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Our Verdict
The Blood of Dawnwalker is a brilliant debut for Rebel Wolves. It inflicts weight on every decision with its time mechanics, yet still lends you enough freedom to embrace those small moments that make us human. It pushed me into agonizing situations, uncomfortable choices, and ridiculous asides, all interwoven with a simple yet tremendously satisfying combat system. Small gripes about overused enemies and dated animations aren’t enough to keep this from being one of my favorite RPGs in years.
Every second counts in The Blood of Dawnwalker. You have 30 days to save your family, and those precious moments tick away with every meaningful action you take. I shouldn’t be ‘wasting time’ – but I do. To make tea for a dear friend after a stressful outing. To share a story with an old lady giving directions, rather than brushing her off. To provide company to a man beyond redemption. It’s an RPG where your decisions matter, and consequences linger, yet I find myself making choices against my natural instincts. It’s a world where I question my beliefs, my morals, and who I trust – and where I wonder whether even those are enough to alter my actions. It’s one of my favorite games in quite some time.
The Blood of Dawnwalker drops me into 14th-century Vale Sangora, a fictional region loosely set in the Carpathian Mountains. It’s been two years since the area was abruptly taken over by four powerful Vrakhiri – vampires with full sets of razor-sharp teeth and claws (garlic fine, sunlight absolutely deadly). Now, protagonist Coen and his family live under the rule of Kynaz Brencis and his three subordinate counts. His only demand is a regular exchange of blood: that of the populace, taken in small amounts ‘willingly’ from every adult, in return for a sip of his own, which clears all diseases, including the increasingly prevalent bubonic plague.
Unfortunately, Vrakhir blood can’t fix everything. Coen’s mother, Esme, has retreated into a shell following the death of your brother, and refuses to eat. My early hours are spent mixing a concoction to give her enough strength to attend the monthly Blood Mass (you can read my preview if you want more detail there). Doing so correctly is enough to keep her alive – not a guaranteed outcome – but still earns a snide remark from Brencis that “this herd shall soon need culling.” Desperate for a solution, Coen and his father Pieter turn to local rebels, who are planning to break into the closed-down silver mines and spark the fuse of revolution.
It’s a pitiful attempt at an uprising – the last glimmer of hope from a people on the point of breaking, marred with shaky voices and a fear that things will inevitably go wrong. Inevitably, they do. When the dust settles, Coen’s life is in tatters. His family is in the cells of Greifberg Castle, where they are being kept for the grand coronation in 30 days. He has been turned by Brencis himself – but the transformation hasn’t taken completely, leaving him human by day and Vrakhir at night. A “Dawnwalker.” With only local witch (and close confidant) Anca by his side, Coen must set out to find a path to rescue his loved ones. Gather allies, forge equipment, train his own abilities in battle – the choices are all mine, but the clock is ticking.
This is the debut game from developer Rebel Wolves, but many members of the studio, including Game Director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, are former CD Projekt Red staff who worked on the likes of The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077. That heritage is immediately present in the foundations of Dawnwalker, visible in everything from the conversation colors to Coen’s clue-finding ‘focus mode’ that highlights key objectives, and it would be strange not to mention it. I don’t want to belabor this point, however, because The Blood of Dawnwalker is worthy of standing on its own two feet.
The key hook to Dawnwalker is that 30-day deadline, which doesn’t progress in real time but instead ticks forward, segment by segment, with each completed quest. Outside of the main objective, your path is entirely yours. It’s both freeing and terrifying. What if I miss something great? The answer is that you probably will. Suddenly, helping every troubled bystander on the side of the road feels like less of a quick checkbox to fill. It lends weight to everything you choose to spend time doing. Yet as often as I make the obvious choices – to seek out the rebel group’s base of operations, or pursue a rogue Vrakhir slinking the streets of Svartrau for help – I make ones that feel fulfilling, or comforting, or supportive to those around me. Human choices.
The most obvious course of action is to disrupt the operations of Brencis’s three fellow Knyaz – swaggering ex-soldier Ambrus, Mongolian tyrant Bakir, and elder witch Xanthe. All three are fantastic, and while they probably deserve more screen time than they get, their brief appearances do feel more striking as a result. Each of them is running a variety of camps, patrols, and such that you can stroll into and wreck shop, raising your notoriety until they’re forced to deal with you directly. It’s a solid framework to build around, a great way to grow stronger, and most of them even have a little story quirk to tell – a mother begging her son not to fight, an investigation into a possible betrayal, or an upsetting farm of human ‘cattle.’
Simply working through these quickly grows a touch monotonous, however. After dealing with Ambrus, having picked up some decent gear and a few combat tricks along the way, I take a long trek south to meet back up with my witch friend Anca, who suggested visiting her old convent to search for information that might help our cause. This is an absolute firecracker of a quest, and a clue that the real magic of Dawnwalker’s narrative chops is to be found in pursuing the other missions – those that deal in the various factions and key characters who have the potential to aid Coen in his impossible task.
I could sit here and wax lyrical about so many of these, giving example after example of distinctive setups and agonizing character moments. How I committed, on multiple separate occasions, to choices that made me physically uncomfortable. How I pushed myself to say ‘yes’ at times when my brain was screaming ‘no.’ How I swallowed my burning anger at what felt like a senseless death, and found a beautiful moment of shared sorrow in return. How I grew surprisingly fond of a lonely, grubby old man with a filthy mouth and little remorse for his actions, even as he helped me uncover secrets that might have been better left buried.
A large part of that success results from the nuances in character writing. The Blood of Dawnwalker is filled with people stuck in horrible situations, and most are just trying their best to get by. People warm to you as you help out, but rarely to the simplistic extremes so common in RPG companions. I grow notably closer to some as I work alongside them, such as rebel leader Crake or the mysterious, cool-headed Vrakhir Lacra, but there’s always a sense I’m being kept at arm’s length by both. We’re allies of circumstance, not friends.
There are awful people seeking redemption, and there are those who crave nothing more than embracing their monstrous side. There are the Uriashi – giant mountain-dwellers encouraged into society by Brencis, only to largely be used as pawns and viewed by many with distrust or fear. Dawnwalker also engages its main subject matter head-on, pondering the ‘curse’ of vampiric immortality. The Vrakhiri don’t fear much, but the things they do scare them on a deep level. I encounter those left to a fate worse than death… Then, later, I start to wonder if perhaps avoiding what comes after is a blessing in disguise.
As the days tick on, my strength grows – and so does my impact on the world. I can feel Vale Sangora shifting around me in response to my actions. Most obviously, this happens through the notoriety system, which builds as you pick apart Brencis’s infrastructure. Extra patrols are stationed in towns, taxes and curfews are imposed, and people begin recognizing me. That opens some doors, such as a smuggler approaching me in an alley to offer a rumor of potential allies, but it closes others. What could have been a peaceful mid-mission guard interaction escalates when one reaches for his sword: “Wait, you’re bloody Coen of Laslea!” At its very highest, shopkeepers rush your trades fearfully, and you can’t take more than a couple of steps in the big city of Svartrau without someone calling for the guards.
The time limit sits ever-present on my screen, yet it quickly feels less of a mechanically pressing concern than I feared. My first encounter with a pop-up warning about potential ‘points of no return’ for the main mission’s final act, which are clearly marked as such, comes when I have 14 days to spare, and more such options follow in quick succession. Despite this, the clock still carries weight – it even creates interesting circumstances where I have to consider when to upgrade my skills (probably three-quarters of your abilities require both time and points to learn), or if I should actually help a bystander being hassled by bandits.
With that said, I’ve had what seemed like ‘minor’ encounters at first escalate into map-crossing adventures that earned me some of my best equipment, so you can never write anything off completely. In most cases, I get the impression that there are lots of ways to stumble into the ‘big stuff’ – you could happen upon any of the milestone locations a quest takes you to, meet one of the involved characters in passing, or even snag a missive from a fallen soldier that clues you in to the opportunity. Rebel Wolves clearly wants to give you the chance to pursue the creations it’s proudest of, even if you choose not to.
The developer isn’t afraid to wrench opportunities away, however, and the most likely occurrence of this is failing to keep Coen’s health sufficiently topped up at night. While regular salves can heal him during the day, in Vrakhir form you must rely on drinking blood – fresh or bottled. Failure to do so will see dialogue options in every single conversation begin to flicker: “Give in to the hunger.” If he gets thirsty enough, you won’t even have the choice to back out – you’ll simply drain whoever’s in front of you to death, whether it be an innocent shopkeep or an essential companion such as Anca.
There’s one big element still to be discussed, and it’s one of my favorites: combat. The Witcher 3’s action was always its least interesting aspect, but I gleefully anticipate every encounter in The Blood of Dawnwalker. Whether you choose to fight with sword or claw, everything revolves around directional attack and blocks. You can leave your movement neutral for a ‘safe’ defense that always works, but adding in the correct direction removes the stamina cost, and blocking with precise timing opens a window to counterattack. Rebel Wolves recommends a controller when you first start playing, but it feels great on keyboard and mouse, with WASD a precise and responsive tool.
I built into these core fundamentals for much of the game, favoring passive skills that make my perfect blocks stronger and let me follow up with special directional counterhits. When you get into a flow state, weaving perfect parries with counterattacks and combat skills, you feel so unstoppable that I began to wonder if I should bump the difficulty up. Then I would lose my rhythm, and take blow after blow as I fumbled to recover. If you do want more challenge, you can adjust the impact of your stats and the ferocity of foes independently, or even turn off directional indicators altogether and rely on animations alone. For an easier time, you can lift the penalty on incorrect defensive inputs.
As well as improving Coen’s swordplay (my favorite ability being a precision slash that deals high damage, with the chance to instantly decapitate your target), you can build into either Witchcraft or Vampiric powers, although each of these can only be used by day or at night respectively. While I dabble in both, I end up pursuing the latter more, and the shift in strength that results is remarkable. Once darkness falls, I have more health, can regenerate through attacks and blocks, and eventually gain the ability to simply explode all but the biggest threats in an instant with my mind. It costs three ‘activation charges,’ sure, but my chosen loadout rapidly fills these back up with successful perfect blocks.
Gear feels equally valuable, and many quests open the door to powerful weapons, armor, and accessories – whether deliberately so in the narrative, or coincidentally. The boosts they provide are simple but meaningful, and you can equip Coen with day and night sets to play to the strengths of his dual forms. My Vrakhir clothes shorten vampiric cooldowns, amplify lifesteal, and boost claw damage; my outfit as a human bolsters my shallower health pool in that mode, and reduces how much life force I expend when casting magical hexes. You’re also able to invest in bringing gear pieces up to your level to keep them relevant for longer.
Dozens of hours into my adventure, I’m charging through the forest in wolf form, and I come across a small camp manned by Xanthe’s elite Blood Guards. They immediately recognize me, but that’s no bother; I’m here to wipe them out. Having done so, a scrawny ‘blood addict’ approaches, and begs me to give him the phial of Xanthe’s blood that remains. I’ve been quite friendly to the commonfolk of Vale Sangora, but this is different; I’m eyeing up the powerful skill that drinking the Boyaress’s blood will grant me. As his body falls to the floor, I envision how my allies would react: sad sympathy, disgust, smugness. Best I keep this one to myself. It’s a tiny moment, but one that drives home how much this world means to me.
The Blood of Dawnwalker is a brilliant first outing for Rebel Wolves, and a must for fans of choice-driven RPGs and vampire games. There are elements that could be improved. While the combat thrills, I find myself in arenas with the same handful of enemy types too often, and neither of the two different lock-on mechanics is flawless. The framerate can take a hit in the busy streets of Svartrau (my aging rig might be partly to blame, but many people are working with older hardware now). It’s a beautiful game, but not groundbreakingly so, and the facial animations in particular can feel dated, although the developer tells me it’s currently working on improving these in a day-one update.
In the moment, none of that bothers me. I’m too lost in the fantasy, and the emotional beats land well even without big-budget production values. The prospect of replaying a 30-50 hour RPG (more if you count time spent reloading) is an intimidating one, yet I already have designs on a second playthrough. I would brand it my ‘evil’ one, but I don’t think I can call this first run truly ‘good.’ I’ve made choices I’m not sure were virtuous. I’ve refused tearful last requests, let people I care about perform unspeakable acts, and left poor, lost souls to fend for themselves without guardian or guidance. Each time, I believed I was doing the best thing I could – but I couldn’t say for certain whether that’s true. I can’t wait to do it all again.