There is a persistent lie at the heart of vampire fiction, and Blood of Dawnwalker repeats it with a straight face. The lie goes something like this: being a vampire is a curse, a burden, a tragedy. And yet, in almost every game, film, or series that sells you this idea, the vampires in question have marble physiques, supernatural powers, and the luxury of watching centuries roll by while the rest of us worry about mortgage rates.
Blood of Dawnwalker, the upcoming RPG published by Bandai Namco, does not stray far from this tradition. Early in the game, protagonist Coen is turned into a vampire and spends several dialogue sequences making his displeasure very clear. He carps. He moans. He radiates reluctant-hero energy in every cutscene. Then you open the skills menu.
Coen Can Teleport. Coen Can Walk Up Walls. Coen Is Fine.
Spend a few moments browsing the ability preview clips and the suffering starts to feel a bit overstated. Coen can teleport. He can walk up walls. With enough unlock points, he can slow time and make enemies boil from the inside. This is not the lifestyle of a man who should be complaining.
To complicate the fantasy further, Coen is not even a full vampire. He occupies a hybrid state, which means he avoids one of the most iconic vampire drawbacks entirely – death by sunlight. During the day he walks around like any ordinary person, no grotesque fingernails, no desperate scramble for shadow. He is, in effect, a vampire with most of the benefits and few of the penalties.
There is one mechanical consequence worth noting. Coen has to keep a separate vampire health bar filled with blood to avoid losing control during conversations. It is a gesture toward the idea that vampirism costs something. But in the opening hours, that cost feels light compared to the abilities being handed to you.
The Ludonarrative Problem With Vampire Games
This is not a new problem. Games about vampires have long kept the narrative suffering and the mechanical empowerment in separate rooms. The story tells you that vampirism is horrible. The gameplay tells you that you can now throw knights into walls at speed. Players are expected to hold both ideas at once and feel the appropriate amount of conflicted.
It rarely works. The moment you start browsing skill trees and watching preview clips of your new supernatural toolkit, the protagonist’s anguish becomes background noise. You are not suffering with Coen. You are theorycrafting his build.
What would actually land, and what vampire games have been reluctant to fully commit to, is a design where the mechanics and the fiction are pulling in the same direction. Where the game does not just tell you that vampirism is dangerous and isolating, but makes you feel it through systems that push back hard.
What a True Vampire Survival Sim Could Look Like
Imagine a vampire game built around genuine scarcity and disadvantage. Not a power fantasy with a guilt mechanic bolted on, but something closer to a survival sim where your condition is a persistent liability as much as it is an asset.
Vampire folklore from cultures around the world gives designers an enormous toolkit of weaknesses to work with. Garlic, crucifixes, silver, running water, holy water, scripture, church bells, uninvited thresholds – the list is long. There are even regional traditions that name specific plants as deterrents. Juniper berries, according to multiple folklore sources, are dangerous to vampires. Walking through any dense woodland would become a minefield rather than a stroll.
A game that took all of these seriously – not as occasional puzzle elements but as constant environmental pressures – would produce something genuinely different. You would not be an apex predator moving through a medieval sandbox. You would be a creature living on the edges of a society that has accumulated centuries of folk knowledge specifically designed to stop you.
Combat would need to reflect this. Yes, you might be able to overpower a lone villager in the right conditions. But a torch-wielding mob armed with the right herbs and a priest at the back? That should be a situation you flee, not fight through. The game would need to reward evasion, misdirection, and patience over direct confrontation.
Power Should Be Earned Through Survival, Not Handed Over
None of this means a vampire survival sim could not eventually deliver a feeling of power. It just means that power should arrive slowly, built from hard-won knowledge of the world’s systems and genuine effort rather than unlocked through a menu after an hour of play.
If you want a keep on a mountainside or influence spreading through a town’s underground, you should have to work for it through years of careful navigation, not through a moderate number of ability points distributed after a skill tutorial. The slow accumulation of real control, after starting from a position of genuine vulnerability, would make that payoff mean something.
Blood of Dawnwalker may deepen its mechanical stakes as it goes on – the review from Rock Paper Shotgun suggests there is more to discover beyond the opening act. But even if it does, the early hours have made one thing clear: there is a version of the vampire game that nobody has fully made yet, and it would look a lot less like a superhero origin story and a lot more like a desperate, systemic crawl toward survival.
Coen’s teleportation is fun. But a vampire genuinely terrified of juniper berries and a lit torch, trying to outlast a suspicious village through cunning rather than claws? That is the game worth making.