Everyone you converse with has their own stat sheets, and are able to boost theirs in retaliation, so even if the game says you have a 100% success rate on an action you can never be sure. Most actions consume willpower, but if you find your skills just a bit lacking in conversation you can spend even more to boost your numbers for that check. Of course, all that power doesn’t come from nowhere – it comes from the willpower and hunger meters in the top left of the screen. Sure the glitches are frustrating to a fault, but there’s not a whole lot of games that make creative problem solving this engaging and satisfying. You may miss out on finding the Hacker leader by not investing in Hacking, but a decent lockpicking skill may just allow you to find some information to blackmail another character into helping you. While I do think there are one or two too many skills, especially dealing with dialogue, putting points into anything is always beneficial. The game walks a tightrope with overall open ended levels with some routes leading to dead stops, but it manages to do some cartwheels and backflips along the way because there’s no wrong way to build a character. If there’s no other way through with other skills like lockpicking or utilizing powers such as Dominate, you can’t complete that objective. If you can’t convince a character to tell you their secret or simply leave a room, that’s it. The mission of course gets more complicated as you progress and find out what’s going on, but everything save for your main objective is completely optional.Īs you play and discover more and more complications, you may only be able to resolve some with specific character builds. To do this, you can use vampire vision to see hidden objects, turn invisible to get into areas you’re not supposed to, and even take on the appearance of another person for a bit more authority. In Leysha’s first level, you’re asked to remove any evidence and rescue survivors from the mass murder scene all while it’s being investigated by both the cops and the feds at the same time. You’re usually given a seemingly simple objective, then let loose to accomplish it however you see fit. I was having an absolute blast once I got into a proper level. I was very worried this would end up like another Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood, and yet… Lip-synching appears to be completely automated and ends up not matching anything, and pretty much any animation other than walking or feeding on someone looks uncomfortably stiff. The problems don’t end there though: the writing early on can be hard to follow, some puzzles just don’t give you enough information to solve them, some skills are more useful than others, and oh yeah the animations are terrible. These persist throughout the game, and it’s the clearest sign Swansong needed a bit more time in the oven or a bigger budget to match their ambition. Once each character has their mission is when things finally start to get interesting, but it can be hard to even get to that point thanks to various glitches like NPCs not spawning where they should or your character getting caught inside a door requiring a level restart. You’re then introduced to all the important players through Emem’s eyes in an overly long, confusing, and ultimately boring sequence. The game begins with a lengthy text crawl to give you the basics of the World of Darkness, and that’s essentially all you’re getting in terms of explanation of proper nouns unless you dive into the Codex. Swansong unfortunately makes a terrible first impression. It’s got a lot of flaws, but this unique blend of interactive storytelling and character building makes for an incredibly interesting adventure. Each chapter, you play through three scenes as each of the three main characters, relying on stats and powers you purchased with experience points to win arguments, interact with the environment, and solve puzzles. It lies somewhere between a Telltale style adventure game and an immersive sim like Deus Ex. Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong is a bit of an odd duck. Emem, Galeb, and Leysha need to navigate the underworld’s politics to survive, let alone come out on top. While the few who remain at headquarters bicker and fight over who’s at fault and what’s left, three Kindred are tasked to investigate by the prince – to discover who attacked them and hide any evidence of the supernatural. A party that night has gone horribly wrong, with all attendees either destroyed or staked. The Camarilla of Boston has issued a Code Red to all Vampires in the city.
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