Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong

DO NOT buy this game. It is not worth your time or money, even if you love VtM. I got it for 90% off on sale, and still wish I had refunded it after completing it. Pros: -genuinely feels like a VtM installment. Good world building/lore. -that's literally it. Everything else went to complete ♥♥♥♥ once this project left the writer's room. Cons: -the devs seem to be allergic to attractive protagonists. Two of the main characters were completely insufferable, and the only one that was actually attractive got tortured and is horribly mutilated for the last third of the game. -NPCS range from forgettable to grinding nails on a chalkboard. I'm looking at you, annoying child character with a lisp. Many are introduced and set up with plot threads, and then immediately forgotten with no payoff for helping them. -the animations and character modeling are just atrocious. They didn't even try to lip sync dialogue, and there are noticable stutters during animtions and between cuts. -the graphics are very, very bad. I was playing on maxiumum settings, and I would have sworn this game came out 10 years older than it actually did. -there are so many game breaking bugs. During my playthrough, I got softlocked twice on different levels by getting stuck on random bits of terrain. There is no way to unstuck yourself, and the only solution is to restart the level from the very beginning, losing up to an hour of your time. The game also randomly crashed on me once. -the dialogue/skill system is needlessly complicated, and even when you're doing everything right, it still often comes down to RNG. This is not fun, and there are no real hints or guides to know what you're supposed to focus on. -the puzzles are not designed well, and are needlessly frustrating. I recommend having a walkthrough guide open on a second monitor if you really subject yourself to playing this thing. -the walking speed is too slow, even on the "jogging" toggle. This game is unfinished, broken, and absolutely miserable to play. I regret buying it, and regret grinding away hours to finish it. Unlike with Bloodlines, the core of this game is rotten, and no amount of community mods could ever fix it fully.

Paid $6 and still probably not worth it. I can't play this game any further either because it's incredibly frustrating. I love VtM material but this game requires you to metagame your stats to know what you need to succeed or you get screwed and have to replay over and over. That ruins the whole point of roleplaying, and this game has nothing other than that. I put in stats the way I would think makes sense for each character and nope, the game had completely different ideas of what the character would have (and really illogical and randomly I might add), so whoops, congrats you just suck and can't change it. Good luck progressing things when it's a domino effect of losing more on future scene challenges because you didn't get the rewards from succeeding early on and it's all cumulative. Good story but absolute cancer game design. BL2 is way better than this and I can't believe I saw a review that said otherwise. VtM Redemption and CKIII Princes of Darkness mod are all way better than this.

Worst "Vampire: The Masquerade" game ever made. Visuals are laughable. Voice acting is terrible. Gameplay is a joke. The writing is boring. The characters are dull and ugly. Here I might provide a huge text about what they did wrong - but it would be easier to say they did nothing right. This "game" is a disaster - and a disgrace to the World of Darkness franchise. Take it from a man who loves the setting and actually runs VtM tabletop campaigns as a Storyteller (aka Dungeon Master): you don't want to touch this one. Ever. The developers should consider changing their profession and never trying to make games ever again. In all seriousness, if you still consider buying this - you've been warned. NOT RECOMMENDED

100% success rate to influence a conversation, and somehow IT FAILS?

first up, two warnings. 1. once you're at scene 9, if you quit the game during a scene after an autosave, there's a chance you'll get a game-breaking bug and have to restart the scene. i had one as Leysha and another as Emem. 2. i advise playing this game with a guide, especially if you have decision paralysis, because this game will throw a bunch of this/that decisions at you. not all of them make a difference to the way the story plays out. there are some skills that are completely useless and you'll never need to use them. also if you miss something you might have to replay the entire scene again because there's no manual save. this game is... okay. there's no combat, it's entirely walking around and talking to people, solving puzzles, and occasional hiding. i like that. i HATE the focus mechanic, i feel like it just overcomplicates something as simple as dialogue, which is like 70% of the game. i discovered about 2/3 of the way through that i could run, but decided i was going to walk because it felt more badass. i was really excited to [spoiler]figure out who the traitor was[/spoiler] but the game just tells you. there are no hints, no clues, no trail to follow, they just tell you the answer. and then i thought, aha! [spoiler]but the accomplice[/spoiler]! but no, they tell you that too. i thought that was a let down considering that the rest of the game is so puzzle-focused. i recommend it (with a guide open), but don't expect bloodlines.

One thing I’ve started realizing with developers like Big Bad Wolf is that I keep getting drawn into their games because of the premise and potential rather than the actual consistency of the final product. I tend to support a lot of mid-tier AA developers because some of the best studios in gaming originally started there before eventually breaking through. Early CD Projekt Red, older BioWare, and other now-established studios all had periods where they were working with more limited budgets or production quality, but still managed to deliver compelling and emotionally engaging experiences despite technical limitations. What I’m starting to notice, though, is that there’s a category of developer that consistently produces fascinating ideas without ever really evolving past the same execution problems. I’ve started seeing that pattern repeatedly with studios like Spiders, Piranha Bytes, Cyanide, and now Big Bad Wolf. The Council and Vampire: The Masquerade Swansong both pulled me in immediately because the concepts are exactly the kinds of games I want to exist: occult themes, political tension, mystery, branching dialogue, psychologically driven storytelling, and narrative-heavy roleplaying. On paper, these games sound perfect for me. But after playing them, I keep running into the same problems: - weak facial animations - poor lip syncing - uneven voice delivery - rough gameplay systems - awkward presentation - production quality that constantly undermines immersion At a certain point, it starts feeling like more than just a budget issue. Plenty of smaller studios with limited resources have still managed to create emotionally compelling experiences through strong direction, presentation, writing cohesion, or polished execution in key areas. With some of these AA studios, the issue starts to feel more structural: they are excellent idea generators, but consistently struggle to transform those ideas into fully realized experiences. What makes this frustrating is that they often get just enough right to keep pulling me back in. The atmosphere, premise, and narrative concepts continue to create the sense that the next game might finally be the breakthrough title. But after multiple releases, I’m starting to feel like I may be repeatedly buying into potential rather than proven execution. That doesn’t mean these games are without value. In fact, some of their ideas are genuinely more interesting than what many AAA studios attempt. But compelling concepts alone can only carry a game so far when the presentation, gameplay feel, and overall polish repeatedly fail to support the emotional and narrative weight the games are aiming for.

I sincerely wish I had read the reviews before buying - this is among the worst games I have ever played. There is no save mechanic and the game is full of bugs. It often becomes necessary to restart a scene to correct issues, but the inability to save means that restarting a scene can require repeating several hours of play. I had to repeat every scene at least once; 12 hours in, after repeating the fifth scene 7 times, I decided it wasn't worth the time and effort despite having purchased the game at full price. If you enjoy being frequently frustrated and repeating the same less than inspiring dialog over and over and over and over again then this might be the game for you. Otherwise, don't waste your money even if it's on sale for $5.

Я редко бросаю игры, но осилить прохождение Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong я не смогла. Игра не интересная от слова совсем! Я люблю вампирский сеттинг, люблю интерактивное кино, но эта игра совсем не понравилась. Тут много багов, странная система прокачки, скучные диалоги, скучные персонажи. Обычно в таких играх ты пытаешься обыскать каждый уголочек, чтобы что-то найти, но в Swansong мне хотелось как можно быстрее закончить сцену. У меня было две попытки пройти эту игру, не могу! The Council от этих же разработчиков я прошла с большим удовольствием два раза и собрала все ачивки. Забыла упомянуть, что я люблю Vampire: The Masquerade, но Swansong откровенный кал!

Swansong has the worst writing of all VTM videogames, including all the cheap graphic novels. Frankly, I can't recall a chronicle with worse writing from my personal roleplaying experience. The game treats you like a toddler, explaining every social interaction at the slowest of paces. It makes primogens behave like spoiled babies throwing tantrums at random neonates and it forces your character into needlessly making ridiculous mistakes. I'm talking about writing primarily because the game doesn't really have anything to offer beyond that. The puzzles are either trivial or nonsensical, the visuals are bland and gameplay itself consists of illusions of having any influence on the dialogue. It's bland, it's boring and it is primitive to its core.