If you want to know how I truly feel about Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong, you don’t need to look any further than the title of this post. I’ll be honest with you all, I finished my playthrough of the game a while ago, I just haven’t been able to pull myself together to sit and write this post until now.
If there are two parts to writing game reviews that I don’t enjoy, it’s playing bad games and then writing about them. I would far rather spend my time behind my desk eagerly typing away, sharing something that ignited my soul and made me feel like a small child on Christmas morning with you all.
Although, In a strange and twisted way, I guess that’s what I’m about to do right now. However, instead of Santa Clause, the creature shimmying down the chimney is Krampus, and instead of that bicycle you always wanted under the tree, it’s dead puppies. Just piles and piles of dead puppies. That’s the type of Christmas morning you’re in for with Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong.
At its core, Swansong is a combat-free role-playing game with graphics so bad and graphical glitches so prominent that you’ll think you’re playing a bland version of The Sims 2. Before we go on, let me say I have no issue with combat free RPG games, that isn’t what muddied the waters here. In fact, one notable combat free RPG would be Disco Elysium, and that’s one of my favourite games of all time.
My problem with Swansong is that it’s just not a good RPG. From the skill system to the dialogue and the janky graphics, Swansong is an underutilized, incoherent and lacklustre RPG that is better off left unplayed.
Through the course of the game, you will play as three different vampires, Leysha, Emem, and Taleb, all of whom have been summoned to a meeting at the vampire HQ, if you will, to investigate a party that went wrong and ended in more bloodshed than even the vampires are comfortable with.
The idea of the game is that missions are tailored to each of the vampires you control, and you will control each in turn. Throughout the game, you find yourself jumping from one character’s mission to the next, hoping that these three timelines will eventually pull together to tell a half-decent story. Spoiler: they don’t.
One of the plethora of issues the game suffers from is lore. If you go into Swansong without prior knowledge of the World of Darkness traditional role-playing games (under which the Vampire: The Masquerade games fall), then enjoy feeling lost, confused, and overwhelmed with everything thrown your way during the game. This alienation is wholly unnecessary and speaks volumes about the quality of writing in the game. Imagine not being able to watch Stranger Things without first playing Dungeons and Dragons or not being able to follow Star Trek unless you’ve been to space.
Unfamiliar terms, words and lore aside, even when the game did make sense, it’s still a chore to play. A core part of the game unfolds through “confrontations”, which are conversations that require you to say all the right things to proceed. However, because of how terrible the writing is and an irksome “dice roll” mechanic, it would be easier to get vampires to swap out blood for tomato juice than it is to pull off a confrontation.
Another area where Swansong not only fails to impress but infuriates is in the quality puzzles the game wants you to solve. Now let me paint a picture for you about the riveting puzzles you will be tasked with. You find a printer, and it’s out of ink. What do you do? You replace the ink! WOW! Okay, how about another. You find a form. The form needs to be filled in correctly. You do so. WOW.
Suppose your idea of a good time is solving the same level of puzzles as what you face in the office every day. In that case, Swansong will more than deliver. However, if you were hoping for something a little more imaginative, this is not your game. Or mine, as it would turn out.
