Love at second bite

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I didn’t immediately like The Blood of Dawnwalker. In fact, during the first few hours, I spent a fair amount of time wondering why someone had taken perfectly good action RPG controls and decided they needed to be rearranged. Then I got used to it.

Not just tolerated it, either. Somewhere between getting murdered, learning how to parry properly, and eventually understanding what the game wanted me to do, the combat started becoming fun. Then the quests got interesting, the vampire powers opened up, and suddenly I was looking at the clock, wondering where my evening had gone. 

The game comes from Rebel Wolves, a studio containing several former CD Projekt Red developers, and you can immediately see some of that Witcher DNA running through it. Thankfully, it isn’t The Witcher 3 with vampires pasted on top.

You play Coen, a young man living in the fictional Vale Sangora during the 14th century. Vampires led by Brencis have taken over the valley, and after things go spectacularly wrong for Coen and his family, he becomes something called a Dawnwalker. This means Coen is human during the day and vampire at night. Convenient if you have always wanted both witchcraft and bloodsucking on the same CV.

You have 30 days to save your family, but this isn’t some annoying Majora’s Mask-style clock constantly counting down while you desperately search for the toilet. Time moves forward when you complete significant activities. Exploration itself doesn’t necessarily punish you, but choosing to finish one quest means spending time that could have gone somewhere else. This is probably the game’s cleverest idea.

Modern open-world RPGs have trained us to hoover up every icon on a map. Dawnwalker actively tells you that you probably aren’t going to see everything in one playthrough. At first, that gave me anxiety. What if I miss a weapon? What if this random peasant has the greatest side quest ever written? Eventually, I stopped worrying about it.

Instead, I started choosing quests because they sounded interesting or because I liked the characters involved. The result is an RPG that feels oddly personal because your version of Coen’s journey will depend heavily on what you decided was worth his limited time.

Day and night also significantly change the way you play. Human Coen has weapons and witchcraft. Vampire Coen is much faster, can use more supernatural abilities, and can feed to restore health. Moving around at night also feels different because your vampire abilities let you traverse areas that would require a more conventional route during the day. The transformation isn’t just cosmetic, and I found myself considering whether certain quests might be easier or simply more entertaining depending on when I attempted them.

Then there is the combat.

On the PS5, this took me a while to understand because Dawnwalker uses directional attacks and blocks. You point the left stick in a direction and combine that input with the shoulder buttons to attack or defend from that side. Initially, it feels weird.

Years of muscle memory from action games kept telling my fingers to do one thing while Dawnwalker was demanding something completely different. There were fights where I felt like I was operating construction equipment rather than swinging a sword. The game also expects you to parry. Properly.

Once the system clicked, however, I actually started liking it. Getting the timing right, blocking an attack, and immediately responding with a counter is extremely satisfying. 

The writing is excellent, especially when it comes to smaller characters. People have their own motivations and aren’t simply waiting around for Coen to solve their problems. There are also plenty of moments where the game makes you choose between several unpleasant options rather than clearly marking one response GOOD PERSON and another response CARTOON VILLAIN.

Technically, my experience changed considerably during the review period. Before the day-one patch, I ran into several issues on PS5, and performance wasn’t always as smooth as I would have liked. The launch patch adds a Performance mode targeting 60fps, and after installing it, a lot of the problems I had been dealing with during the review were either fixed or substantially improved.

There are still rough edges. Some animations could be better, enemy encounters can become repetitive, and the combat system takes longer than it should to become comfortable. The game also carries enough Witcher DNA that comparisons are unavoidable. However, Rebel Wolves has done enough differently for Dawnwalker to have an identity of its own. More importantly, I wanted to keep playing.

That is ultimately my test for an RPG. Not whether I completed every quest, found every sword, or murdered every unfortunate creature wandering around the forest, but whether I wanted to go back once I put the controller down. With The Blood of Dawnwalker, I did.

It wasn’t love at first bite. The strange combat controls nearly put me off, and the early technical issues didn’t exactly help. But once everything clicked, I found a fantastic, beautifully dark RPG with excellent writing, meaningful choices, and enough interesting ideas to separate it from the games that clearly inspired it. Give Dawnwalker some time. Just don’t give it all 30 days.

The Blood of Dawnwalker
Rating: 4.5/5
Price: R3,999
Developer: Rebel Wolves 
Publisher: Bandai Namco Entertainment 
Platform: PS5, XBS, PC

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