you completed.

When you're just talking with characters, interacting with the world, coming up with puzzle answers it's pretty good and there are a variety of situations where you can take the story on slightly different paths but altering what happens to certain characters or doing things that will effect later scenes or later events for the other two characters.

Galeb is the clear winner when it comes to protagonists with the best actor, his past, being the oldest and actually behaving more like he would be over 250 where the other two are around 100 and are basically indistinguishable from 20 year olds, his former sire and his new sire's influences on him, being under the influence of the beckoning, seemingly growing to both dislike humans but also while seeing the Camarilla as damaging everything it touches. Both having some more quiet reflective "humanizing" moments while also at times feeling like a badass who it makes sense to actually give missions like these. Emem owns clubs, her sire is her ex, and she doesn't really want to do anything. Leysha has a maybe pretend daughter and has amnesia, and it is very obvious what the daughter and her relationship are if you look at what generation vampires they both are in the character codex screen, she isn't helped by her daughter being both annoying and having a poor voice actor. Easily enjoyed Galeb's scenes the most as apart from being the best character he interacted with more people, his puzzles sections were better done, and because of either a bit more time with him and more scenes where he is dealing with more people the actual mechanics of the game and growth of your skills and traits worked better. Whereas Emem spends half her time talking to no one, which seems odd for the more social seeming character and Leysha spends a lot of time either hiding or altering her appearance to look like others without needing to talk as much.

Nowhere near as good as The Council due to split between three characters hurting progression, making some skills pointless, and heavily limiting trait progression. Confrontations are now much more dull as they rarely involve good back and forth and don't benefit as much from investigations and no finding what characters have as strong and weak points. So many beyond amateur incompetent decisions, skills that need obvious reworked or to be combined (or that should just be removed), certain skills with some characters basically required to do important things to expand on the story and get better rewards where other skills have almost no use ever, no skip to next dialogue line button instead a strange option to hold a button to sort of fast forward through some of the things it allows that some genius made even worse by locking the option out on your first playthrough. I know this one was figured out at least back with the release of the original Deus Ex but if we find a 6-12 digit password in a file have the decency to enter the code yourself or to put the file on the screen while entering the code.

Then there's all the decision that would have made sense in early planning for the game but no longer make any sense in what the game ended up being. You need to drink blood to lower your hunger meter which is raised by using powers or in certain moments, but killing a victim, killing a rat, or luring a character in front of others raises suspicion that is shared by all characters and that will eventually make it more difficult to use each conversation skill. This entire system makes little sense as there's no reason for anyone to ever find, know about, or care about rats that you could kill, there's is no logical system to judge distance or viewcones for when people will or won't see you lure others to safe rooms to feed on, most characters aren't allowed to be fed upon (for some strange reason it tends to be all the character that are alone that would make the best choice, almost like they realized the system didn't make sense but decided to just cheat to make things more difficult instead of altering it). Then there's the fact that either no one will find the victims you feed on or kill or if they do find them there is no reason for them to fill a suspicion bar, what are the other vampires or the vampire hunting group that has people that you kill in it going to be shocked at finding out that vampires are real? We break someone's neck doesn't matter, drink from them fine, kill them drinking from them they get suspicious, and if they see some weirdo luring someone into a closet they get suspicious but not enough to say anything about it at the time.

Going beyond rank three in an attribute seems like a terrible idea, security is worthless because you can either find keys or codes in the environment or expendable items to raise your skill, technology is basically worthless, education and deduction can be used fairly often but typically just so your character can notice obvious things or to sound smarter in a conversation where something would get explained to them there is no real clue/plot/xp/narrative path reasons to increase them if feeling better about your intelligence replenished your interaction points that would have made them more practical. When it comes to vampire powers some trees are obvious things to increase, if you have dominate you get Iron Fist the best power in the game but then auspex worthless beyond the first power, obfuscate is worthless with the third power only able to be made use of in the last section requiring you to take the useless second power (funny enough a path in one of the first missions requires the third power but since you couldn't have gotten it yet someone gives you a thing to drink that gives you the power for that one mission).

Why the hell is there a paid DLC character that barely adds anything and why in the world would a studio pay to get Jessica Chobot to try to act?

It's a game that would be much more enjoyable to play on your second time because you would know all of what is pointless to take, things that it seems like you have to worry about but really don't, and would give you the button to speed up conversations. But it's also a narrative and puzzle driven game that is inherently not going to be as interesting the second time around.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1530813186647019520
Video: https://youtu.be/cIzbe7Lzmco

If this was anything but a Vampire the Masquerade game it would take heavier hits in the review score. However it’s not too common to get a game set in this universe and it even be of this quality. A compelling and intriguing story of three unique characters navigating their way through the world of darkness. Many good scenes with plenty of choice and consequences mildly let down by the myriad of bugs you’re likely to experience. Overall an enjoyable experience if you’re able to dodge the bugs 🐜

Portuguese & English review

Portuguese -
O pior drama interativo que já joguei... A história é tosca e o sistema de interatividade não faz sentido. Primeiro que basicamente o jogador é travado pelo próprio jogo, até os diálogos são forçados a um certo travamento coisa que quem jogou indigo prophecy ou até o aclamado Detroit become human, sabe que não faz sentido porque se o jogador descobre algum detalhe extra, deveria ter acesso imediato tal como nos outros dramas interativos, não estou a falar da escolhas.
Sobre as personagens, a pior é a Leysha tem uma crise existencial durante a gameplay que é ridicula, a Louis Enem é uma personagem mediana que até gostei, o Galeb... É algo que até dá gosto de jogar, mas a personagem perde a graça devido às limitações técnicas do próprio jogo.
A pior entrada desta franquia.

English -
The worst interactive drama I've ever played... The story is crude and the interactivity system doesn't make sense. Firstly, the player is basically blocked by the game itself, even the dialogues are proposed to a certain blocking, something that anyone who played Indigo Prophecy or even the acclaimed Detroit Becomes Human, knows that it doesn't make sense because if the player discovers some extra detail, it should have immediate access just like in other interactive dramas, I'm not talking about the choices.
About the characters, the worst thing is Leysha has an existential crisis during a gameplay that is ridiculous, Louis Enem is an average character that I actually liked, Galeb... It's something that I enjoy playing, but the character loses its edge. thanks to the technical limitations of the game itself.
The worst entry in this franchise

Was hilariously CRINGE at first regarding the fan fiction-esque quality of this game, then turned into a boring nightmare of lame puzzles and QTEs that do nothing to draw the player in.

All the vampires look like edgelords and Hot Topic fanatics, and the voice acting is as wooden as the stakes I wish I could drive into this game.

Not even worth playing ironically for laughs.

The biggest let down of 2022 for me. I enjoyed Big Bad Wolf's previous outing, The Council, and assumed that putting the formula to work in the World of Darkness setting could yield nothing but positive results.

Unfortunately, Swansong suffers from uneven character build diversity, strange pacing decisions, and huge story threads that can be easily missed. While the use of RPG elements in a narrative adventure is still a neat concept, Swansongs three POV characters basically need to be built a certain way to make the most of their story paths. If you decide to play through Swansong, do yourself a favor and use a wiki to build your Kindred with the ideal skillset so that you can avoid needless pressure points.

Una fantástica puerta de entrada al universo de Mundo de Tinieblas y, como ya ocurría con The Council, una buena aventura gráfica cuyos puntos fuertes son el guion y las batallas dialécticas.

I couldn't find a key and then it restarted my game.