Building Berlin by Night. How Oaths and Ashes is redefining the Vampire: The Masquerade visual novel
· PCGamesNLauren Bergin News Editor
Lauren spends most of her time dead in League of Legends, or equally as dead in Valorant. Don't ask her about Vampire: The Masquerade.
Published: August 5, 2026
In Berlin, subversion is art. Counterculture is mainstream, undercurrents are seedy, and bullets remain embedded in the Victory Column. Yet there's a level of elegance: Neo-Classical architecture, museums a plenty - a sense of class, mixed with an electric sense of rebellion. There's no other city quite like it; there never has been. It's in this world that Vampire: The Masquerade - Oaths and Ashes takes place; a world that we've encountered before back in White Wolf's 1995 sourcebook, Berlin by Night, this time reimagined for the modern day. World War II is firmly in the history books, and the Wall has very much fallen, but the vampiric feuding of the Camarilla and the Anarchs never truly ends.
We're playing as Alice, a two-hundred-year-old Camarilla Ventrue that's resolute in her devotion to the Ivory Tower. But we also play as Lenz, who Revive the Spark CEO Dawid Ciślak tells me is Alice's "counterweight." He's a Duskborn, or Thin-blood - a vampire whose lineage is so diluted that they don't have the full suite of abilities that full-blood Kindred do. He's rugged, ragged, and brews weird alchemy as a hobby. He is, for all intents and purposes, everything that Alice hates.
How their stories intersect remains a mystery at the moment - during my playthrough of Oaths and Ashes' Steam Next Fest demo, I only masqueraded as Alice, and had just arrived in Berlin as the preview came to a close. We've seen VTM visual novels do dual-character narratives before - Draw Distance's Reckoning of New York is perhaps the most recent example. But what excites me about Oaths and Ashes is that it feels like it's taking Draw Distance's format to the next level - your actions shape the political structure of the city, and you can brew Lenz's aforementioned liquid oddities in a potion-making minigame. "We wanted to take the genre a step forward," Ciślak tells me: I believe Oaths and Ashes can do that.
A major part of Oaths and Ashes' appeal, however, is that Berlin setting. We've seen myriad chronicles in Los Angeles and New York, then Bloodlines 2 took us to Seattle, but we've not seen a European chronicle in a long time. I ask Ciślak why Revive the Spark chose Berlin: he says that the Stateside settings are "wonderful," but that they've "been the default backdrop for this world for a long time."
"We wanted somewhere the series hadn't already leaned on so heavily," he says. "Berlin was almost the only setting that made sense to us. It's a city that has died and been reborn more than once. Flattened in the war, cut in half, walled off for decades, then stitched back together almost overnight. That history is right there in the streets, in the mismatched architecture, in the way whole districts still carry the seams. For a game about the undead, about people who refuse to stay buried and identities that keep getting overwritten, it's hard to imagine a better home.
"The [thing] that clinched it, though, is that Berlin's own history is already shaped like the story we're telling," he continues. "For most of the last century it was contested ground, fought over and split between rival powers, each one claiming its own piece of the city. That is close to how Vampire itself works, with rival factions forever carving a city up between them and fighting over every block, and much of Oaths and Ashes runs on exactly that struggle."
The city's duality is echoed in Alice and Lenz; the Ventrue and the Thinblood - Vannevar Thomas would lose his mind (again). Alice is ancient, polished, and seasoned; Lenz is counterculture, grit, and grime. They're the primary reasons Ciślak feels that Oaths and Ashes stands apart from what's come before.
Alice, as Camarilla in an Anarch world, is "the representative of an order that barely holds any ground. Everything that gave her power and standing - her rank, her protocol, the weight of the Tower behind her name - means almost nothing on these streets. Nobody in Berlin wrote the rules with someone like her in mind, and that collision is the heart of the game."
Lenz, then, is her "counterweight. A Berliner, born and raised, for whom the city is home rather than an assignment. He's a Duskborn, a Thin-blood, and they rarely get to be more than side characters. Thin-blood alchemy, which [VTM] V5 introduced and which we think is one of its most interesting additions, almost never gets real screen time either, so we built a whole playable perspective around it." Alice and Lenz are two rogue planets in each other's orbit: "two protagonists at opposite ends of the same city, running on different systems, close to two separate games in one.
"We know this space well," he says. "We've played the Vampire games that came before us, we have a clear sense of what they got right and where players wished for more, and the aim was to build on that. There are also a couple of things we're planning that I can't get into yet, and having the White Wolf team behind us helps a lot, both with reach and with getting the World of Darkness right. "
The idea of "getting the World of Darkness right," however, is an interesting concept. Taking Alexander Ward's Project Nightmares live play as an example, it's clear that, for some, core TTRPG rules are set in stone, while for others, they're made to be broken. How do you translate staple tabletop systems into videogame form in a way that still makes things fun, but doesn't undermine the integrity of the universe? I ask Ciślak, who says that Revive The Spark's focus was more on making the story and setting feel correct, versus ensuring every minor rule is adhered to.
"For us, the essence of Vampire was never a particular rules set or a specific way of rolling dice. It's a very specific feeling: the predator inside you that you're always managing, the fact that every meal has a cost, and the slow erosion of the person you used to be as the centuries wear on. If a player finishes our game having felt those things, we've been faithful, whatever shape the systems underneath take."
Using Alice's range of Disciplines (or 'abilities') as an example, he notes that you trigger them on a whim, but that "every time she uses them her Hunger rises, and if it fills up, the Beast takes over at the worst possible moment and does something monstrous. The player is constantly making a very Vampire kind of decision: take the powerful, safe-feeling option now and risk losing yourself later. There's rarely a clean choice, only which price you're willing to pay. That, to me, is more faithful to the tabletop than any amount of accurate stat blocks would be."
He highlights, however, that "the lore itself we treat as untouchable." He, of course, mentions the game's staple Masquerade mechanic, but also that "the tabletop has always had domains and turf, with Kindred fighting over who controls which part of a city, and we've built that into an active layer where you take Berlin over district by district. Neither is a straight port of a pen-and-paper rule, but both serve the same core fantasy."
The player can never "forget what they are," Ciślak says. "The line, for me, is the moment a change starts to make you feel like a superhero rather than a damned thing negotiating with its own monster. The moment power stops costing anything, it stops feeling like Vampire. So we're willing to redesign a system, cut a mechanic, or invent a new one, provided the cost is still there."
We've already seen part of the demo, but Ciślak promises a script that's "hundreds of thousands of words" long and "mechanics with weight." He also stresses that, despite online allegations of AI use, "every line is written by hand. A player wrote, more or less: 'I read the whole thing and didn't feel any AI, then I went looking for the AI bits, and sure enough, there they were.'
"That tells you a lot about the current climate," he laments. "It's funny and sad at the same time. If someone sets out to find AI in a game with this much text, they'll persuade themselves they've found it whether it's there or not."
Revive the Spark has penciled in a 2026 release date for Vampire: The Masquerade - Oaths and Ashes, although the specifics remain unclear at the moment. You can wishlist it here.
Oaths and Ashes joins an increasing lineup of World of Darkness games, including Hunter: The Reckoning - Deathwish, Werewolf: The Apocalypse: Rageborn, and Vampire: The Masquerade - Eternal Whispers.