Rebel Wolves, the studio founded by The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, is releasing its first game next year. Developed by a team of CD Projekt alumni, the open-world action RPG The Blood of the Dawnwalker has a lot of similarities to The Witcher, from its dark but highly detailed vision of medieval Europe to its no-longer-human protagonist, who must use a combination of swordplay and magic to fight horrifying creatures.
The Blood of the Dawnwalker imagines if Vrakhiri (Rebel Wolves’ made-up word for vampires) seized the opportunity presented by the Black Death, offering desperate people a cure for the disease in exchange for their blood. You control Coen, a Dawnwalker who navigates the world as a man by day and a vampire by night.
Your experience navigating the game’s dark version of 14th-century Europe can vary widely based on how you choose to spend your days and nights. I got a glimpse of the way the story can diverge through a closed-door, hands-off presentation hosted in a faux cathedral on the Gamescom showfloor. As the demo begins, Coen has just 22 days to save his family. His quest led him to seek a powerful weapon wielded by the warrior Saint Mihai in the Svartrau Cathedral.
By night, Coen can use his vampiric powers to walk on walls and bypass the cathedral’s guards. Creeping in, he sees an old vampire leading a service along with a fresco depicting Mihai’s legendary silver sword. Coen seeks more information from the Cathedral’s library, growing claws to swiftly deal with some guards.
The combat system allows you to slow down the action to figure out your next move, heal during combat, and assign your favorite items quick slots. It’s a hybrid of action RPG and turn-based combat Rebel Wolves dubs “adaptive flow” — think a blended system similar to Final Fantasy 7 Remake — that lets you opt to have Coen automatically block and attack or take full control of his movements for more precision. The game will have adjustable difficulty levels ranging from story mode to hardcore, depending on how much you want to focus on perfect parries and how much you just want to wander around looking at the gorgeous art while investigating gothic mysteries.
After dispatching the guards, Coen bypasses the library’s locked door by using his shadow step ability to get in through the window. There, he reads a beautiful illuminated manuscript with information on Mihai’s crypt, stealing a key so he can return during the daytime when he won’t have access to his vampiric powers. The game also flashes a notice that time has passed. You’re not on a timer when exploring or fighting, but you burn hours off your clock by completing certain objectives.
A second group of guards lets Coen show off his super speed as he cuts them down with a sword, lopping off limbs. The fighting can be a bit chaotic, so you can adjust the camera to make it a bit further away from your character if you prefer a wider view. Coen’s now clear to search a series of five tombs for Mihai’s crypt. Exploring underground by the light of a torch, he hears frantic rapping from behind a wall, but we’ll get the payoff for that on the day side.
Normally Coen would have to choose to search for Mihai’s sword by either day or night, but the presentation used a separate save game to show the alternate path. By day, Svartrau is bustling with pilgrims eager to visit its cathedral. Aside from the supernatural elements, Rebel Wolves worked to create a faithful version of a 14th-century European city, replicating its architecture and districts. The place feels alive, with people chatting, repairing wagons, and just cleaning the steps in front of their homes. The cathedral is guarded at night, but by day you can just walk in and watch a baptism performed in blood. The vampires have twisted the beliefs of the people here to their own purposes as a way to control the population.
Coen seeks out the harried deacon of the cathedral and asks about the catacombs where he believes Mihai is buried. The deacon claims to have no knowledge of them, but offers Coen a chance to check out the libraries if he’ll track down the church’s missing caretaker, Radu, who often hangs out at the city’s asylum. This turns into a pretty grisly detour, as an asylum resident reveals that the building has a secret area where plague victims were sealed up to die. Investigating that space uncovers some very old corpses – and one fresh one.
It turns out Radu was into some very shady activity and got himself turned into a mindless monster with some vampiric powers. Coen has necromantic powers he can only use while in human form and he can speak to the fresh corpse, offering it some items found around the area to get extra information. It’s a deeply creepy effect, with the corpse bleeding from his eyes and moving jerkily as he explains his fate before Coen allows him to rest again.
Reporting what happened to the deacon gets you back to the same place: reading the book, finding the symbol of Mihai, going into the tomb, and then discovering that the rapping behind the wall is Mihai himself. He was betrayed by another saint and driven mad in his eternal imprisonment, attacking you on sight. He’s a ghastly figure, a walking corpse that comes at you with a sword and shadowsteps away from your attacks in a way that’s distressingly similar to the way Coen himself fights.
As Mihai reveals with his dying breaths, there’s a good reason for that similarity. He is also a Dawnwalker who was doomed to starve every day and then come back to life as a vampire each night. The sword he’s wielding is not the one you seek: that’s been broken and you’ll need to reforge it and seek out augurs who can explain more about your shared condition and protect you from a growing evil.
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Reforging a blade to claim your legacy isn’t an especially original concept, but Blood of the Dawnwalker’s approach to storytelling that Coen’s duality presents is intriguing. The presentation showed a depth of detail in its visuals and narrative that promises to bring something fresh to vampire fiction and I look forward to sinking my teeth in when Blood of the Dawnwalker releases next year.
