Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong review: a gleeful RPG soap opera

In my senior year of religious boarding school I am watching. PassionsThe afternoon ritual was called “The Ritual”. Beyond the basic soap opera premise of rival families getting messy, the iconic series had everything for a restless teen: suspense, melodrama, shamelessly imaginative comedy, awful sex, and campy supernatural storylines (including witches and warlocks — it was, after all, set in New England). Our febrile minds projected cartoonish power fantasies and petty grievances onto its absurd archetypes — the rebel, the dark horse, the struggling parent. PassionsThe daily line was now a direct link to the hotter, more magical world. It was amazing.

I didn’t realize there was a PassionsFrom the beginning of my adult life, I was in a hole that looked like this until last week when I started playing Vampire The Masquerade. Swansong. In 1991, the Vampire tabletop game RPG made a splash in a genre that saw vampires as monsters to kill. But it’s a post-Twilight world now (sorry, Anne Rice), and the idea of the undead secretly living among us is a common fictional conceit. Once you have logged in, SwansongI was completely unaware of what I would be getting. The first couple of hours I spent reading the codex slowly and staring blankly through my character sheets.

Nineteen hours later, it turns out that baby’s first Vampire game was a gleeful return to all of the good stuff I didn’t know I missed: courtly intrigue, indulgent posturing, and coldblooded betrayal, but this time, with fangs. There’s no combat, so everything boils down to conversational dominance and manipulation. My high school days were filled with the drama and frivolity of my youth, but now I feel the need to escape the harsh reality of the pandemic.

Image: Big Bad Wolf/Nacon via Polygon

Swansong takes place in the World of Darkness RPG universe, where vampires (“Kindred”) juggle soap opera-scale power grabs, mind games, and existential crises. Most Kindred follow the Masquerade, a survival protocol maintained by the ruling Camarilla faction to stay hidden from mortals; humans are usually livestock or slaves, and in-game documents highlight the Camarilla’s pragmatic interests in environmentalism for the sake of their prey’s health. Atop this food chain is the city’s Prince, supported by a council known as the Primogen; at the bottom are “thin-bloods,” whose weak powers are the supposed result of their generational remove from the First Vampire, Caine.

SwansongIt opens with the Boston Camarilla panic mode. Then, it introduces three playable Kindred: Emem. Galeb. And Leysha. A Code Red has been called (the emergency lockdown procedure). Kindred have gone missing at an important party, nobody knows the details, and we’ve been summoned to help Boston’s Prince, Hazel Iversen, the personification of Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss in a red jumpsuit. She gives each character missions (“scenes”) and clearly has a hidden agenda of her own.

Galeb and Emem share the same basic mechanics. A Willpower bar determines their interactions with other people and a Hunger bars denotes that they need to eat (at maximum Hunger, their next interaction could jeopardize The Masquerade). Kindred drink from live humans (“vessels”), which must be done discreetly in a limited number of safe zones. It’s also bad form to drink the vessels to death. I turned cool, sophisticated Emem into a habitual rat eater — a gross survival decision that increased her Suspicion meter and made her later interactions more challenging. (I never fully got the hang of Suspicion — it’s supposed to indicate how much you stick out through mistakes and gaffes, but on my playthrough with the most dire screw-ups, I had the lowest Suspicion yet.)

Galeb and Emem have rich backstories. They all share core personalities and belong to different clans (Toreador and Ventrue respectively). Through character builds, I’m allowed to determine how they approach problems and conversations. For full control of my character and discipline sheets, the custom build was my choice for my second playthrough. Character includes stat-like capabilities (such as Persuasion and Technology and Deduction), that can affect interactions, confrontations and conversations. Discipline includes clan-specific Kindred skill tree like Auspex (augmenting your senses and seeing memory) or Celerity (slowing down time or blinking from one location to the next).

There’s a ton of lore to absorb, but it’s manageable if you’re used to navigating jargon-heavy genre fiction (hard sci-fi trained me well for this). Another option is to ignore the detailed backstories and play blind, but then you’d miss out on one of the game’s most formidable resources: a vividly detailed codex that updates as new story elements are revealed. Retrospectively, it was something I ought to have used more often, particularly as a cheat sheet during conversations. As I began to absorb foundational World of Darkness facts such as the stigma surrounding the Malkavian insane clan, Ventrue superiority and the role of British imperialists within New England Kindred politics, it became easier for me to understand.

My first Galeb was heavy on Intimidation and Psychology, a role-playing choice I made based on his voice — crisp enunciation and condescending disdain and everything you’d expect from a descendant of Ottoman royalty. He should have dominated most conversations, but at critical points it was almost impossible to squeeze information out of an NPC, even when I restarted, tweaked my stats, and used Willpower to “focus” and beef up my abilities. His claims about seemingly weak characters were quickly overcome when I discovered that they had unhinged levels focus. Galeb’s final showdown was a pathetic indictment of my unfamiliarity with the game systems, hinting at synergies between Character and Discipline that I have yet to master. He was killed, and I felt guilt-ridden. Absolutly This is only possible during the final act.

Image: Big Bad Wolf/Nacon via Polygon

After my first playthrough, I noticed that the game seems to lean heavily on Education and Deduction — multiple mid- and late-game scenes call for at least 2-3 points in each. Deduction proved to be particularly useful for a novice, which somewhat undermines the idea that any character can be built. It is possible to ignore Security and Technology skills, such as the ability to hack into computers or open safes. You should instead focus on finding keys and clues in the environment. The key to success in such cases is Education and Deduction. This refers to how much information can be gleaned through social engineering. I occasionally got annoyed with characters who lacked the right skills to meet certain checks, but therein lies the rub of narrative RPGs: There’s no such thing as a perfect playthrough — participation in Swansong’s systems necessitates that you also accept failure.

Swansong’s puzzles are mostly fun adventure-game staples — manipulating objects, identifying patterns, and simple decryption, to name a few — with some truly frustrating exceptions and a good dose of bugs. Emem makes things tedious, especially in prison scenes. Concentric rings are a type of puzzle that is initially interesting but then quickly becomes a problem. Mechanical puzzles with moving parts really need a clear locking mechanism, especially when said moving parts are fiddly and don’t stay in place.

The game also bugged out on my attempts to access a hidden prison cell, even though I’d found multiple solutions to the final ring puzzle; the solution turned out to be one where the correct nodes didn’t even line up, and I only managed to solve it after (I assume) a patch to adjust their alignment. Emem’s Blink skill is also frustrating to use when there’s platforming involved; Blinking onto a pillar then wildly swiveling the camera around to find other possible destinations on a timer is not great. There’s also the heinous valve puzzle in Leysha’s Red Salon scene that had me screaming internally before I gave up.

Image: Big Bad Wolf/Nacon via Polygon

It was a tedious task to try and solve many of these jankier puzzles. I spent a lot time neurotically looking at each scene. It gave me an appreciation of the process. Swansonghumor into its environment. All the book skins in the game are a joy — I’m a huge fan of the author John Game. In one of Galeb’s Long Island secret base scenes, I had to get an old religious book using an automated retrieval system — even though I was calling up books from centuries past, physics textbooks or English dictionaries frequently came rolling out on the conveyor belt. There’s also a treasure trove of pop culture jokes, from Shining’s orange carpet to a low-key Zodiac Killer cameo; Leysha’s doctor, Richard Dunham, is a dead ringer for Michael Shannon, and the game’s ultimate villain resembles a fanatical James Cromwell in full Vatican Gone Wild mode.

As with any soap opera good, Swansong does an artful job at probing psychological issues — trauma, grief, regret — without losing its focus on entertainment. And like any great soap opera, it also creates a noxious love-hate relationship with twists (and in this case, uneven mechanics and systems) that you can’t control. I’m not sure whether my initial feelings around Swansong stem from a lifelong weakness for toxic Machiavellian soaps, or because it’s a genuinely well-crafted fantasy that plays on (ironically) human needs to be accepted, forgiven, or trusted. It’s probably a bit of both.

At the end, with two-thirds of my crew dead (oops), I didn’t feel a sense of finality, but the immediate need to go again, janky puzzles, bugs, and all. I have a special relationship with SwansongThis has been almost my daily ritual appointment Passions — until I fully exhaust the entire story, I need my dose of ridiculous people making ridiculous decisions, and the nuclear fallout of their mistakes.

Swansong: Vampires – The Masquerade The game will be available on Windows PC and PlayStation 4 as well as PlayStation 5, PlayStation 5 and Xbox One. Later versions of the game are also available on Nintendo Switch. Nacon provided a prerelease code for Windows. Vox Media is an affiliate partner. Although these partnerships do not impact editorial content, Vox Media could earn commissions from products sold via affiliate links. Here are some links to help you find. additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.