Vampire: The Masquerade: Night Road review

Warning - This review contains minor spoilers for the first half of Night Road.

    Vampire: The Masquerade: Night Road by Choice of Game is a text-based choose your own adventure game. It's not even a visual novel with the entirety of the game being text with a scattered few character portraits. It's the kind of game you would play on your cellphone but that doesn't mean it's not deep. The writing is far deeper and, ironically, allows a great deal more freedom in determining your character's choices. It also incorporates the tabletop games' rules regarding Hunger, Humanity, the Masquerade, and skill sets.

I recommend the black background.

    How good is the writing? It's a rare game that allows me to have a character arc for my video game protagonist. However, the character I created for this game, Ransom, is a guy who started as a duplicitous and self-interested scumbag before making turnaround due to seeing the true depravity of his fellow Kindred. He killed two innocents during feeding, killed his sire, rescued a bunch of migrant workers from blood slavery, fell in love, played genius vampires against one another, and finally decided to just get the hell out of town. On my second playthrough, I didn't repeat any of those actions and had a lot more choices to go through.

    The premise is that you are a vampire who has been able to survive his first few years as an undead predator. This automatically makes you different from the protagonists of most Vampire: The Masquerade media. You aren't the absolute rock bottom of Kindred society but a respected(ish) professional doing a necessary service for the Camarilla. Being a courier is different from being Sheriff or Scourge but at least you can expect to actually be paid for your work.

    The situation in the Tuscon, Arizona is pretty bad for Kindred. The Second Inquisition has got electronic surveillance on large numbers of the undead, has driven the undead of Dallas, and is seemingly everywhere. The current Prince, Lettow, doesn't trust cellphones or other modern conveniences and he's not necessarily wrong. His predecessor supported large numbers of mad science experiments including cloning blood and trying to enhance Kindred abilities. This has brought massive attention to the undead in the region.

Prince Lettow a.k.a the Eagle Prince.

    Contrasting Lettow is the perky Anarch tech bro, Julian, who has grand visions of a future defined by transvampirism as well as a controlled crash of the Masquerade. In a society where everyone has a cellphone, there's no possibility of keeping the existence of vampires secret. You'd need some sort of all-pervasive magical Technocracy to do that (and vampires don't know that exists). He believes STEM and a controlled propaganda campaign are the only way to pave the way for human-vampire coexistence.

    Your character is caught between these two individuals and their competing visions for the future of the vampire race. Lettow is about as reasonable a Prince as can be imagined in the setting, possibly because he's Gangrel rather than Ventrue, and even mentions being a friend to the protagonist from Bloodlines. Julian is shown to be a friend of your character early on. However, his ambitions are running up against the fact that vampires are monsters and it's very easy to kill innocent people even if you're trying to be a "good" one. Interestingly, enough, night-to-night survival is just as much an issue as the behind-the-scenes business of being undead. You begin the game with no haven, no car, no money, and no wheels.

    Let's just say you had a bad night in the desert. You also are starving and everyone around you looks good but feeding could result in you killing. It requires making contacts and playing your cards right to get equipped to do the jobs necessary to make money. The feeling of desperation is one that I didn't expect and is very appropriate for V5. Your Kindred can even say, multiple times, you are only in this for the money.

Elena is the best ghoul since Heather.

    Being a text-based game is both the game's biggest strength as well as biggest weakness. The lion's share of the game requires you to use your imagination to fill in the blanks. We're partying like it's 1988 with those books that came with Sierra software games like Wasteland. Even then, that had actual characters on the screen and gameplay. Still, I found it remarkably easy to get into this as a text-based RPG. The fact they don't have to limit themselves to what is programmable means that they have far more freedom to describe whatever they want. Like a novel, the only limit is one's imagination.

    Indeed, the gameplay is the closest to the actual tabletop game. If you try and Intimidate someone but don't have a very high Manipulation or Intimidate score, you're going to fail. If you're not very good with guns, you're going to miss. Much of the game depends on you spending your experience judiciously between social, combat, supernatural, and academic abilities. Virtually every level gives you a half-dozen ways of approaching things and you can't do them all. Disciplines also rouse your Hunger and managing that is far more difficult than I imagined. Some of the best parts of the game are accidentally killing a human and then being forced to dispose of their body.

    It should be noted that Night Road takes some jabs at current politics in America. One of the levels is an overcrowded hospital where the conditions are horrifying (made worse by Kindred feeding) but that's because it's the only free hospital in the area. Another level has hundreds of migrants gathered in a slave pit where they are regularly bled for the sale of their blood to vampires in Seattle. The Second Inquisition is also implied to be as powerful as it is because it's leaching off the excessive amount of surveillance and personnel watching the Mexican border.

    In conclusion, this is a solid game if you don't mind a lot of reading. It's dark, gritty, violent, and horrifying. It's definitely a game for adults with multiple sex scenes and plenty of hard moral choices. I admit, I kind of regret that this wasn't a Triple A game or even a AA because it does have the kind of plot that would have made an awesome Bloodlines spin off. It took me about three hours to finish my first playthrough and I suspect I rushed a bit through and a slow one would be about four hours. As such, I have to judge it by the price and ten bucks is a reasonable one for a good interactive novel.

 7.5/10 

Available here