Vampire: The Masquerade - Shadows of New York
- DB
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
A bloody good time - until the ending burned everything to ashes.
Here's what I've been watching and playing over the last seven days...
MOVIES
Still brilliant, still one of the best movies made so far in the 21st Century - if you haven't watched it yet, you really should.
And rounding out the Russell Crowe underrated awesomeness double-bill is another of this century's best movies and another easy 100% recommend.
GAMES
Vampire: The Masquerade - Shadows of New York
Game summary: Your old life is dead and buried. You have no afterlife to look forward to, and your vampiric unlife is about to fall apart unless you solve an unsolvable crime. (Steam)
Normally, a Visual Novel lives or dies on how good the writing is, and - for the longest time - it felt very much like Vampire: The Masquerade - Shadows of New York was going to come out very much on the 'live' side of things... which is pretty ironic for a story about vampires.
However, where this game trips up is in taking the final, and most important, choice out of your hands - a pretty ballsy move for a game with limited choices already.
If the writing had been good enough to allow for either of the two endings to fit however you played the game, then it might've worked out.
Unfortunately, my Julia (the protagonist) that she deserved or what the game seemed to be building up to.
To explain, Julia is a very low-ranking vampire given the thankless task of investigating the Final Death of another vampire, just so the leaders of the community can say they put some effort into investigating it.
So I started playing Julia as quite apathetic and just wanting to be done with it all, eventually growing more and more pissed off with being treated like a puppet and intending to show up the others by exposing what really happened.
And the writing seemed to fully support this, feeling like a well-developed character and story arc that would lead to an enjoyably explosive ending.
However, I can only guess that some of my earlier decisions were more heavily-weighted in deciding the outcome of events than some of the later choices, and the ending was more wet fart than explosion.
As a result, I was left entirely unsatisfied with how the story ended and have no intention of playing Shadows of New York again thanks to that final choice being removed from player control.
How the ending turned out, in stark contrast to how it looked like it was going to, pretty much soured me on the game entirely and I don't think I can recommend it - although if you're lucky enough to hit the right choices for the ending you want, you might well end up loving it.
Vampire: The Masquerade - Shadows of New York looked like it was going to be a very good experience right up until it pulled the rug out from under me at the very end, leaving me entirely unsatisfied. [4/10]
Also currently playing: Batman: Arkham City, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020)
TV
A little break this week before it's back to a galaxy far, far away and The Book of Boba Fett, which I'm hoping to review next week.
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