VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE: SWANSONG is a choose-’em-up with charmless characters

By Rick Lane

The virtual legacy of Vampire: The Masquerade is patchy to say the least, but the tabletop RPG did inspire one of the best-written videogames of all time. 2004’s Bloodlines was a sultry, humorous, and delightfully twisted portrayal of Los Angeles’ undead underbelly, filled to bursting with weird and wonderful characters. It may have been buggier than a rotting corpse, but it excelled at making vampires seem sexy, scary, and above all, strange.

Vampire: The Masquerade: Swansong does the complete opposite. Its cabal of backstabbing bloodsuckers are painfully boring, frequently stupid, and exhibit all the charisma of a Nosferatu living in a bin. Big Bad Wolf ’s narrative RPG has grand ambitions and spots of potential, but it all falls apart in a mess of half-baked ideas and a script sucked dry of personality.

Setting its vampire story in Boston, Swansong sees you play as three different vampires, all high-ranking members of the Camarilla (a sort of cross between a governing body and the Mafia). Emem is a politically ambitious vampire who struggles with authority, while Galeb is a suave and loyal Camarilla henchman. Finally, there’s Leysha, who has recently awoken from three years in hibernation due to the debilitating mental illness that commonly afflicts her Malkavian clan.

Swans ong’s dialog ue is flatter than a hedgeh og on a high way

REALITY BITES

The decision to focus on a trio of characters makes for a confusing opening. Swansong gives a rapid-fire overview of the three perspectives, while simultaneously introducing the rest of the Camarilla court and sketching out the off-screen events that kickstart the plot. Gradually, it becomes clear that a party organised by the Camarilla to seal an alliance with a group of thaumaturges (vampire warlocks) has been attacked by unknown assailants, and the head of the Boston Camarilla, Hazel Iversen, dispatches the trio on separate missions to investigate.