The Vampire Regent

Reviewing (mostly) every game (or DLC) in my library, 623: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️☆☆ (8/10) ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Tbh, I wasn’t expecting much from [i]The Vampire Regent,[/i] but I am quite pleasantly surprised! I actually like it almost as much as I did [i]Vampire: The Masquerade — Night Road[/i]. Which segues nicely into my next point, actually. To get the obvious out of the way: [i]Vampire Regent [/i]is basically "We have World of Darkness (“WoD”) at home." And I mean that as a compliment. It’ll feel familiar to fans of WoD, as it’s one of the most gritty worlds I’ve read, and it shares many similarities to WoD in respect to lore and description. Still, the authors were able to put their own creative spin on vampiric lore, plot, and choices. It actually reminds me of William Loman’s[i] A Kiss from Death[/i], in which more experimental mechanics ask for the reader’s trust and belief. Sadly, [i]Vampire Regent[/i] also shares [i]A Kiss from Death’s[/i] weakness of not being character-focused enough, and the writing being a tad on the drier side. Still, this is an underrated gem of a game! [b]As always, thank you to the staff for the free copy![/b] [b][h2]Pros:[/h2][/b] ✅ [b]Concept.[/b] For once, …

The writing was only okay, which was surprising considering that Zaper’s War for the West was so well written (maybe it’s Newberry’s contribution I didn’t like?). Some of the dialogue came across as immature. There were also far more grammatical mistakes than I usually see in these games. The story was okay; it was nice playing as a powerful elder vampire prince (or regent as this game calls it) rather than a younger vampire being ordered around like in other games. However, all the twists were predictable and story lacked originality. The game’s format was a lot like War for the West, where each day you either improve a skill or hold court, which results in a random event. Some of these can be quite interesting, but it does create the issue that it feels like you should just be focusing on improving your skills instead of getting the court events. Also like War for the West, the game only has three skills (in this case, physique, perception, & manipulation), which doesn’t feel like enough to have unique character, especially in a second playthrough. At least there are four vampire bloodlines (clans) to choose from, which each have a unique ability. The game does tell you when a s…

Excellent text-based gritty vampire novel before Hosted Games went full woke and set themselves on tainting subsequent releases with token manner that is distasteful. The game takes place in just around a month more or less and you're thrown into various intrigues that eventually cluminate in some brilliant plot twists. Another thing that sticks out in a positive light is the fact that you as the vampire leader of the city and start on top - the struggle lies instead in staying both there and alive. That kind of twist is unusual but very well executed with testing your own loyalties and those of your underlings to you. The most negative aspect is that the save system is fundamentally broken and with the game being abandoned it will never be fixed. As luck would have it that just affects the multiple saveslots, in other words you can still keep and complete your current game ongoing through PC reboots and whatnot without losing progress. The game also features a randomness to the events/scenes you get as you pick a location to spend your timeslot, meaning the save slot feature would be handy. All the more so since some of these events are disjointed in terms of time and choices, …

Do NOT trust the save states, I've never had them work in the years I've had this. A lot of funny and interesting scenarios, but can also get very redundant quickly. If you wanna play as a "good guy", play a different game

Great, fun story. I come back to this one from time to time to replay it.

A fantastic story where it does actually seem that your choices matter. Well suited to multiple playthroughs.