Vampire The Masquerade: Swansong Review - Playing Politics

thegamer.com:

At first glance, I’m enchanted by the neoclassical designs, art-deco lighting, and glistening surfaces of the pristine apartments in Vampire the Masquerade: Swansong. Against the backdrop of the nightscapes, they always look astonishingly immaculate and lush; you’ll find barely any speck of grime or dust on them. But these abodes of the super rich are occassionally punctured by the sight of wrecked furniture, pools of blood, and disembodied cadavers—all the unkempt aftermath of a gruesome murder. Even these scenes seemed deliberately placed, as if part of a perverse decor that the ultra-rich use to outfit their ornate spaces. After all, every broken limb, collapsed shelf, and discarded document serves a purpose: they’re simply information used to manoeuvre around the torrid web of Swansong’s most elite circles.

It is perhaps no surprise that occupying the highest echelon of these elite circles are the mythical vampires, with individuals flitting around from one high-society gathering to the next in endless cycles of power struggles. Swansong is set in the pen-and-paper universe of the World of Darkness, a gothic interpretation of the real world in which vampires quietly live among humans, with the cornerstone of their clandestine societies built upon the Masquerade, a law that hides the existence of vampires and the undead from humans. As with previous games in the series, you’ll continue the tradition of upholding the Masquerade, but this time as three playable vampires—Emem, Galeb, and Leysha—in Swansong, as they navigate the conspiracies that threaten the very existence of their vampiric sect.

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