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World of Darkness Preludes: Vampire and Mage on steam, ios and google play store

Ok so thanks to @abadbadman (whom I can’t tag for some reason… thanks again so much <3) I’ve been able to play the VtM/Mage preludes. So far I’ve only poked at the vampire one, so this is a spoiler free, mid game review of the vtm interactive mobile-based game.

I have liveblogged it and with the tag “secrets liveblogs” you can avoid spoilers. I try and put the most heavy stuff under “readmore” but sometimes….

Edit: What kind of game is it?

It’s a choose your own adventure text-based game. You’re texting your contacts and have, sometimes, options to “fill in the blanks”.. So you have “some” leverage to how you “did” things as you tell them to your contacts (”and this is how I’m here in the gutter dying but I wanted to say goodbye” was pretty stupid imo XD). So your game system is just your mouse (or your finger if phone) to choose the options. No QTE, no skill involved. There’s no stats, you don’t know what you’re good at, or bad at, and you don’t really choose who you text or what you choose to not tell them. You cannot rewind, but you can restart any chapter.

So far… This is what I felt and co.

There’s no character creation, you don’t choose anything but the character’s choices, so if you’d like to customize your character, not gonna happen. Your name is Case and you’re fucked. (also everyone has such a whiteboi name, it’s insane, I mean, there’s no diversity so far…)

The writing is fairly well done (I was very wary, but it does look like text exchanges, both in stress or in non stress situations). I just fucking loathe all of the “artsy” references and other ramblings/rantings that are just plain jerking off of drug youth vocab just cuz. They’re just too long personal conversations of shits, it’s just… junkie talk.

The story itself is intriguing and well brought, but it’s very confusing and gives you little to no agency as a player. You don’t know how strong (or weak) you are. I really didn’t dig the whole “hey I dreamt this, oh it’s exactly where I was, lol” prophecy background. 

The characters have agendas, motives and are really different. That’s good. But everyone’s a snowflake and I hate that. I also fucking hate the “unknown someone sending you texts with riddles/clues” trope. Just blacklist the number if they’re really annoying.

The art is terrible. It’s all over the place, I would rather have nice portraits of the different characters instead of this modern art shit. It’s just not useful nor helpful not gives anything about the ambiance. To me it’s wasted resources that could have gone into a better game system.

Dead-ends. There are so many of them. Not that it’s a bad thing in itself, but it’s too directive once you’ve made a few choices, you’re just stuck… Ok, there are a few meaningful different choices and paths that you can take and that have non-dead-end outcomes (at least as a base), but there was more than one instance that I had to redo an entire thing “in the right order” just to avoid all the death traps. I even got stuck last time at “retry” and there were just no options given. I kept having that one same choice and died. So I will have to restart the whole chapter. It’s very frustrating because the world is harsh and unforgiving, but that, I concede, is a good thing. I just wish I had more knowledge of my character, or at least some sort of stats to work with (that fucking monkey ffs).

Length. I have no complains in terms of time vs money, honestly, it’s fairly long and offers replayability, but I’m used to short princess maker visual/text novels, and tbh this game should be shorter. Why? Because in princess makers and all those text novels, the interest of the game is blast through the story exploring all possible outcomes and different marginal choices to unlock all badges/rewards/different endings and other little details to see exactly how these little changes affect the story as a whole.

Lore. Ok to me this was weird and hard. First, my character seems to still engage in sexual activities for some reason, AND for some other reason, can die of hunger and mundane injuries. There’s no frenzy (at least not where I reached). That… was odd. Like, I seriously died because I couldn’t feed.

Humor. It’s dark humor, there’s a few laughs to be had and I found that good, well brought, all my thumbs up, but it was often ruined by the god damn rambles about how things felt and how many actions are just plain illogical (telling some people plain weird stuff and so many people having no basic self preservation instincts… like seriously).

Things you gotta know. Ok you need to know lots about drugs to actually get what the characters are feeling. Like seriously, all the comparisons, all the time, I just blacked out because they’re that much into “is this what kids are doing these days?” aspect. I just feel no attachment to the characters because of this, they’re just way out of the moon with all the drugs and stuff. Where’s the predator, the lucidity, the transcendence.. The society so far is non existent. That’s good because you know, you discover those nasty things afterwards, but starting a game with a rogue embrace and no basic crash course is something I don’t think is a good idea for a prelude. (Unless you’re Gangrel :p)

So a werewolf game is being in production, and more info will be told on my birthday (feb 1st).. And it’s being developed in Paris?