Liu Bei Do Bei Doooo 님이 최근에 작성한 평가

**Ignore my play time. I finished this game on PS4 but want to review every VtM game on Steam because I have a problem**

This is a game that has the very rare and unique recommendation of "GOOD WITH A GUIDE". Without following a guide, I think your mileage will vary DRASTICALLY.

The fundamental reason for this is because the entire progression system creates a negative feedback loop. You only level up before each level. If you don't level the right skills for that level, you won't make enough XP, and without enough XP, you can't level the right skills for the next level. Ad infinitum. This can very, very quickly hamstring the hell out of you and force you into serious consequences and numerous bad endings. Not only that, but there's also an absolute tonne of easily missable information and items. While finding these things do add to the player's repertoire of options, they also add to the constant sense of trial and error.

I came to realize this problem and was getting frustrated very early so I chose to skim a guide for each level before playing it. It's really not ideal, but ultimately I found the game and its story compelling enough that it felt worth it (choosing to read as little ahead as I could to avoid spoilers). I get most people understandably won't want to do this, which is why I have to warn you that the game WILL screw you. You will not get the full story in one playthrough and you very likely won't want to do another. That's why I have to recommend a guide if you're like me and would prefer playing through a game once, experiencing everything, and moving on.

Beyond that though, what's here is a real tried and true Vampire the Masquerade experience. It's unpolished (awkward animations, dead eyes, and numerous bugs/crashes), but it inhabits the spirit of the IP extremely well. The game is all about politicking, negotiating, intrigue, and uncovering secrets. If that's not VtM, I don't know what is.

In terms of actual gameplay, all of your time will be spent exploring levels for clues, doing puzzles, and talking to various characters. You'll use your skills in the gab to persuade people to your side, or simply use your vampiric powers to force them into it. The boss battles themselves are known as "Confrontations" in which you'll use these same strategies, as well as clues you've discovered, to talk kindred and kine alike into doing things your way. I think it's an absolutely fantastic mechanic that feels very VtM and very satisfying. There may not be any exciting combat here, but it still manages to be the most brutal VtM game so far.

Like I said, it's a tough and awkward recommendation, but ultimately I can't help but say go for it. It's obviously no Bloodlines, but similar to that game, if you know how to work around the jank and BS ahead of time, you very well might be able to have yourself a great time in the Boston court.

I originally played this on itch.io as part of the Vampire game jam and love to see that it's now on Steam.

It's only a short demo, but there's a reason a small game jam game is now on its way to becoming a full blown release with Paradox's backing.

The game is a classic CRPG with clear inspiration from Disco Elysium, but set in the World of Darkness. It's something that VtM meshes perfectly with and is a really good start. I'm definitely looking forward to Heartless Symphony.

The only reason I put in over 20 hours to finish this game is because it has "Vampire: The Masquerade" in the title.

It's one of the most frustrating games I've ever played. If I had hair, I would've pulled it out. The primary problems are the bad pathfinding, endless glitches, and most of all, the unbelievably incompetent allied AI. When you're on your own in the early game, or with just one other companion, the game is overall fine. Repetitive, but playable. Once you're in the mid game and have 3-4 other companions though, sweet Jesus is it maddening. Your coterie will routinely:

- Get stuck in objects/the floor
- Stand around and stop attacking for seemingly no reason
- Ignore the enemies in front of them and run ahead, aggroing entire other groups of enemies
- Not understand what walls are, and thus try to shoot guns/bows through them
- Cast spells willy nilly, with no regard for any particular strategy (even the options to turn this off are bugged!)

All this in a game that is 90% real time, dungeon crawling combat. Unlike Bloodlines, there is no real unofficial patch to rectify these problems, just a mod that also overhauls the entire game. Thus, not ideal for a first play through.

These issues made it borderline unplayable to me. Around 9 or 10 hours in I came to a point where I had to decide if it was really worth finishing or not. Ultimately I decided I wouldn't uninstall it, but that I would use command console cheats to ease the misery. Thus, I played through the rest of the game using "free casting" and "free ammo". Suddenly the game was actually pretty fun! I could spam cool spells myself, and more importantly, not have to worry about or babysit my idiot children. The blood vessels in my eyes were safe at last. I could finally relax and actually enjoy some of the better aspects of the game. Namely the very wide variety of magic, as well as the oddly compelling story.

I'm really fond of the story pitch for the game in fact. Starting as an accidentally anachronistic Crusader in the middle ages and then continuing to a purposefully anachronistic Crusader in the "modern" day (aka 1999) is a really fun idea that no other VtM video game story has really explored since. These folk live forever, so why do we only ever experience their lives in one moment? And why only modern day? To be fair I enjoyed the modern setting here a lot more than old Prague, but it's really fun to see that leap and that journey for the character. There should be more of that.

So it wasn't ENTIRELY the VtM name that made me force my way through it, but it certainly did most of the heavy lifting. All in all, I really can't recommend it to the vast majority of people. Even those who are accustomed to 90's CRPG jank. But, if you're an excessive Vampire: The Masquerade diehard, and are willing to cheat your way through it, then there is SOMETHING here to enjoy.

Great little Diner Dash game but with the MUCH added benefit of being Sweeney Todd themed. The gameplay is straightforward and addicting, the story interesting enough, the one song it has doesn't get annoying somehow, and best of all there's some wonderful animations to enjoy (my personal favourite is the steak table).

There's really only one flaw, but it is a glaring one. Each night when you close up shop, you're given the ability to use your money to upgrade the business in various ways. Faster machines, more ingredients, getting an employee, etc. The only real issue with this is that the main upgrades (more ingredients, and more tables to serve more customers) work entirely against you. There is virtually no benefit to actually expanding. All it really does is make the game significantly more difficult and since the game seems to follow its story regardless of what the restaurant looks like, there's really no incentive for the player to take these pivotal upgrades.

I spent 75% of the game with 1 or 2 tables (out of 4) and with the same 2 ingredients you start with because I was making plenty of cash for the more worthwhile upgrades while keeping the stress to a minimum. By the end though I wanted to see what a full house was like. It wasn't too difficult (with all the speed upgrades), but there's still no actual value in it outside of getting to see some new gruesome animations. Again, those animations are pretty great though.

It's a pretty glaring flaw for the gameplay loop, but since the game is only around 4-5 hours long, it honestly isn't that big of a deal. It's still a fun game regardless and is easily worth $5.

The short of it: don't bother unless you're into playing EVERY VtM game like I am. Just play Night Road and Parliament of Knives if you want good Masquerade stories by Choice of Games. This is by far their worst work yet.

Pros:
- A story outside of the US. Greece specifically is a cool choice with potential
- There's more deliberate options in shaping your character at the very beginning than usual (ironically with less purpose as your dialogue and reaction options throughout the story ignore any personality you may have created)
- The shortest in this series (only a pro because it's so bad)

Cons:
- Your character has no agency at all until the very end when everything magically revolves around you
- Chronic lack of build up to anything that happens, big or small
- Gravity of situations are not at all apparent, likely related to the point above
- Similarly due to the lack of build up, there are no likeable characters. We're not given any time to understand who these people are or why we should care about them
- All "moral quandaries" have the subtlety of a train
- Many basic editing mistakes and inconsistent wording of options
- These options are often nonsensical too. For instance, when I chose to hide, I assumed I'd use my 3 points in Obfuscate, not just crowd under a box with a mortal the game is forcing me to befriend
- When the options aren't nonsensical, they're usually meaningless; simply the same option reworded
- Thin-bloods and ghouls will simultaneously be hilariously strong and worthlessly weak when needed

The list goes one really. Once again I'd say go play Night Road and Parliament of Knives if you're interested in these games. Hopefully the next one will be more on par with them.

Up there with Night Road for best of the best.

While Night Road is loved for its openness, Parliament of Knives weaves an equally, if not more so, strong narrative by being much tighter with what it allows the player to do/be. This might be disappointing to some, but I think it's overall a net positive in creating a more cohesive story.

Story wise, this one really delves deep in the inner workings and political intrigue of Camarilla life and weaves a genuinely gripping mystery. It's really what I feel VtM is all about. It's also nice to see Canada (or anywhere outside the U.S) get some love.

Mechanically, the only real difference between Parliament and the other Choice of Games Vampire stories is that the skill system is a fair bit different from the actual tabletop. Rather than intermittently spending skill points to add 'dots' to skills, Parliament instead uses a percentage system. Every now and then you'll be given a list of options to define how you were trained in the past, with how it affects your current skills in brackets ( ex: "So and so taught me such and such (+manipulation, +charisma)" ). I like the system because it better defines HOW your character came to be who they are, but purists might be put off by it. I also liked its reputation system which also used percentages. It was nice to be able to go in and reference exactly how each major character felt about me at any given time. Kind of unnecessarily gameifies something that's not particularly crucial, but it's a nice bit of clarity.

Otherwise it's your typical CoG game with an absolutely solid story, characters, intrigue, and roleplay potential. Definitely recommend to any Vampire: The Masquerade fan.

What a great idea, executed so terribly.

Ironically reading the negative reviews of this story made me more excited to play it myself. I was expecting a middling story that was less serious than the usual VtM fare, but with a fun twist of playing a mortal. Instead what I got was so much worse.

The logic of the kine in finding out there are vampires is so nonsensical that if this didn't have "Vampire" in the title, I'd call them all absolute idiots. A group of adults being led by a literal child into believing in and subsequently killing vampires is just painful to read. If this were written in a more comedic tone, it could maybe(???) work, instead it's written completely straight, like any other VtM story.

Beyond that, your character's role is so extraordinarily hamfisted. I have no reason to be involved in this petty vampire turf war. The game TRIES to rectify this by really driving home your family's history in town, but frankly it has nothing to do with the protagonist, so why should I care?

While all the kine are idiots, all the vampires are frustratingly incompetent. Almost immediately after we assumed vampires existed (again, thanks to a child), every single vampire in town came to me and explicitly told me they were a vampire and needed my help? Like what? Not only am I random Joe Schmo #2537 that JUST moved to town a week ago, but also good work completely ignoring the masquerade! EVEN THE PRINCE THEMSELF came to beg a kine to help with their incredibly petty feud. It's just pathetic.

In terms of actual interactivity, I felt very railroaded. Especially by the end. 2/3rds of the way through the story I was done with it. Rather than pick a side, I just wanted to kill all the vampires because they were all so godawful, and none of the humans were any better, so their lives, nor mine, mattered to me anymore. The game specifically gives you the option to basically go "let's just kill 'em all" repeatedly. Guess what didn't happen. My character gave no attempt whatsoever in following through with what I chose. The game straight up ignored my choices.

Night Road is still the best of the best with these games and I'd recommend skipping this one entirely.

Absolutely FANTASTIC deckbuilder. It's a shame I didn't learn about it earlier.

Don't go in expecting Slay the Spire or any of the other roguelike card games, though. This is more akin to Thronebreaker; a strictly linear RPG with deckbuilding/card combat, and it does it very well.

The similarities don't end there either. Like the world of The Witcher, this game uses a lot of old Russian/Easter European folklore to tell its story. However, Black Book takes it much further by making these old beliefs the central tenet of its themes. Rather than being in a fantastical world with monsters designed like ones from folklore, you are instead in the real world, only with the twist that all of these archaic ideas are real and true. Its setting is hyper specific to a region in Russia where old pagan folklore and the new beliefs of Christianity first met and melded into one at the turn of the 19th century.

Because of this, I learned SO MUCH about this region and its customs. It provided a really fascinating look at the history and religion of the area while simultaneously being a great strategic deckbuilder. The game even provides its research studies in the credits!

It also has some real bangin traditional folk music sung by a choir local to the area the game is set in as well as fantastic Russian voice acting. I can't comment on the English voice acting because it seemed only right to play it in Russian.

The only cons I could give are that it feels longer than it needs to be (30+ hours for one play through doing all optional tasks along the way) and the difficulty really drops by the last third. By the end I was making decks that trivialized the vast majority of combats, including bosses, on the normal difficulty setting. But that was some of the fun, theorycrafting new decks as I unlocked cards and seeing what crazy OP ♥♥♥♥ I could create.

All in all it definitely joins the roster of the best deckbuilders out today.

No sound, no visuals, absolutely archaic in its UI design, and it doesn't even play well with Steam notifications (maybe to do with playing on a 4K monitor?).

HOWEVER, it's also an absolutely fantastic story that's well-paced and constantly had me excited to see where it was all going. The depth of the skill system and being able to specialize and really understand what your character is good at (and thus make choices accordingly) was also much more than I was expecting. It really does the tabletop proud.

Throw the OST to Shadows of New York, Bloodlines, or some lo-fi vampire beats in the background and you've got yourself a thoroughly enjoyable choose-your-own-adventure book to read.

I'd definitely recommend it, and while it IS a direct sequel to Coteries, I wouldn't necessarily recommend playing that one first. The story and characters of the first do play a role here, but it's not particularly necessary to know them ahead of time. Frankly, Coteries is worse in every way, though Shadows is not without its faults too.

Pros:

- Absolutely fantastic music reminiscent of Disco Elysium's top-tier dramatically moody tracks
- Beautiful art
- The story is a very engaging whodunnit of political intrigue. It really exemplifies what Vampire the Masquerade is all about
- Writing and characters are interesting, especially the main protagonist
- Everything is appropriately moody and filled with self hate, but with a wonderful lack of edgelord cringe
- Choices matter more than in Coteries, *sorta*. Basically there are 5 choices that will determine which of the two endings you get, everything else is just flavour. I'm giving it enough of a pass to call it a positive, but don't expect wild branching paths here. As long as you know this going in, it's an enjoyable ride.

Cons:

- Speaking of, unlike in Coteries, where you'd decide what characters to see and when, this one is much more railroady. ALL of the main story content is fixed. What you choose to do with the in-between time is entirely flavour. None of the side activities seem to have any relevance to the plot or characters, thus making them feel incredibly pointless

- The player is not given the final choice of what to do at the very end. Instead, the protagonist decides for herself based on 5 key choices the player made throughout the game. This can (and did for me) lead to the character acting in a way that the player didn't want in the final confrontation. However, after my initial disappointment, I actually liked the outcome that it led to, UNTIL I GOT THE ACHIEVEMENT:

Basically my biggest gripe, as petty as it seems, is the fact that they named the endings "Good Ending" and "Bad Ending". After getting both of them, they're both well written and satisfying in their own ways. It's exactly what you want from a"choice-driven" visual novel, yet to qualify either as good or bad severely devalues or overvalues the result. Really took me out of the moment. They should've called it "Lasombra Ending" and "Kine Ending" or something similar.

But as I said, it's a bit of a petty complaint, so if THAT'S the biggest bother, than obviously the game overall is quite good.