Finally, a good vampire video game to sink your teeth into

digitaltrends.com:

Table of Contents A night on the town Working up an appetite Bloody good

You would think with so many vampires in video games that we’d have more actual good vampire video games. Yet despite everything from Castlevania to The Sims 4 including blood suckers in some form or another, most games miss the point of what has made vampires so compelling. They lack bite.

That is, the biting commentary vampires excel at as vessels of our larger societal fears during any given moment in time. There are — at best — two vampire video games that successfully pull this off: 2004’s Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines and 2018’s Vampyr. With the release of narrative RPG Cabernet, that number goes up to three.

A night on the town

Vampires are social monsters. The terror they inflict comes from their ability to look like us and glide through regular society while carefully picking off prey to feed upon. While they have different powers depending on the story, mostly vampires use charm as their weapon of choice. This is the core idea behind Cabernet. Much like 2022’s Pentiment, this is largely a game about talking to people and building relationships. The caveat is that those relationships likely always come with a price.

Cabernet begins with the funeral of Liza, who will soon wake up as a newly turned vampire. During her eulogy I’m given the option to choose what kind of life she lived, which grants stats like Science, Arts, History, and more. These will come in handy once I set out into the game’s 19th century Eastern European town filled with residents, both living and undead. As a vampire Liza needs an invitation to enter certain buildings as well as a reliable source of blood. Building relationships is often a means to an end. As any good vampire, I deftly navigate conversations with the town locals to ingratiate myself to them which then broadens my options in any given evening.

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