You are an ancient and powerful vampire, and you wake up in the basement of some decrepit Seattle building, with no recent memories and a strange sigil on your hand. The first thing you do is feed on the cop who finds you, before smacking his partner into a wall so hard that his blood spatters the brick. A violent fanged rampage ensues, where you beat up and tear apart rival undead and their ghouls while currying the favour of the local court of vampires, and trying to keep your existence hidden from the mortal populace of this sultry city.
But this is also a detective story: there’s a younger night-stalker sharing your brain, a voice in your head named Fabian, who talks like a 1920s gumshoe (presumably because he once was one). Fabian isn’t violent at all; he evidently works with the human police and the vampire underworld, snacking on consenting volunteers’ blood and using his mind-delving powers to solve murders. These two stories are two entirely different games in the same setting, but then everything about Bloodlines 2 feels stitched awkwardly together. It is unfortunate that I happen to be playing this right after bingeing AMC’s Interview with the Vampire TV series, because the contrast is stark. One is a masterful, frightening, sexually charged and deftly comic reimagining of vampire mythology. The other is OK.
Appropriately, the development of this vampiric saga appears to have been cursed. The first Bloodlines game was a cult classic PC role-playing game released in 2004, and it took more than a decade for a sequel to get off the ground. Bloodlines 2’s development began in 2015 at Seattle-based Hardsuit Labs, led by the first game’s writer. But the development was fraught with difficulties, and in 2021 the whole project got passed on to a new developer, The Chinese Room. What has resulted is an interesting cut-and-shut job with elements of Hardsuit’s version of the game woven together by The Chinese Room into a 25-hour story that just about makes sense. It’s not a total bust, but there are a lot of evident loose ends.
For example, there is a giant screenful of vampire abilities that you can learn, evidently intended to give you some choices about how you approach the game – seduction, brute strength, manipulation. But you start off already super powerful, and you get the most fun mind-control and neck-snapping dark powers in the first couple of hours, giving you little reason to learn more. When I tried to do something interesting with these abilities – such as possessing mortal prey on the street, or interrogating someone by breaking into their head – the game often refused to comply.
And though my interactions with my vampiric brethren have been interesting, my interactions with the humans of Seattle have been downright baffling. Walking down the streets you’ll hear sex workers shout “Just gotta pay off these college fees!” to nobody. A businessman sitting on a bench opened with the line “Want to get into business together? Sexy business?”, then got up and followed me around the streets saying “I can’t wait to fuck you!” until I got so annoyed that I ate him. I know that vampires see mortals as inconsequential puppets, but not like this.
Bizarre, out of place non-player character behaviour is not the only thing about Bloodlines 2 that feels extremely late 00s. It reminds me of the spate of awkward-but-interesting first-person games that followed 2000’s Deus Ex, and not just because of the outdated animation. Gliding with unnatural speed across the rooftops of Seattle is fun, which is just as well, as most of the game’s missions have you pootling back and forth across the city talking to people. But when you encounter ghouls – and there are so many of them – you get drawn into some of the most awkward first-person fighting I’ve played in decades. It is so unfun that I knocked the difficulty down to easy after the first few hours so that these annoying skirmishes would be over faster.
There is an OK vamp story hiding in here; careful, dicey conversations with dangerous fellow vampires are by far the most interesting thing that Bloodlines 2 has going for it. And I enjoyed some parts of Seattle, particularly the dive bars packed with people gyrating to (of course) goth music. The Chinese Room has managed to make something playable and vaguely interesting out of a game development disaster. But after the first few hours, I kept going more out of morbid curiosity than enjoyment.
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