Hot off the success of their recent episodic adventure game Life Is Strange, Dontnod Entertainment has revealed their next game – the early-20th-century set action RPG titled Vampyr.
Life Is Strange is one of the most fascinating games of 2015. When it first released, I seemed to only hear about it in terms of jokes and ironic quotations of the game’s apparently hilarious attempts at writing dialogue for modern teenagers. Now, all I see is legitimate love and care for its characters and story – empathy and sympathy and genuinely considering it as a Game of the Year contender.
Such a path of attention is similar to the one Dontnod Entertainment received for its first game, Remember Me. Flawed in innate ways, and reviewed lukewarmly on release, but loved passionately by many – a modern cult classic in the making. Such newly found love has made Dontnod’s announcement of their next game, the action RPG Vampyr (no prizes for guessing what it is about) all that more interesting – especially given its choice of setting.
In a PlayStation Blog post, game director Philippe Moreau says that Vampyr is set in London during the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic. “England was recovering from the aftermath of the World War I, and the Spanish Flu was making its way through London’s winding alleys,” Moreau said, also highlighting the political and scientific turmoil happening in London, 1918. ” Superstition was becoming less socially relevant, but it was still in the streets, folklore, and politics of London, so science was on the rise, but the world was still a dark, scary place. Especially the smoggy, smokey, war-torn streets of London.”
The game follows Johnathan Reid, a former doctor during World War I who has come down with a bad case of the “I-am-now-a-vampire” disease. “A rational man, Reid wants to come to terms with vampirism – he wants to understand it,” said Moreau. “Basically, he wants to treat it as a medical condition, but as you play through the story and meet many of the characters in the game, you’ll discover that things are much more… organised, or deliberate, than that.”
The player choices that defined Dontnod’s Life Is Strange and Remember Me also rear their head in Vampyr. “One of the most interesting things is that everyone you meet in Vampyr could be a target, if you want. But each kill will have consequences on the fragile streets of London. You’ll both see those consequences, and feel them,” according to Moreau. “But as the saying goes, ‘you are what you eat’ – at least, in Reid’s mind. He’s a very human vampire… at least, he hasn’t forgotten where he came from. Do not think that makes him ‘good’, though. You’ll see.”
There is no further details on Vampyr’s release, but one can assume some connection with PlayStation given the origin of this information.
