Look, I'd only play this if you REALLY like Vampire: The Masquerade and you REALLY like David Cage games, and you don't mind playing with a walk through up. If you don't have that walk through you'll be contemplating banging your head against a anti-homeless bench. The amount of moon logic on why passwords are what they are is out of control and that's ignoring the simply infuriating puzzles that suck incredible amounts of time for no reason.

The movement speed is insanely slow, the game doesn't tell you, but there is a "spring," but it still isn't exactly speedy. The game really wants you to explore, but the movement speed makes you want to avoid it at all costs in some pretty large environments. Also, the entire dialogue system is a dice roll pain in the ass. It's like if Persona's demon negotiations were made overly complicated and you had to add in dice rolls to USE THE SKILLS YOU INVESTED IN. Insanely annoying.

The choices are... fine. You often don't know the results of your actions before hand and the game doesn't let you do anything truly major, despite some opportunities to completely shake the Boston Court if they'd let you. Instead the game plays it safe as possible. The story itself is pretty good, especially if you like the general direction of the V5 metaplot, but it's not worth the time or entry price.

Lastly... oh my god they want you to read so many inane documents. Which is sad, because I've slowed down to see some actually cool lore, but I know I missed stuff because I could not stand to read 100s of pages of accounting work and inconsequential skipping manifestos. I love the idea of the game, a lot actually. The 3 main characters are phenomenal, but my god I cannot stand to think about it any longer.

I know this game didn't get particularly great reviews, but just having completed it I don't understand where so much of the negativity has come from.
Is this game of the year? No.
Is this a very enjoyable 30 hour romp that does justice to the source material, with it's intriguing plot and well developed characters? Absolutely.

Swansong suffers from what every VtM game since Bloodlines has: a good story with poor execution. This game is glitchy and ugly but the story was compelling enough to keep me going. If you really like VtM then consider it on sale but it is by no means a "must play" game.

There are also five Steam achievements that are broken that probably will never be fixed so completionists take note.

Please ignore my play time - I already played this when it came out, but I wanted a Steam copy for myself :)

To sum it up: It's an amazing detective game & a great VTM experience, the deductions are fair but do not hold your hand. Yes, the character models look outdated and the animations are janky, but you get used to it and the voice acting is pleasant.

I feel like a lot of love went into figuring out the best ways on presenting information to the player and allowing them to come to their own conclusions, if you miss out on making the connection between pieces of information you've found, your character won't point out what you've just learned (most of the time) - I'm so happy about this, I find it super annoying when adventure/detective games do that.
That said, a lot of the time the reward for finding information is knowledge, so you need to be invested in the setting and the story for it to feel rewarding.
I can't judge how the experience would be for someone who doesn't know Vampire the Masquerade well. For me, if my Storyteller presented a game like this to me as a campaign I would be thrilled. The characters are nuanced people, rarely can you take first impressions at face value. I also enjoyed exploring the Inquisition up-close.

Negatives:
- I've already mentioned the character models, you have eyeballs, I don't need to tell you.
- It seemed to me that skills/disciplines were pretty unbalanced and the fact that at some points in the story the game will just hand you abilities in case you haven't specced into the Discipline in question felt bad.
- I found the beginning/tutorial at the Prince's Quarter too slow, the game really only gets into its stride after that

Still, please give it a shot, I feel like it's severly underrated and I would love if Big Bad Wolf could make another one!

Just watch it on YouTube tbh.

If you really need to know why: game tries to prevent saving and loading so if you want to see the other choices you need to replay large chunks of it just to see other outcomes, has a skill system with no indication of what will be useful so you will "fail upwards" in some parts losing every roll and skill check and fumbling your way to the end, the characters and story are very dry and predictable and the graphics and animation aren't even that good.

If you're into WoD and like detective games with sneak elements, this game is for you :) It's a mix between sneaking, walking simulator, and story telling game. Dont expect an action shooter or a second bloodlines game...

If you like the Sherlock Holmes games from Frogwares, give it a try.

It's an ok game but many design and technical problems bog it down from being properly good. If you're starved for World of Darkness game or a Vampire game, this might be a good temporary fix.

● The models, the environment, everything looks good...when it's not moving.
● I like the art direction.
● The world, but that's automatic with Vampire: The Masquerade.

● The Music is fine.
● The writting is serviceable, basically:
Don Corleone wants you to protect the family from the feds, except replace Don Corleone's
charisma with sexiness but no charisma, and the family with "vamily".
The plot has nice twist when you can find the triggers to unveil them.

● The Animation: Everything looks so good in screenshots but the moment humans move, oh god. It
seem that the animators got overwhelmed when the lead designer told them there was gonna be three
main characters in the game. The only sequences that look good are those with Galeb, but maybe it's
because the character already has a stick up his ars** so the robotic motion looks fine on him. Quite a
shame given that freaking Bloodline which is 20 year old now has better facial animation than this game,
and this game is a walking simulator, not an action game.
● Minor Bugs: There some minor sound and model positioning bugs, but nothing major, but it's quite
bad given that this game had a whole year sitting on the Epic Store before its actual release.

● RNG Fest: I don't know who tought that putting two hostile RNG rolls on a player action in an
exploration game was a good idea. Not only the player has to roll one time to perform dialog checks, but
the game actively tries to cancel said action when successul by rolling another dice to f-the player over.
What's worse every skill action uses precious resources and the bad outcomes just suck, this ain't no Disco
Elysium, so you'll feel robbed. ALT-F4, save scum with no second tought my friend. Speaking of resources...
● Resource Management Sucks: Look, I like my excel sheet games as much as the next guy, but this is
a narrative exploration game, the game design should encourage me to DO stuff not the contrary. The
game will find every opportunity to make you waste the two resources in the game Willpower and Hunger,
and will barely reward you for it, if it will not rob you with a bad RNG. Maybe the dev decided to make
every action so freaking expensive to increase the tension of the game, but that just made the game
frustrating. So whip up a guide to know what button to touch and wich not to touch and realise how many
useless skill checks there is given that more than half of the locks and password blocks have keys in the
environment.
My recommandations: Play the first three level blind or semi-blind then just go the informed road after that
to save up your resources and frustration.
● Obtuse Design: That's just adding both previous points together, this game is supposed to be a
narrative exploration game with some puzzle, except that it punishes you from exploring or forming a
narrative so you end up with a huge obtuse puzzle to get through the end of the game. The game fails
narratively especially given that most of your choices don't matter and those who matter are kinda
arbitrary and left-field. I think the devs expect the player to play the game more than once, but there's no
point in doing so except to find the golden road. There is only 2.5 end state in this game: Win, Fail, Fail
and dead-no-epilogue. The epilogue also sucks when you Win. Before thinking about replayability the devs
should've spent more work making the few mechanics actually fun either by deepening them or make
them narratively interesting so to make them worth replaying by themselves. As is the mechanics are just
there to serve the big puzzle machine that has only has like 3 actual piece to resolve the mystery that you
don't even need the mechanics to unveil.


Buy when discounted and after you've exhausted the Coterie of New York interactive novel games and Heart of the Forest who do better with less, and after your third replay of Bloodlines. Don't forget to load the IGN guide for this one it'll make the experience far more enjoyable, it's one of these games that feel there's only one correct way to play and every other one is invalid.

Pros:
-Good plot
-Core gameplay is fun
-Well written main characters
-Believable (main) side characters
-Slow gameplay that still manages to convey tension when needed

Cons:
-Character models are just... terrible, especially for such a narrative-focused game in 2023
-Skill tree is poorly balanced (or rather, the story requires certain skills without telling you ahead of time)
-General lack of polish detracts from the experience

Overall: You may look at the trailer, and think "Hey! This game is like VtM: Bloodlines!" Don't think that. It isn't. This game is like Detroit: Become Human. If you like games like Detroit: Become Human but want it in the setting of Vampire: The Masquerade, this is the perfect game.

Action sequences are done, for the most part, through skill checks and quick-time-event "dialogue choices". I say that because all confrontations are treated the same, be that a shouting match between sire and childe, or a shootout with security officers. This is one of those times where it sounds worse than it is, because the game actually pulls this off effectively. In fact, the structure works well, conveys tension when needed, and rewards how you built your character... mostly.

The downside is that occasionally, you run into skill-walls. Want a good ending? Hope you built your character a specific way. It's not often, but it happens a lot in the final scenes of the game. And then some skills are completely useless. The skill tree works about 80% well. It just needs a bit of tuning for the game. Or more accurately, some moments need more than one skill-based solution.

(Emem needs 4 celerity by endgame. You're welcome.)

The plot and characters are all great. I found myself more and more invested as time went on, and each character fills a different role. Galeb is the testosterone-fueled John Wick character. Emem is the socialite/spy character. And Leysha is the detective type character who, frankly, is one of the best written Malkavian characters I've seen. All the possible suspects for who might be the traitor are believable, and at no point did I think "nah, this person definitely isn't it".

Last note, because it needs to be said - the character models are awful. They're just... bad. It's a shame, because they really bring the game down a lot. For a game where you are so focused on what a character is saying, you'd think they would have made sure at least the facial expressions looked right.

But it does all work in the end. It's a bumpy ride sometimes, but the core of the game is fun, and I'm enjoying my time with it. Just know what you're buying - Detroit: Become Human, in the VtM universe - and go in with those expectations, and be ready to enjoy the majority of the game. What they got right outweighs what they could have done better.

Overall: Recommended.

Do not buy this game.
It's that simple. Just don't.
This game is an insult to VtM and just video games in general. It's laden with game breaking and game ending bugs. I may have 17 hours in the game (I tried incredibly hard to like it) but after the 5th time I encountered a bug that soft locks the game I just had to admit how bad this thing is.
I won't rant, there are plenty of bad reviews here. Just, save your money.

ONLY BUY THIS GAME FOR $5.00 OR LESS.

I'm gonna take my time with this, this game should only be played by fans of VtM/WoD.
It's a dirge on the brand in general.
Let's get objective.
Graphics: Good, almost great.
Music: Absolute Banger of a soundtrack, it shouldn't go as hard as it does.
Sound design: Excellent, Moody, creepy & terrifying(Sometimes) vibes.
Gameplay: Error 404 Fun NOT FOUND. Full Stop.
Writing: Goodt writing of character's & dialogue.
Story: FAILURE. Fractally multiplied by bad game design decisions.

Great Potential Game ruined by a 3 stories that should have been 2.
I'm now going to save you money by explaining why spoilers are pointless for this game, IN DETAIL.
Let's be real, Galeb IS the Main character.
Emem(The woman on the cover art) is player 2.
Leysha is a cool character but her storyline is garbage & it can't justify being part of the storyline.
The design of the story element is screwed over by being able to choose chapters in the first half of the game & then mid-way through 3 stories, you have play the game in the order the dev's decided.
This is a hyper-deceitful tactic that management likely employed to have evidence for replayability in pre-release marketing, and it mortally wounded this game, because there is zero reason for it.
I could try to wonder aloud that maybe the dev's had the attention span of a small child and just jumped all over the story and then finally they found their design groove and completely changed the story structure but not the marketing where they said the choice of who's story to tackle is up to the player's and... yep. nope. Marketing.
Now speaking of story, there isn't a clear or muddied one to be found, for any of the character's or the overarching story.
Without spoiling, here's why: Emem had her story split in half to make this "This SHOULD have been an E-mail" using side-story details and 3, maybe 5 conversations with one-off characters, into a 3rd story arc to pad game time.
I do mean this because I love the Clan of Malkav, but the tired trope of mentally ill malkavians is so done to death that it has it's own section in the the V5 corebook on how to not be ableist, it's that much of a trope. AND YET...here we are & here's a Mentally Ill Malkavian. A character that could have been the standout, but instead got the scraps that were rewritten to be a whole story, which was then Padded relentlessly like this run on sentence, and I'll be Diablerized if I don't mention possibly THE DUMBEST game design decision since <Insert controversy here>, The Printer is out of INK and we have to point and click to find a fresh cartridge.
Le sigh, the real crime of Leysha's Journey is that her story should have been a dlc storyline that the developers could have used to flesh out what was going on with the rest of the tertiary characters and lore.
Instead, you'll spend the most time playing as her & if you don't use a guide(like me) you'll not only be RESTARTING WHOLE CHAPTERS, but also ALT+F4-ing during failed dialogue checks because conversations & other in game animations are the only place you'll get a checkpoint, but you cannot load checkpoints as there isn't a function to do this.
(It was promised as a patch but I can no longer find said documentation on this so... Le Cry)
But the only place you'll get experience is from said DC's and the only reason to do said DC's is the XP because the dialogue is the same in most of the conversations.
So while the conversations are believably written and voiced, the plot never does a thing to move itself forward and doesn't reward you for playing, just suffering along in spite of it.

I went in blind, with some expectation.
A muddy political world, maybe the heroes journey or another of the 8 classics of storytelling, but that isn't what you get.
You get a nothingburger with hints of "A tale of two cities" or twin redemption's but nothing more, which kinda makes me wish this had just been a choose-your-own-adventure-movie and skipped out on the downright un-fun gamplay. Or a point-&-click. Those are the 2 dominant gameplay modes that you can't miss, which constantly fight over how to punish you next. They're hidden a wee bit by the psuedo-RPG element and the illusion of choice, but even then, the mechanics are done so poorly that the famous GameDev quote of: "You don't make choices, you edit sequences" can't be applied here.

If you've read this far and you're on that casual perusing of reviews to make a purchase decision, thanks for reading and hopefully getting what I'm making as explicitly clear while not being over the top or mean to the developers.
As WoD fan, I am Disappointed in there not being any World-development in an official VtM game or more accurately, a regression.
As a Player I am salty for spending 34+ hours of my life on this game.
As Consumer the bugs and glitches in this game were refund-worthy.
As a thinking human, the re-coding of gameplay into topics of Sexual Assault felt cheaply used, and were then casually tossed aside. ICK

Overall, I see now why a good chunk of the early players were bent, I bought on launch but forgave having to wait because of a game-breaking bug.
I waited til after the switch launch & for the promised patches.
Sometimes it doesn't pay to have patience, it just kicks the can of disappointment down the road.
Just remember, only buy this for $5.00 or less.