I’m willing to forgive a lot of problems in order to play a good vampire game. The closest that’s come to really providing the proper tone before is the 2004 Blood-Draining Stealthy Chat ‘Em Up Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. It was so nearly correct, offered a variety of different challenges depending on your initial racial choice, or mission paths that could wildly diverge based on your dialogue choices, plus it’s got one of the best self-contained horror sections in an otherwise mostly action-oriented game that comes out of nowhere.
It’s also nearly totally broken to the point of unplayablity.
Juding from this recent trailer Dark, which is a game that truly feels like it should have a second word in the title, seems like it might follow the same route. The trailer showed some inappropriate animation styles (you’re really going to use the Neck-Biting animation where the two characters are clipping through each other? In your marketing campaign?) along with others that conflict with the tone it seems to be setting (Bycycle kicks to the face? In your Grimdark Horror Fantasy?)
The art style’s along the lines of a Walking Dead style of cel shaded animation, it’s a simple touch that lends a lot of flair to the design than a more photorealistic attempt might. That sets expectations for the quality that maybe it doesn’t deliver. I don’t know if you know, but Telltale’s The Walking Dead is pretty great, y’all.
Though it’s true that marketing doesn’t suggest feature-complete content, but Dark will be with us in only a few months and there’s already some distinct problems with tone here. If the song choice is indicative of the sound design, for instance, it sells itself as something we should want nothing to do with.
Hopefully it’ll work on a systemic level, like Vampire before it, so minor concerns like this are irrelevant. That’s perhaps a tall order.
