What are the two words that would instantly get you on board with any game pitched to you? Some of you might say “indie roguelike”. “Pixel art”. “Arkane immersive s-” you start before I cut off your third word. For me, this was always “Roman RPG”. Yes, acronyms count as a single word. My game, my rules.
Until now, that is. A group of former The Witcher 3 developers yesterday announced The Blood of Dawnwalker, a game they describe as medieval X-Files. I’ve hit enough word counts to know that hyphenated words count as one word, and the juxtaposition of the word “X-Files” just after the word “medieval” tickled me in a way that I never knew I wanted to be tickled.
What Is The Blood Of Dawnwalker?
Truth be told, we know very little about Blood of Dawnwalker other than what was announced yesterday.
Blood of Dawnwalker is set in the 14th century, and the trailer takes place in the Carpathian mountains. A man flees a burning town with his young sister, wrapped in a blanket. When guards assault them, shadows attack. A wisp of smoke evaporates a man’s leg. One soldier is pummelled by a ghost. A Night King-esque creature explodes a fleeing guard with her mind. And a Nosferatu-looking fella feasts on the corpses.
For some reason, these creatures help the plagued child. And then pledge vengeance on the world, or at least this small mountain valley.
The cinematic trailer looks good, but I can only get so excited about CGI trailers. The ten seconds of gameplay shown afterwards are hardly revolutionary either, though more gameplay is promised this summer. Sure, the biomechanical boss looks disgustingly cool and the combat looks fast, but what can we glean from that? Very little. But sometimes a solid premise is enough to carry a game through this early period of development.
What Would A Medieval X-Files Look Like?
However, we found out a little more about The Blood of Dawnwalker and new independent studio Rebel Wolves in a Twitch Stream announcing the game. Game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz and narrative director Jakub Szamalek are shown in conversation talking about the importance of independence and artistic freedom.
There’s a lot of buzzwords involved – it is a marketing video, after all – but they also heavily reference Fallout 2. There will be no ‘main’ quest to follow, freedom of choice is paramount, they want to create an old-school RPG with cutting-edge graphics. I love the example that writer Ariana Siarkiewicz gives later in the presentation, explaining that, thanks to your vampiric bloodlust, if you speak to someone before feeding you may lose control and eat them. And this could be anyone. Your best friend, a quest-giver, anyone. The narrative implications of this throwaway line are exciting, and give us an idea of how open-ended the gameplay will be.
The magic in the game is eerie. You won’t see fireballs or bolts of lightning, but you might encounter birds flying backwards or the aurora borealis coalescing at ground level in the middle of the day. It’s this blend of realism and uncanny that draws the X-Files comparisons from art director Bartlomiej Gawel.
“Our magic is also serious, and it’s closer to paranormal phenomena than to traditional spellcasting,” he tells environment artist Adam Payet in the VT. “It’s like The X-Files set in the Middle Ages.”
Payet responds by talking about the weather and lighting systems for some reason, oblivious to the fact that Gawel has just dropped a bombshell that will get more players wishlisting this game than any other sentence in the 45-minute presentation. Yes, I know he’s reading from a script, but I think they should have dwelled on that comparison a little more.
The X-Files is singular in science-fiction because it’s rooted in conspiracy and realism. There really could be aliens out there. There are no rayguns or hover cars, just strange phenomena and extraterrestrial explanations.
The Blood of Dawnwalker looks to do the same for the Middle Ages. This isn’t a fantasy world, it’s not Middle-earth or the Continent. It’s a regular world, there’s just vampires in it now. This vision of the occult, the balance of historical and fantasy, is a really interesting premise, and distilling that down to “X-Files in the Middle Ages” is enough to get me on board in a single phrase.
The only question that remains until Rebel Wolves reveals a gameplay trailer later this year is, if protagonist Coen is our Mulder, does that make Nosferatu his Scully?
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