00:02The blood of Don Walker's best feature might be that it sometimes takes choices away from you.
00:10In this story-driven action RPG, you play a vampire, but even the most good guy vampire
00:16ever still has an insatiable hunger for human blood. Sometimes in Don Walker,
00:21that hunger can get the best of you, even if you're actively trying to resist it.
00:26What is this? A fireplace?
00:29Don Walker is a game all about making you live with the consequences. I recently played about
00:35four hours of The Blood of Don Walker, and what I liked most was how much developer Rebel Wolves
00:41leans into the possibility of player failure in the game. Well, failure isn't really the word for it.
00:48Sometimes people die whether you mean them to or not, but ultimately that's part of the story
00:53you're building. And for Cohen, your half-undead protagonist, life goes on.
00:59Take, for instance, a story quest in Don Walker's prologue, which sets up just how nasty things have
01:05become for Cohen and his fellow humans in 14th century Europe. As the Black Death swept through
01:11the valley where you live, a group of powerful vampires called Vakari offered a reprieve. The
01:18humans are given the vampires healing blood in return for their total fealty. The quest has you
01:24brewing up a potion for your ailing mother, who is so disengaged from reality that Cohen and his father
01:30are struggling to get her to eat. You need her to be lucid because tonight is the blood mass when
01:36the
01:36vampires show up to exact their tithe of blood from the villagers. If your mother is out of it during
01:47the mass, the vampires will notice and they don't leave people they perceive as weak to live for long.
01:53So head to the local herbalist Anka to get something that will help mom keep it together long enough to
02:00get through the mass. Anka tells you to mix three spoonfuls of the powder she gives you into water,
02:06that is hot but not boiling. But a storm hits and a bunch of other things happen. When you finally
02:11get back to your mother, you have to mix up the concoction. I remembered Anka's recipe, but several
02:16of the other people I spoke with at the preview did not. During my story's take on the blood mass,
02:21Cohen's mother lived through the event. In the games played by those other folks, she drew the
02:27vampires' attention and didn't fare so well. Consequences are also born out of its brilliantly
02:33executed time mechanic, which forces you to think carefully about what actions you take and when.
02:40You start Dawn Walker's prologue in the morning before the blood mass and have several in-game hours
02:45at your disposal. What you do with that time is up to you. There are side quests you can undertake
02:51all
02:51over the place. Time advances when you take on quests, not when you're running around between them.
02:59And you're told how long each task will take, so you can make decisions about what sounds important
03:04and what maybe doesn't. But crucially, you can't do everything. Time is also advanced when you level
03:11Cohen up to unlock new skills and perks in the game's extensive skill tree, which means you might
03:17have to choose between leveling up or completing a quest, or risk an unpleasant outcome to power
03:24yourself up. In another prologue quest, you're tasked by a farmer with tracking down his brother,
03:30Lazar, who you'll discover has fallen into a cave. Hidden in the cave is also an undead mini-boss creature.
03:37Even if you know what waits for you, there's a choice to make. Level up for the fight and risk
03:42Lazar dying before you arrive, or take on the creature at a lower level. But Don Walker's
03:48coolest demonstration of narrative branching and consequences come later in the prologue,
03:53after Cohen undergoes his vampire transformation. It happens when a group of villagers head to a
03:58local silver mine to gather metal they can turn into weapons to mount a resistance to Vacari rule.
04:04The Vacari show up in force, kill most of the rebels, and infect Cohen. You fight your way out of
04:11the
04:12mind using your cool noob vampire powers, which include deadly claws and enhanced speed. Combat
04:18in Blood of Dawnwalker has you blocking, parrying, and dodging incoming attacks, then striking when
04:24there's an opening. How much blocking and attacking you do is determined by a stamina gauge that refills
04:34over time. Timing for parrying and dodging is important, with windows that give you time-slowed,
04:40perfect versions that let you counterattack and which don't cost stamina. You can also set the
04:47game's combat to be directional to experience the challenge as its developers intended, which requires
04:52you press the right analog stick in the direction a blow is approaching from to block it, and use the
04:58direction to dictate how you'll swing your sword to try to find openings in an opponent's defense.
05:04Once you get the hang of it, the Blood of Dawnwalker's directional combat system is intuitive,
05:09but fights are still tough, especially early on, since enemies hit pretty hard. In vampire form,
05:15Cohen can heal himself by drinking blood, and you can do that with a special attack that has him
05:21quickly appear behind an opponent and sink his teeth into their neck.
05:28But the ability has a fairly long cooldown, so you can't rely on it to survive. After you escape the
05:34mine, you can head to a burning building up on a hill, where Vladimir, Cohen's best friend and the
05:39leader of the rebels, fled in the confusion. The Vakery's soldiers have him trapped there, and if you kill
05:45them, Cohen will try to convince his friend that it's safe to come out, in spite of Cohen's vampire
05:51transformation. After a few dialogue choices, I managed to talk Vladimir out of the burning building, but the
05:57battle with the two tough soldiers had left me desperately weak. Crucially, Cohen's health bar is
06:02also his hunger level, and that bar is split into two main chunks. If your health is over the middle
06:08line that separates them, your hunger is under control. If it's under it, Cohen starts to struggle.
06:15In conversations in which you're hungry, a new option appears when you have choices, and the hungrier you
06:21are, the more the other choices on the menu move and flicker, sometimes disappearing or switching
06:27positions with each other. Give into the hunger might suddenly flash from the third position on
06:33the list to the first, catching you off guard when you're trying to choose something else. But if you're
06:38hungry enough, the choice can disappear altogether. I never had a chance to mess up picking a response to
06:44Vladimir. The hunger overtook Cohen and he attacked and bit the man, murdering him, before I could do
06:50anything about it. Whoops. It was a great moment where my fighting ability conspired with my vampire
06:57nature to change the outcome of a story beat. This won't happen all the time. The developers told me
07:02they don't want to punish players for being bad at combat by making them rage out in conversations.
07:08So instead, you'll have the ability to initiate conversations yourself, which gives you time to
07:12maybe hunt around the area for a few small animals you can drain to sate your bloodlust. But managing your
07:18hunger is important, lest you find yourself losing control. All in all, it seems like a lot of people
07:25can die in the blood of Dawnwalker as a result of choices you make, actions you take, and unforeseen
07:31consequences. The last two hours or so that I played took place after the somewhat more linear prologue,
07:37opening up into Dawnwalker's open world, where you're free to explore and address problems as you like.
07:42Your main goal is to rescue Coen's family from the castle where the Vakery are keeping them, but you
07:48only have 30 in-game days to do so. The general idea is to use the time to gather allies
07:54who can help
07:55Coen in that final assault. Dawnwalker maintains its narrative freedom by working on a framework that
08:00gives you the smaller goals of dealing with each Vakery lieutenant before you go for the castle, in a
08:06system that seems reminiscent of Shadow of Mordor, that divides the story into smaller, more discrete
08:12pieces. This is how the blood of Dawnwalker allows you to get so many people killed. If you fail a
08:18quest
08:18or accidentally eat your best friend, it might affect how you go about attacking the castle, but it doesn't
08:24change the fact that you eventually will. If you eat the wrong guy and it closes off your ability to
08:30complete a quest, you just move on to the next one, or maybe to another approach to that quest.
08:36A lot of quests can be pretty malleable, and how you approach them changes depending on when
08:41you approach them. Coen isn't just a normal vampire thanks to some supernatural shenanigans,
08:47he reverts to his human form during the day and only becomes a vampire at night. That gives you options
08:52for how you take on problems. As a vampire, you might infiltrate a stronghold by using your powers to
08:58climb a wall or teleport to a window, but you'll be attacked on sight. As a human, you can lie
09:04or use
09:04guile to get what you want, or help people to get them on your side. Functionally, the human vampire
09:11dichotomy means that the Dawnwalker experience balances a lot of different elements. Human Coen
09:17fights with a sword and unlocks a different set of abilities to use in battle. You also can't heal by
09:22drinking blood during the day, which means you have to rely on items like food if you get into trouble.
09:27But more interestingly, the balance of human and vampire means that just because a quest went badly
09:33for vampire Coen, that doesn't mean human Coen can't pick up the pieces, or vice versa. Some actions
09:40and deaths will lock out pathways and quests, but not all the time. The developer said they don't want
09:46players to necessarily feel punished for their choices. So while you might kill someone who was
09:51important to a certain quest, there are often other paths you can discover that might let you
09:57complete it. No, we haven't got time. More than anything, my The Dawn of Blood Walker experience
10:03was of consequences, both foreseen and unforeseen. From which quests to pursue, to when to level up,
10:10to whether you're at risk of eating someone important. It's a game that's constantly giving
10:15you choices to make, and in the moment, a lot of them feel like they might be life and death.
10:20Collect me? Oh, I don't think so. The Blood of Dawn Walker releases on September 2nd on PlayStation 5,
10:27Xbox Series X and S, and PC. God, all this blood.
10:33What's next?
10:34it
10:34just
10:35what's next?
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