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
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