Vampyr

Vampyr excels in making its mechanics, systems, and presentation mirror its protagonist’s inner struggles. It associates vampirism with disease and corruption, immersing us in a claustrophobic, hostile city whose inhabitants are at the mercy of predators of every kind – including the main character, Dr. Jonathan Reid.

The game starts with a discussion on mortality, framing dying as a blessing: sometimes the pain is so immeasurable and seems so unending that we welcome the embrace of death with open arms. This immediately presents Jonathan Reid as a damned figure, as his vampire condition is not a superpower, but a curse: he’ll never find relief for his eternal aches; he’ll never be released from the soul-crushing memory of each time he failed those dear to him.

This is further reinforced by the tragic events of the opening, where we witness a young woman coming to Reid to embrace him. Since our vampire vision is active at the time – he has just been turned – we see her as a shadowy figure, expressionless, housing nothing but veins full of blood. She sees Reid with affection, whereas he now sees her with hunger. It’s inaccurate to describe his ensuing guilt as heart-wrenching, for the knowledge that our actions led to the death of a loved one suffers no heart to exist; we’re alive just by a technicality, being just what remained of ourselves. It’s no wonder Reid’s heart doesn’t beat anymore.

Another doctor soon finds Reid in front of a corpse, and despite recognizing his supernatural condition, decides to lend a hand. Dr. Swansea gives Reid both a purpose and an anchor to reality: the doctor is to live and work in Pembroke Hospital, attending to the patients while also trying to discover a cure for the epidemic striking London at the time. In the hospital, Reid meets another vampire, Lady Ashbury, who will serve as his mentor and assist in the hunt for his maker.

Vampyr takes place in London, which is depicted as a decadent, putrid city. The Spanish Flu is ravaging the land, and the people are becoming desperate. There’s a priest who only thinks about cleansings by fire. There’s a boy who won’t leave his house because he fears human beings more than monsters and the plague – and not without reason. There’s a mad woman who thinks she’s a vampire, and a man who lets her bite him because he’s alone and in need of company – we’ve all been there. There’s a gay couple who refuse to go to the nearby hospital, fearing reprisal for their relationship. After all, London is full of “greedy cockroaches who feed on despair.”  The city is on the verge of collapse, and we can clearly see that by the crumbling state of the buildings, by expecting death to come at us from every corner, as they may hide bloodthirsty vigilantes or feral vampires, or by hardly being surprised in seeing impaled corpses decorating rooms painted in blood.

We begin in a part of the city that seems beyond salvation. The police have forsaken it. At night, criminals and vigilantes prowl the streets. There are buildings hiding hundreds of corpses. People are scared, defenseless, bewildered by all the violence. When Reid asks his mentor who the man he had just hunted was, Lady Ashbury promptly answers: “Criminal, Victim, Hunter, Prey.” You know violence has become the norm in a city when these roles have become interchangeable, and there is no difference anymore.

Vampirism is just another nail in London’s coffin, just another epidemic. In Vampyr, vampirism is a moral disease, the consequence of a society that is already putrid, marked by hate and inequality, filled to the brim with rot. Here, unlike classic vampire stories such as Dracula, the vampire is not tied to a foreign menace, to an outside threat, but it’s a corruption that starts from within.

It’s only fitting, then, that the story associates the creatures with some mythical figures of England’s past, such as certain renowned knights and kings. “People will always believe in monsters. It’s easier than accepting their own darkness. We can all be monsters,” a bartender says to Reid. Vampyr’s narrative puts enemies within one’s own family, within one’s own countrymen, within one’s own past. There’s no need to look outside; we are already killing ourselves.

Vampyr ties blood with hate, and puts vampires in the upper classes of society. Those of noble lineage can live well, drinking the people’s blood, while the common vampires turn into Skals, a type of vampire that, after becoming a pariah and being relegated to the slums and the sewers, turns feral. Vampirism is depicted as a cycle: it will always strike when a society is at its worst; when the rich are preying on the poor, when two men must hide their love in public lest they become hunted, when the solution offered in dire times is not to help the other and try to reconnect, but to further separate people by walls.

While those in the poor districts of London avoid going out on the streets, fearing for their lives, a sidequest in the wealthy district of the West End has Reid finding an exquisite restaurant for a bored gentleman to visit. We see a woman preaching about women’s rights, but there are no passersby to hear her enthusiastic speech. A man is warning people of the vampire menace on the same street… and to the same audience. And just a few blocks away, where wealth turns from boring reality to unachievable dream, vampires are prowling dark alleys, killing anyone who gets near them. We meet characters who are communists, and it’s no coincidence that the worst outcome for their district is when they are removed from the board.

The overall atmosphere is grim. Reid’s workplace is described as a “giant morgue disguised as a hospital.” When he meets a secret society of vampires, there is no glamor to the situation, only harsh judgment. The Ascalon Club is a group of vampires who believe they are the elite of their kind. They are old, wealthy, and very white. They like to chase foreign vampires away from England, and talk about supremacy and pure blood. “What we need is a wall,” one of the wealthiest members says to Reid. “As long as the right people are at the right side of the walls. That’s all that matters.“

Reid’s investigation into the identity of his maker quickly gives place to a more pressing matter: saving London. As the story progresses, the more decayed the city can become. London is divided into districts, and each one has a single person as its pillar. During the game’s chapters, Reid will eventually face a choice regarding the fate of that person, which can impact the whole district. The wrong choice may invite chaos in, resulting in various deaths and decreasing the district’s “health status”. And if it becomes too low, everyone there dies. Yes, everyone.

Every NPC in Vampyr has a name and a story. We can talk to all of them and discover their secrets. And we can drink them up after that. Usually, in Gothic narratives, there are horrible consequences for secrets coming out in the open, so when Reid finds information about a person, their “blood level” increases – and the higher the level, the more attractive they become as food, giving more experience points to our character. In Vampyr, we can drink up almost every NPC, depending only on our own level.

Vampyr excels in tying gameplay and story together. The difficulty, for example, is directly linked to the decision to feed on human blood. Drinking the people of London makes Reid considerably stronger, which makes our life considerably easier, reflecting Reid’s temptation to drink blood. Every citizen is a potential meal. Every conversation can be a prelude to slaughter. And people’s secrets usually are secrets for a good reason: they often cover up misdeeds that can tap into our sense of justice, encouraging us to kill: “that woman beats her daughter all the time, maybe the daughter will be better off alone,” we may think, trying to justify murdering her for a huge amount of XP.

The choice of killing someone is not just a moral one, having real effects on the world. People will react to the death of others, and each casualty will decrease that district’s health status. Mastering every skill available will mean the fall of London, making Reid the strongest person in a necropolis. On the other hand, if we try a pacifist route, we’ll have to care for the health of every citizen, as they often get sick, and Reid – being a doctor – must craft the right medicine to cure them.

A full pacifist playthrough can be quite difficult to achieve, though. Besides the fact that it makes combat a lot harder, the choices regarding the pillars of each district are not easy ones to make, since their outcomes are rarely obvious. Sparing a person may appear merciful at first glance, but can actually lead to horrible consequences later. This makes each choice meaningful, carrying a lot of weight – and the game autosaves after each one, preventing the player from abusing the save system to circumvent a bad choice.

Vampyr, however, occasionally fails during some of these moments by not making it clear what each choice indeed means. An early example can help explain the problem. There’s a moment when Reid discovers the identity of the person blackmailing Lady Ashbury and confronts them. Reid is faced with three options: to make them quit their job (“I look away but you resign”), forget (“You will forget all about this”), or kill them (“I’m ending this right now”). The latter is very clear, but the first two choices are not: we can make the person forget, but forget what? Only that Ashbury was a vampire, since that is the root of the blackmail? And the first option – to make her quit her job – may seem harsh, but Reid will actually offer to finance her activities to compensate for the resignation – a vital piece of information that is not shown by the text that accompanies the choice. Therefore, the problem is not that the outcome of our choices can be out of our control (life is often brutal like that, the bitch) but that the choices themselves, because of how they are written, are not clear regarding what they actually entail.

The level design is also far from stellar. We find locked gates blocking our progress around the city, for example, but some – like the one in Whitechapel – could have been easily bypassed if Reid could just jump over the small ledge at its right. A kid could do it, but that ledge is too hard for poor Dr. Reid, forcing us to find a way around it – and let’s not forget that Reid can bloody teleport with his vampire powers. Ledges must be like garlic to him, I don’t know. This artificiality in the level design is all over London, making us frequently question why we can go to certain areas and not to others.

Combat, in turn, can be as interesting as we make it. If we start to drink everyone, Reid will have a plethora of skills to use, being able to wipe the floor with most enemies by summoning shadows from the floor to grab and pierce them, by throwing spears of blood at them, and so forth. Each enemy here has a health and a stamina bar, as does Reid. The action is slow-paced, as basic actions, like attacking or dodging, consume some of our stamina, making Reid unable to act for a while if he runs out of it. Depleting an enemy’s stamina, in turn, stuns that enemy, making them vulnerable to being bitten, which increases Reid’s blood gauge, used for vampire skills.

Some weapons, then, are great at hitting the enemy’s health bar, while others fare better in depleting their stamina, and some directly increase our blood gauge. This means we’ll have to be able to read our enemy well so that we can dodge, attack, and use the correct skills at the right time, while choosing carefully what type of attack is best for the moment.

Finally, the game could use some quality-of-life improvements, such as enabling fast travel between safe houses and showing discovered NPCs on the map, so that we don’t have to wander around looking for them each time we forget their precise location.

Vampyr is one of the best vampire-themed games out there, succeeding in making all of its parts work together to reflect the protagonist’s curse, immersing us in a harsh and violent setting. It may have some problems regarding the artificiality of its level design and how it makes some of the main choices vaguer than they ought to be, but it certainly makes up for these flaws with a well-crafted story, tragic characters, and strong atmosphere.

July 17, 2026.

Review originally published on December 09, 2019.