Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong

Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong falls short of its ambitions as a story-focused detective RPG due to a dense but uninteresting plot, bland characters, and unintuitive puzzles.

Vampire The Masquerade: Swansong is a dialogue-driven RPG that stakes everything on writing that isn't up to the task.

Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong offers an impressively flexible story, but that can't save it from its mediocre writing and scattershot game design.

My relationship to Swansong has become almost like my ritual appointment with Passions — until I fully exhaust the entire story, I need my dose of ridiculous people making ridiculous decisions, and the nuclear fallout of their mistakes.

A bland and occasionally baffling return for the Vampire: The Masquerade series

Rarely have I played a game where I wanted to restart a scenario to undo bad decisions as I have here. Swansong makes you pay for your missteps and should be an excellent game for watercooler discussions with others who have played it.

Moral murkiness helps preserve the tension across Swansong’s duration. There’s always something at stake – your life, the masquerade, your integrity – and that does a lot to infuse some meaning into all the talking and scouring rooms for notes. I doubt that Swansong is set to become a vampire RPG of legend, like 2004’s Bloodlines, but it nonetheless makes vampires scary again.

Mystery and intrigue at a vampire court is fun, and there are some great puzzles and conversation battles. But Swansong also has a lot of walking in between them - as well as some potentially annoying bugs.

Solid and definitely have an audience. There could be some hard-to-ignore faults, but the experience is fun.

Swansong's biggest problem is that at times it's perhaps not as clear as it could be about what you're actually meant to be doing or how to bypass certain problems, and you'll find that it's trial and error that gets you through. There's also a couple of technical issues, including one in which we spent ages wandering around trying to solve a puzzle only to reset the game and discover that the solution to the problem hadn't loaded the first time around. Not cool.