Vampire: The Masquerade - Coteries of New York

There was so much potential in the beginning of this game. The story seemed interesting and solid and I thought the choices were meaningful. All that gets thrown out at the ending. SPOILER ALERT: There's only one ending and its just... bad. I don't like it. Perhaps its fitting for a "dark story" to have a dark ending, but as a visual novel of sorts I feel like my efforts were wasted. What is the point of making choices if none of them matter? It honestly made me feel disgusted and angry. I actually don't even own the game here. I bought it on Steam, gave it a negative review there and decided to give a negative review here too because of how angry this game made me. I wasted my money on this game, and I don't want anyone else to do the same.

I enjoyed the writing, the looks, attention to the world's lore. Unfortunately, the creators seemingly were not interested in making a game or ran out of resources. 1 ending (+ a "Say nothing to die" early option). The game feels even more linear than normal, because in the ending a minor character comes out and explains how their extremely contrived mastermind plan went perfectly, nothing you did matters at all, and BTW you're their slave now. The End. All sub-quests are self-contained, don't inform the story, and their outcomes do not vary based on your decisions. There is a resource management (Blood) system at play, but since your actions do not affect outcomes you can just ignore it. Overall, it feels extremely rushed. Characterization was one of the pseudo-novella's only strengths, there just wasn't enough of it. You meet your individual coterie recruits (separately) a few times, most everyone else twice, and the game is short and on rails, so you're not going to get to know them well or spend much time with them. Creators could maybe write a good book, if they came up with an actual plot of some kind other than "mastermind's plot is so stupid it's actually ineffable and brilliant."

while the game starts out strong the ending is a misable mess designed entirely to deprive your character of all agency and sequel baits. Very unsatisfying. Would be one start but beautiful presentation deserves some leeway. Otherwise not worth the asking price even on sale.

I wish this had saveslots. Good: + interesting characters + mostly well written dialogue + music & art Not so good: - 'narrative' writing (aka the protagonist's thoughts mostly) - story at the end seems a bit... trying to tie all the ends together, but instead making a huge know out of some insignificant thread while ignoring the ones that were actually interesting to me? - dialogue options often unclear - no save slots - apparently having to replay the entire game at least three times to see everything... And from what I gather from other comments a lot still stays the same, so it's a lot of replaying the same passable scenes multiple times, just to get to a few new scenes. And if you missclick on an unclear dialogue option, well then, restart the whole playthrough cause no way to reload. I just wish this had saveslots, that'd bring it from 6/10 to at least 7/10. There's a few bits I'd be interesting in replaying/seeing different routes, cause the characters and dialogues ARE absolutely enjoybale. But having to replay ALL of it, for ONE scene, with the pressure of never picking the 'wrong' dialogue choice? That's a huge time investment just for a few scenes. The time I had with the game was enjoyable, and I don't regret the purchase, so recommended if you'd like an alright visual novel meeting some cool vampires for 4-10 hours (depending on your reading speed).

This game is a visual novel, and thus should be rated as such - it makes no sense in my view to compare it with a full-fledged RPG. With that in mind, these are the considerations that led me to give it three stars: - The story is of course the main component of a VN: the one in this game nails the setting of Vampire: The Masquerade quite well and will keep you engaged if you like that setting (as I do), otherwise your mileage may vary. - The game saves your progress automatically, and the only way to re-do a choice is to re-start the game. I normally don't like this approach, but in this case it is successfully used to create tension and not frustration, since there are few "Bad Ends" and none of them catches the player completely unaware. - The player can impersonate one out of three characters, and there's no way to experience all the events in a single playthrough; on the other hand a single playthrough is quite short (3-4 hours of reading) so even by taking the completionist approach (which requires about 4 playthroughs), the game is not particularly long, even for a VN. - A capital sin for a VN that encourages multiple playthroughs, there´s no way to skip ONLY the text that you have already seen in a previous playthrough. - A lot of reviews complain that there are no real choices in the game; this is not true, a lot within the playthrough may change depending on who you choose as character and on your dialogue choices. What is true is that many of these choices do not have lasting effects, and that the player's agency is close to zero in the final part of the game. The autosave feature is there also to limit the player's ability to "game the game", and suggests that while the game was designed as an interactive experience, the focus was on "experience" and not "interactive". -The game ends quite abruptly, on a cliffhanger of sorts. It's not my favorite kind of ending, but it can make sense in the context of the story the game is trying to tell.