Very well made Vampire interactive fiction. Nothing not to love about this!
Maybe they'll make a Narrator Voice Acting DLC? I'd pay a few bucks for the game to read to me.

Very mixed review on this one: I'm a huge VtM fan and really wanted to love it, and I do in parts. But the whole is something I struggle to recommend at full price in its current form.

The Good: The writing is mostly excellent and the art is suitably gothic and skilfully done. The music leans slightly generic but is effectively atmospheric. Aesthetically, this game has a lot going for it. A lot of the stories are fun to read through and understand the assignment of being modern Gothic horror.

If I were reviewing this game as a linear visual novel, I'd say that it was great.

The Bad: But this game doesn't advertise itself as a visual novel: it has the loftier ambition of being an RPG. And as an RPG, this game is often extremely frustrating to play. There is very little in terms of clear choice in your starting stats, meaning you need to restart the game a bunch of times, using trial and error, until you've worked out which of the choices in character creation actually give you the stats that you want, and tough ♥♥♥♥ if that clashes with the roleplay fantasy you had in mind. You want to be a former professional sneak thief captured by The Warrior and taught how to 'conduct yourself honourably'? Better enjoy that starting Thief stat of 0, since your choice of Sire apparently has total control over what your entire life pre-vampiric turning taught you.

Of course, there *is* a way of honing your skills: you have to use them in checks! A lot of checks. And if you're trying to train a skill, the likelihood is that you're not very good at it, which means you either have to constantly choose options that you're bad with and save-scum to avoid completely ruining whatever you were trying to do, or watch your supposed 'professional thief' blunder their way through multiple chapters before you actually get to enjoy the roleplay experience you wanted to start with. And that's assuming that you actually *get* to make progress: certain checks can be failed with no real consequence, while certain checks can completely close off avenues of progress if failed, or even give you a full game over.

Also, if you imagine that this game treats all approaches equally and will allow a silver-tongued persuader, a down-and-dirty brawler and a keen-eyed investigator to each have their moments in the sun (so to speak), then forget it. Even a character build with zero detective skill will stumble across the most important information pertinent to a story pretty much every time, but woe betide you if you don't have the skills to handle yourself in a fight, as there will often be no other way out and harsh penalties for losing. So having some kind of combat skill is an ABSOLUTE necessity, but the combat rules themselves are often extremely frustrating and downright silly.

As an example: early in the game you can choose to buy a cheap knife, which you'd imagine would be a useful way for non-combat focused builds to offset their lack of combat ability with a weapon. However, the game requires you to have an impossibly-high amount of combat skill *already* to equip it, an amount which, if you possessed, would mean you wouldn't need to buy a weapon in the first place! While I agree that a skilled combatant will probably be able to get more value out of a weapon, acting like you aren't immediately made more potent in a fight just by holding a knife and swinging it around is very silly.

As another example, at one point during the game you are followed along a street by a group of children playing Vampire Hunter. Can you talk them down? No. Can you outrun them? Not without going back six hours of playtime and choosing that one very specific power at the start! No: you HAVE to fight these children. You, a grown-up vampire, simply have no choice other than to fight these children. Because this is an RPG where choices matter.

Also, the powers are massively unbalanced. Corpsetalking, as far as I can tell so far 7 hours in, is a completely worthless power as all the useful parts of whatever information it provides can be found without its use extremely easily... and most of what it gives you is completely useless. Tenebrous Form, Beast Within and to a lesser extent the power that lets you talk to and control animals (I forget what this game calls it) are much, MUCH, more useful than Corpsetalking and Mesmerism, which can entirely be replaced with (and are pretty much inferior to) basic detective or persuasion skills. This is because Tenebrous Form and Beast Within are the only powers that let you skip combat checks, which are the only real roadblocks to progress in the game, and can sometimes be insurmountable roadblocks.

Finally, simply from a personal taste perspective, I dislike the 'vampires are now public knowledge' thing that this game tries to pull. I think it's an incredibly difficult idea to get right, and pretty much every writer who tries misses a load of things that would be inevitably implied or precipitated by such a reveal. 'Vampires as a metaphor for an oppressed minority' isn't infertile narrative soil either, but it's certainly ground that's certainly full of pitfalls. Also, there's a rather dumb joke about confusion over how to say an Irish character's name 'because it's spelled weird', which could be funny at the ignorant party's expense if the Irish lady herself didn't say that she also made the mistake when she was a child... despite apparently growing up in Dublin. Our writer was either indulging in a little English snobbery, or forgot that the majority of our language (and certainly our names) are first learned through sound and speech, not from viewing the word on the page. Possibly both.

In summary, sadly, Steam has no rating in-between 'good' and 'bad', so I simply have to give this game the thumbs-down just because in my opinion it fails to be a good example of the thing it advertises itself as: a CRPG. It's not a *bad game*, especially by Steam's standards, and I hope it does well because there's clearly a lot of love and effort put into it, but as an RPG experience it overpromises and underdelivers.

I normally only review after I've beaten a game, but this game is special, and I want it to do well, so I'm reviewing this evening on launch day after completing Act 1.

I came to Nighthawks relatively late; I was unaware of the Kickstarter and only really stumbled across it with the demo version from a while back. I was immediately captivated by it, though, and knew that the finished product would be something special -- particularly with the dream team of talent (including some excellent voice actors) working on it. I am happy to report that the finished game is everything I hoped it would be.

If you've always liked the idea of Vampire: The Masquerade's "undead in modern day" premise, then Nighthawks will definitely appeal. It's not a straight clone of Vampire: The Masquerade, either, in large part due to the fact that there is no "Masquerade"; in the world of Nighthawks, vampires live openly in society, and, just like humans, occupy all the strata in the social pecking order while also having to deal with their own bestial urges and the prejudice of the still-living. This makes for a thoroughly interesting setting with plenty of potential to explore a variety of mature themes.

And the game mechanics back this up with a variety of ways to play each situation, too. Depending on your background, skills and choices, you can approach the various problems in your path in a variety of ways, with varying consequences for different approaches -- the 100 available achievements should give you some idea of the range of possibilities on offer, and you won't get them all in one playthrough!

As a text-based game, be prepared for a lot of reading (and listening to some excellent voice performances). But you probably knew that. This is a game that respects its audience as adults and doesn't feel the need to cater to people with no attention span -- and that's exactly what a game about the intrigue of vampires living in the modern day should be like, so far as I'm concerned.

Top-notch stuff from everyone involved. Having a blast so far and looking forward to seeing how the story develops.

And no sign of generative AI anywhere. Bliss.