Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong

If 3D games make you nauseous and you love story rich, 2.5D games, then this is the game for you. The artwork and rendering in this game are gorgeous. The skin finishing and artifacts are highly detailed. The lighting is superb. The only issue for me is that the text is a little small, so I need to get up close to read large blocks of text. You can really get into the lore of this game or just play it by walking around, enjoying interacting with things, talking to characters, and solving fairly easy puzzles. This game is classic adventure where you are supposed to use your brain, talk to characters (the voice work is excellent), work out the best psychological steps, and nothing is fatal. The movement is fluid and smooth. I absolutely love this game. I loved The Council too. I hope the team at Big Bad Wolf develops more games like this.

If you like a game with a little detective work, you will enjoy this game

Picked this up on sale for $3, figuring that after years of backlash surely somebody would have created a mod (or fixed the game) to allow you to skip cutscenes. Nope, still can't. Still maybe the dumbest design decision in the history of games. Not worth it even for $3, this studio deserves to die.

Despite its many flaws, I did end up liking the game. The biggest problem is the visuals, which is a thing hard to ignore in an interactive movie. The game is made on Unreal Engine and it shows. The facial animations not as bad as in, let's say, pre-patched ME Andromeda but definitely are on the way there. Especially when you notice that when talking, characters are just stand there infront of each other, wobbling a bit and maybe raising a hand one or two times. It doesn't get much better in catscene with action since the animatioms are still janky and slow there. All that would not be so bad, I think, if the visuals weren't so realisitic. If the game looked simpler, had an actual style to it instead of trying to me hyper realistic, the simple animations didn't stood up so much. But we have what we have. On more personal note, I really, really don't like 80% of locations in the game simply because I hate the modern style interiors and, because we hang out with the Camarilla, those are everywhere in this game. I hate them, they are ugly as hell. I wish we had a few old-fashioned vampires around. From what I understand, the game initially came out very buggy. Unfortunatly, I ran into…

The World Of Darkness seems forever cursed with Mediocre Video Games after about 2005 (The Choice Of Games WOD Interactive Fiction games are all peak however), Swansong is well Mediocre at best and almost insulting at worst. You either play Swansong for its story and its tie to its setting or well not at all, To play this game and enjoy it you got to enjoy the World Of Darkness a whole lot and enjoy any scrap you can get (Me, I'm almost desperate for any thing related to WOD), The Combat and Puzzles are laughable whilst the dialogue and consequences are its one shining bright spot, If you enjoy games with a decent dialogue and choices that do matter you'll enjoy this with the caveat you like the WOD maybe just a tad bit too much. Overall Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong is a game you should only buy on sale if you REALLY like The World Of Darkness.

I want to like this game more. I still like it, despite its many clear faults (mostly graphics). It's not hard to understand for people who already played the TTRPG, and the investigation sequences aren't too hard.