This review has taken me twice as long as it should have to prepare. I love vampires, and I have for a very long time. As such, I find the world of Vampire: The Masquerade to be endlessly fascinating. Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong is a narrative game that nails everything I would want from a narrative, story-driven experience in this world, but makes some major gameplay mistakes.

Swansong puts you in the shoes of three separate vampires, all asked by Hazel Iversen (the Prince of the Boston Camarilla) to investigate an attack on a gathering of vampires. I’m not going to go into too many details on the plot itself, because this game is built on the story. However, I will say that the choices you make with each character can drastically affect how the story unfolds. It is even possible for certain characters to die outright, thereby eliminating certain possible endings.

Each character has different Discipline abilities (Vampiric powers) that can be used in dialogue or exploration/investigation segments. However, you should be careful, because there are limited chances to feed, and using your vampiric powers increases your hunger. If your hunger gets too high, you’ll attack the next human you encounter, possibly endangering yourself and the masquerade.

To offset this, you must use the other skills at the characters’ disposal, such as technology, security, and dialogue skills to uncover information and persuade people without using your vampiric abilities. The non-vampiric abilities cost a resource known as willpower, which can be replenished by items or successful dialogue segments.

Before each level (known as a scene) you’ll have to allocate experience points gained in the previous scene. Because of this, experience is a finite resource. You can either freely allocate your points or put them in one of three pre-determined archetypes based on different things. The problem I have is that there are no hints as to what you might need for a scene, and there is no New Game Plus option.

This means that you’ll often be going in blind and certain investigation paths will be entirely closed off simply due to the character build you have. That’s not even taking into account the fact that if you don’t do certain sections correctly, you’ll lock certain endings or even cause a character to die outright. The story is very interesting, and there are a lot of things to do and find, so if you like games like Detroit: Become Human I think you might be able to ignore the lack of clear progression.

However, let’s get into the meat of the problem. I restarted Swansong twice, but I also had to restart a specific scene once. The first time I restarted because I messed up a set of dialogue options and thought I was restarting the level. The restart function on the menu caused the entire game to restart. I found out later that I could have just reloaded the scene a different way, but the method of doing so isn’t obvious.

The second restart I had came due to a bug. I did a sequence “out of order” while trying to quickly recover progress from my first restart. As such, I began a dialogue sequence only for Emem (one of the characters) to start falling through the world. It autosaved as she started falling, so I couldn’t simply exit and reload that time.

Then, later in the game, a section bugged out and I had to restart because I managed to somehow softlock a section that wouldn’t give me the dialogue I needed to progress. As you can tell, Swansong is a bit buggy. There are other bugs too, visual glitching here and there for example. However, those are a little less obvious and frustrating than the restarts.

In terms of atmosphere, Swansong has fantastic level design, character design, and dialogue. However, the plastic-esque look of the characters is very noticeable on PlayStation 5. The character models don’t always look rough, but there are certain points in the game where they look downright ridiculous. Despite that, the game is dripping with lore and intrigue, as the lore of the Boston Camarilla unfolds through lore pages, files, and dialogue.

Overall, Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong is a great narrative experience. I think if you’re waiting for news on Bloodlines 2, this could hold you over. The difficulty and lack of room for error can be a bit of an issue, despite the game being a very interesting experience overall. There are some glaring issues that suggest that the game could have used a bit more polish or some quality of life improvements.

A PlayStation 5 review copy of Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong was provided by Nacon for this review.

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Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong

$49.99 USD

6

Score

6.0/10

Pros

• Intriguing Story
• Fascinating World-Building and Lore
• Interesting Characters
• Lots of Choices and Endings

Cons

• Difficulty is Intense
• Progression is Very Limited
• A Variety of Bugs
• No New Game Plus
• Plastic-Looking Characters