The Blood of Dawnwalker review: Protect ya neck

Old DNA and new approaches combine to make a very interesting entry into the crowded RPG space.

The Blood of Dawnwalker from Rebel Wolves is a game with a storied lineage. Despite being the first game in what I assume is a planned series, it is the creative offspring of Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, director of The Witcher 3 and head of production for Cyberpunk 2077. Several members of developer Rebel Wolves were also on The Witcher 3 team, with others coming from companies such as Capcom, Rockstar, Techland, and Riot Games.

That’s a lot of high-level experience, and you would hope that the resultant game does something new and interesting, becoming more than a simple copy of what has come before. The good news is that The Blood of Dawnwalker does just that, introducing a simple element that breeds consequence and tension in almost every decision.

This mortal coil

In The Blood of Dawnwalker, you play as Coen. A simple and humble man, you watch your entire world fall apart after a seemingly endless string of misfortunes brings you, your family, and your entire village to the brink of annihilation. 

The town and the entire surrounding countryside have been under the thrall of Brencis, a vicious vampire, and his court. Things are wrapped in a veneer of enlightenment, as blood is to be offered, not taken, but when the offering is mandatory, and the cost of it can still be death, then what’s the difference?

After running afoul of the Court in an attempt to overthrow their rule, Coen is left as the very thing he hated, becoming a vampire himself. Most of the town is dead, his family is missing, and he has little left to strive for but a bloody path of vengeance. 

There is some further mystery at play, however. Instead of burning to a crisp when the sun rises, Coen reverts to human form. Trapped between both worlds, hating the violence and blood that tempts him, Coen must navigate his new reality and decide if he is truly willing to do everything it takes to get revenge on Brencis, or if he wishes to risk maintaining as much of his humanity as he can.

Freedom to fail

One of the most interesting things about The Blood of Dawnwaler is a largely open narrative structure. The aim of the game is to learn as much as you can about the world, level up, get more skills, then go and fight Brenics. Where it gets fun is that there is a ticking clock egging you on. You have thirty days to formulate your plan and get strong enough before your family becomes food for the vampires. 

Many quests and activities in the game will have time costs, and even learning skills and abilities can take time. As you spend this time, you tick closer and closer to the moment of truth, and deciding what you want to do, and when, becomes a vital part of the gameplay loop. 

Layered over this is the fact that some activities can only be performed during the day, while others must wait for the cover of night. Do you want to commune with a corpse to find out a secret thought lost to the living? You’ll need to wait till sunrise. Feel like battling a terrible monster that has been tormenting a town? Then you’ll need to come back at nighttime. 

There are central narrative missions to follow, but much of the game exists in a state where you need to actively pursue the content. This can feel odd at first, but you soon learn to keep out of regions you are not yet powerful enough to survive. Curious about a certain hill, valley, or section of forest? You might as well walk over there and see what is happening. I wouldn’t say that the world is overly filled with activities, but the density does feel more like a living world, and less like a dopamine-driven amusement park for you to vamp out in, which is good.

Reap what you sow

There is an endless slew of choices to make in The Blood of Dawnwalker, and they can have small to massive consequences. Will you free a prisoner accused of being a spy, or will you let him go? Will you allow a friend to carry out a dangerous ritual due to her own guilt, or ensure she can’t do it by destroying vital knowledge? There always seems to be a choice to make, sometimes in the most simple ways you interact with people, and it nearly always seems to have some kind of long-term impact on your character, the world, or the people in it. 

It’s legitimately tough to play the game as a morally upstanding hero, and the temptation to dip into a little bit of neck-chomping is high. The game doesn’t protect you from that either. When you are in vampire form, normal, innocent townspeople are just wandering around like kegs on legs, brimming with pints of beautiful blood for you to guzzle. The temptation to exercise your power as a vampire is real, and it’s easy to think of yourself as the wronged part in a world that played along with the brutalization of your family.

Each choice you make will end up playing out somewhere down the line, and it won’t always be in the way you think. 

Immortal combat

Combat is probably the most fun and infuriating aspect of The Blood of Dawnwalker. You have access to three skill trees and their associated abilities. Witchcraft is used in the day, giving you access to powerful blood magic that can burn foes from the inside or drain their life force into you. Vampirism is the foundation of your night, allowing you access to quick claw attacks and powerful ambushes. Swordmastery crosses both: empowering your swordmanship with passive skills, active attacks, and abilities like literal pocket sand, allowing you to invest in something that will always be there for you, no matter when you are fighting.

The root of the combat system is built around directional attacks and blocks. Match your defense to the offense, and mix up your own attacks to survive the tense combat. Numbers rapidly turn into a problem, as offscreen enemies will launch brutal attacks that you have to be ready to react to. This is mostly fine, but there were some instances where so many enemies piled in that there was nothing I could do for one simple reason.

Terrain and object clipping can be a bit of a nightmare. Get yourself stuck near a rope, or a campfire, or a box of supplies, and you might have a hard time getting back out. Teleporting enemies can end up in spots you might have great difficulty reaching, because the jump animation is, frankly, diabolical.

The multi-directional attack-and-defense combat is brilliant fun and really shines thanks to an excellent contextual dismemberment system, but it is badly let down by the player movement. The good news is that you should learn to compensate for this pretty early, and it gets less annoying once you know what to look for and how to keep yourself safe.

Coen doesn’t move through the world with much grace, which is a huge shame for a man dealing with a recent bout of vampirism. Even outside of combat, getting up hills or through ravines can feel like a bit of a chore rather than joyous exploration.

It can take a little while to get access to abilities, but they do feel powerful, fun to use, and offer a genuinely different feel to combat. During the day, caution is key, but in vampire form you can be a bit more reckless, as a bit of a neck is all it takes to get back some missing health.

Strong foundations

All the ingredients that make up a solid game are present in The Blood of Dawnwalker, but sometimes the game will groan just a little beneath the weight of its own ambition. If you miss dialogue options, reactions and character moods can be a little confusing, as you might be missing important context. That said, quest design is often rooted in an emotional core that adds genuine heart, making the world easy to invest in.

The voice acting is, by and large, excellent, with occasional moments of stilted hamminess doing little to dent the fantastic performances of the rest of the cast. The score is tremendous, adding true tension and terror to the darkest moments in the game, yet offering suitable calm and grounding soundscapes when wandering through a nice forest. 

Performance was solid running Ultra settings on my AMD Ryzen 7 5800X and 4070Ti with 32GB of RAM, but frankly it would want to be with those specs. Exploring lower graphics options didn’t mean the visuals fell apart, however. That is, perhaps, the really interesting place games are in right now, where higher-end visuals seem to come with vastly increased requirements, but not as much visual difference between them as you might expect. 

The Blood of Dawnwalker is an ambitious project that occasionally wears both the best and worst aspects of its inspirations on its sleeve. Where it shines is in allowing players to make their own choices and learn from their own mistakes. It’s incredible fun to play in a world where the clock is ever-ticking, and the results of our actions and words have real consequences not just for us but for those around us.

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Review for
The Blood of Dawnwalker
9
Pros

• The time and choice systems build genuine uncertainty and tension.
• Combat is fun and rewarding, and the directional system shines.
• The voice acting is great, helping us to invest in the characters' stories.
• The soundtrack is wonderful.

Cons

• The movement system lets down the combat a little.
• Great weapon variety would have been an interesting option.
• A bit of a loot pinata at times, making it hard to discern what really matters.