Letting the Days Go By in The Blood of Dawnwalker

It’s 1347, you’re in the Carpathians, and the vampires sweeping across the mountains like a wave are called vrakhiri. Rebel Wolves, a new studio started by CD Projekt Red ex-pats, aimed to give its first game, The Blood of Dawnwalker, a setting as strong, lived-in, and well-defined as the Witcher games they worked on in the past, and they found their inspiration in 14th century Romania and the vampiric legends that have long been told about this part of Europe.

A recent preview in Los Angeles gave us our first in-depth look at Dawnwalker, including a Medieval city that serves as part of its sand box. As soon as Svartrau, the name of the city, was first said, the largely American group of game journalists all went straight to Wikipedia to see if this was a real place. It’s not. You wouldn’t guess that by looking at Dawnwalker, though; despite its fantastical overlay of vrakhiri and magic, Rebel Wolves tried to make everything about Svartrau and the game’s larger world feel real. So when the game’s lead character Coen—the Dawnwalker of the title (and yes, Blade fans, it’s what it sounds like; he’s half-human, half-vampire, and thus has vampiric skills but can still exist in the sunlight)—first approaches the lofty Svartrau Cathedral, it looks like any of the real Medieval cathedrals still found throughout Europe. The Blood of Dawnwalker isn’t an Assassin’s Creed game; it doesn’t backdrop its fictional story in fastidious recreations of real places at real times, bending real history to its whims. It captures the look and essence of what we know about that period of time, grounding that realism in its own original land of make-believe.

Svartrau might be in Romania, but its construction was inspired by cities throughout Europe. Piotr Kucharski, one of Dawnwalker’s writers, explained that the game’s art team took influences from Prague and certain German and Italian cities while building it. Although it’s definitively set within Romania, the goal is for it to essentially be a Medieval everytown, representing any and all cities that could’ve been taken over by vampires in the middle of the 14th century.

The vampires who took over this part of Romania aren’t as provincial. As seen in a cut-scene, the four vrakhiri masters leading this vampiric outbreak hail from different times and places. One looks like a Mongol emperor in the mold of Genghis Khan. Another, a young knight with long golden locks, seems to have arrived straight from a crusade, or maybe the background of a Prince Valiant comic strip. The quartet’s mouthpiece is a straight Nosferatu stand-in, whereas the true power seems to lie within the oldest of the four, a skeletal woman vampire named Xanthe who hails from Greece. In the cut-scene they terrorize a family and stake their claim to all they see, setting up the central confrontation with the Dawnwalker.

It’s hard for vampires to rule a city during the day, though. And befitting its title, and the concept of a town that changes materially every day when its occupying force wakes up upon the setting of the sun, Blood of Dawnwalker is structured around a day-night cycle. Time is essentially a currency in this action RPG. Every decision you make, from the quests you pursue to conversations longer than a few words, eats up a certain portion of your time bar. When you burn up all the daylight and it turns to night, expect to fight vampires throughout the town. Certain quests and characters can only be encountered at specific times of day, and even your abilities change depending on the clock. Coen doesn’t have access to his vampiric skills, like fast-dashing as a cloud of bats or draining blood to recover health, in the daytime. He does have magic he can use when the sun is out, though, and what enemies he will encounter in the sun aren’t as strong as a vampire at night. But then he’s also weaker in the day. Dawnwalker promises a constant push-pull between what you want or have to accomplish and the ticking of the hours.